JW: And how do you view the academic freedom aspects of these conditions?
MS: They are so multitudinous, it's hard to know where to begin, especially in a Q&A like this, where a bit of brevity is required. Earlier, I said that one way of thinking about technofeudalism's origin is through the collapsing distinction between information and money, which coincides with digitization. Well, at least inside and between the technofeudal enterprises, I think that collapse is almost complete.
Proprietary data and/or capta is a currency unto itself. So, if capta (and especially capta in natural language form) is the reserve currency of technofeudalism, you can expect the technofeudal enterprises to be protective of the control they currently enjoy over that currency. They are the money printers. And it is in their interest to enclose existing corpuses of information, to monopolize the creation of new information, to crush competing or new entrant information producers, and to use their monopoly powers to create artificial shortages which drive up exchange values.
Colleges and universities are an existing, durable infrastructure for creating information. Many of the sources of value for technofeudalists, from computer networks to encryption to LLMs, were made possible by the U.S. public university infrastructure. From a feudalist or monopoly power perspective, that is a rival that cannot be allowed to continue to persist unmolested. It must be colonized, absorbed, controlled, or destroyed. If you accept that premise (and I know not everybody will, so many of the threats to education, let alone academic freedom, follow directly and almost become self-explanatory.
Re-upping this interview with @biblioracle.bsky.social from earlier this week which helpfully made me put some shit that had been burbling in my head to page.
academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/the-techno...
