portaPoopy's comments

Institutions are intentional normalizers. That’s the definition of the word “institution”; an entity that exists to service an idea. To build consensus around its attributes and parameters.

Corporations normalize utilitarian agency. Government social policing. University thinking.

Institutions never produced interesting science or engineering; people did. Institutions took all the credit.

IMO you’re being conned.

Universities are agency normalizing agents of government.

We’re not talking launching some professor from a cannon but doing as humans have done for years and updating colloquial language models. This is freaking out the establishment as it does and has, and of course the establishment labels it as anti-freedom to teach them anything, because of course it’s the establishment; it teaches us not the other way around!

MIT is like a rack of Twitter servers; we could unplug it and society will keep going because it’s not immutably reliant on society. Many thousands of workers are though and only “essential workers” have an obligation to output real results.

Boycott was long seen as a necessary behavior to preserve democracy and free markets; flush old ideas. It’s free agency; can’t force people to do business with someone or believe in their figurative identity.

“Cancel culture” is boycott rebranded as a pejorative, to make the public mean and nasty for not wanting to heap figurative privilege on particular people anymore.

Those shrieking loudest about the loss of speech in the US are usually those who are privileged at the expense of speech that would improve conditions for others (do not speak of sick days for railroad staff, or making Walmart pay worker benefits to get their employees off social programs!)

Simple propaganda techniques are being leveraged to relabel free speech that suggests rethinking evolving society. Universities that are heavily dependent on government protections to exist fear change.

Unless research requires exotic hardware (nuclear reactor or something) there’s little reason to provide special accommodations for data mining academics that make up the majority of university work these days.

They can go freely speak in a park, or video chat about their findings. What’s funny is if you bring up how bloated with middle management unis have become you’re anti-intellectual too.

When a corporation, celebrity, or institution are complaining about being oppressed as they rely on “essential workers” who are effectively not allowed to speak out of line, I laugh.