I am an early-stage technician/scholar. I have been in “academia” for 17 years and hold a Scottish/UK PhD from the University of St Andrews.
My view on Arday’s tragedy is that what lies beneath, and now resurfaces, is a new network of unhinged supremacists, fostered and supported by techno-accelerationism; a new rebranding of the “same old, same old”, via neoreactionary thought (NRx), Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, among others.
Amid unreliable AI checkers, surveillance versus scrutiny, Open Access/Open Science versus archival consumerism, vicious culture wars, forced tokenism, attention economies, the “told you so” and “gotcha” fixation, and identitarian echo chambers, this tragedy confirms historical anti-Blackness, but also, importantly, reveals how AI and the assessment of research now present an unprecedented challenge.
Research has increasingly been governed by a quantitative digital bubble that has now perhaps exploded, while AI-driven knowledge production has taken over. This is Text+capitalism at its very best-worst. Most importantly, in contemporary and future research, how will anyone be accused of plagiarism in a world where AI exists? What kind of creative writing can stand up to the dominance of AI-written essays?
As our predecessors have shown, academia has been bloody tough for women, especially for women academics from working-class backgrounds who are also mothers. And may I also add: for women, and for anyone who is and will always be ethnically visible and, therefore, an easy potential target for the new rebrandings of the “same old, same old”.
On UK academia, Peter Thiel, Aporia and Polygenic Scores LLC, see: