Joshua Hansen Interview: The Philosophy of the Metaverse
The Scientificity of Non-Science, Dirty Metaphysics, and the Face-Off Between Academiology and Grammatology.
Mike: Please describe your background, what brought you to the philosophy of education, and what inspired you to take up the cudgels against the “dirty metaphysicians” entrenched in the “hypermodern university?” Perhaps you could briefly explain your definition of “dirty” as it pertains to metaphysics, science, naturalism, etc.
Joshua: A great deal of what I've learned in philosophy has been via the internet, an understandably dubious yet eminently hypermodern proposition. I left the university as a virulent nihilist—for reasons I'm happy to discuss but that may be too explicit to develop here. I was also studying marketing, which I see as the most degenerate avenue of professional development on offer (and if you propose something as being more obscene, I'll respond with “digital marketing for THAT!”). Of course these things can be done well, but then we enter the realm of axiology, ethics and so on, in other words, philosophy proper.
My view of the contemporary university system is that it takes the so-called best and brightest in our society and transforms them into infantilized borderline narcissists—and even some academics have asserted similarly in peer-reviewed publications no less. The contemporary academy serves almost no purpose beyond advancing the technical system through extreme science and selective deconstruction (aside from being a vocational training center for corporate employers and a conduit for conferring social prestige to the highest legacy bidders). The PhD has become a decoration of vice while the academy has become increasingly effective at appealing to its own genealogy to portray an aura of gravitas, a mythos based on pure marketing—sophistry par excellence. That's what I'd like to dispel.
My use of the word “dirty” as in “dirty metaphysics, dirty science, etc.” is inflected by two distinct notions, the first which is like trying to bite someone's ear off during a prizefight. The second would be when an institution or an academy of science explicitly vouches for the scientificity of nonscience based on nonscientific value judgments. The objection is not that value judgments were made, but that they were fraudulently draped in the lab coat of science, something becoming increasingly common.
For a number of reasons, I'm convinced that the contemporary university poses a bonafide existential threat to human existence—even beyond what Paul Virilio calls the information bomb or the integral accident—and that this threat is papered over by a masterful employment of rhetoric by academics and university administrators. It's one thing to be part of a predatory corporation or to be a mercenary profiteer—it's quite another when someone actually believes that this constitutes a substantive contribution to the collective good. That's both what the university has been able to achieve and what I want to demystify. And unlike many of the culture war commentators, I actually have the arguments.
Mike: I met you in Johannes Niederhauser’s The Question Concerning Technology seminar, and heard from you again in Justin Murphy’s Other Life community. In what ways do groups [and guilds(!)] in this “digital intellectual semiosphere” allow people to share complex ideas outside of academic str(i)(u)ctures? To what degree can they replace the university? While effective for the study of philosophy, literature, etc., universities seem to be required as gatekeepers in fields with lethal consequences like engineering, medicine, etc., even if “dirty” physics and the reduction of science to a dogmatic belief have taken over more speculative scientific domains.
Joshua: These movements are remarkably similar to Ivan Illich's notion of “learning webs,” just manifested digitally—which is what I think we're observing in real time. I see these groups as fulfilling an unmet need for a reconstitution of meaning contra the barbarism associated with the university. As you correctly anticipate, I think what remains of the academy will go the route of what Scott Galloway called "cyborg universities," where corporations will siphon their brand equity while intensifying the vocational training model and the drive for marketable intellectual property. At the same time it seems like institutions invested in what education has classically entailed will be facing tremendous issues with delivering at scale (to throw out some nice business buzzwords for you).
Under such arrangements, institutional science would be an even more insular priesthood, necessitating an increasing public grasp on the kinds of claims they're making despite limited access. While it increasingly looks like the notion of “general will” may be defeated by technology, I think there's an ethical imperative to raise consciousness about extreme science before the full implementation of an open tyranny. For instance, Alfred Nobel—the inventor of dynamite—purportedly created the Nobel Peace Prize after a newspaper prematurely eulogized him as a “Merchant of Death.” Similarly, I'd suggest that we eulogize the entire institution of modern science to stave off anthropogenic catastrophe.
I think the best use of the digital intellectual space would be to fulfill Virilio's idea for a “University of Disaster,” where the sciences and humanities collectively consider the implications of the technical progress accident. The development of such preventative intelligence may be an essential precondition for the continuation of history against Big Science's seeming attempts to detonate all reality.
Mike: What are the aims and aspirations of your Philosophy of the Metaverse YouTube channel and Tractatus Anti-Academicus project?
Joshua: To speak of philosophy today immediately suggests what academia has done with it. Academia's main project in the West has been the eradication and erasure of philosophy from the university, let's say from Nietzsche to Laruelle in Europe and from James to Rorty in the U.S. One has to ostensibly engage with the entire academy to determine if philosophy is even tenable. Yet Academia was originally born from Philosophy by Plato in the groves of Hekedemos, perhaps Plato's “Original Sin.” I'm claiming that metaversality reopens fundamental questions of metaphysics and that the academy can be totally deconstructed by a single Logo-centric discourse. This confrontation would be a face-off between Academiology and Grammatology, culminating in the development of a Philosophy of the Metaverse.
One overlooked binary destabilizes the entire Derridean project. Deconstruction confers an appanage for meaning to PhD-robed academics with privileged access to the means of literary production, subsidized leisure and fluency in a register of highly arcane language—not to mention entree to the corporate publishing apparatus and its inner sanctum: the pay-walled archive. Deconstruction is what I jokingly call a “latté-centric discourse” for these reasons, although it has monstrous implications in the real world. Selective deconstruction advances modes of highly-mystified bourgeois violence while the academic will to textuality is in some ways akin to an arms dealer calling for perpetual war.
While academic discourses are allegedly replete with emancipatory potential, they subalternize the actual citizenry of our world, the side of the binary that I want to radicalize. The result would be a recovery of meaning from the University and a reclamation of humanity. The transcendental signified was never deconstructed, just transferred. Post-structuralism was never ontologically discursive in spite of its proponent's claims: the logical center was just hidden behind the curtain of the university, concealing the academic theorist. Furthermore, both must be placed decisively in the posthuman camp, making the new “treason of the intellectuals,” most aptly put, a betrayal against the entire species.
The will to textuality is an expression of the scholarly will to power in action. My claim is that the rise of digital presence—metaversality—disrupts this vector and puts the Derridean science of writing into crisis. My intent is to explode the academic text via total deconstruction and to effectuate the bloodless textual sacrifice of the figure of the academic, placing it under erasure. “The Death of the Academic” as a hermeneutic methodology would terminate bourgeois solipsism while re-privileging the life-world.
Mike: While a hypermodern university aligned with the corporate sector may be heavily entangled with the neoliberal death-drive, it’s arguable academia is not a real wielder of technocapitalist power, only one of its many satellite systems. Why make academia your first target rather than “metaverse destiny,” military-industrial nihilism, or transhumane demon summoning?
Joshua: Of all the forces you cited, I'd argue that academia is the most fundamentally dangerous because the aforementioned vectors are constellations of thought developed in or centered around academe. Metaverse destiny and the transhuman vector can both be mapped onto the academic metanarrative of putative social and technical progress. The military-industrial complex defends principles developed in academe along with the seeming corporate right of neocolonialism. And above all, academia possesses the rhetorical ability to divert crucial political questions into compartmented institutional prerogatives.
On another note, the university is the primary legitimation mechanism for all the above and it's the one most likely to be taken at face value by the general public—like a Rube Goldberg machine for manufacturing consent. It's also the least likely to be critiqued in a way that's decisive because most political and economic power-brokers wield its credentials, ironically except some at the very top. Hence it's continually a matter of reformism, complaints concerning equal time and so on, which engage in an almost total acceptance of academic authority to begin with, thus begging the question.
Of course there's a type of expertise that exists in academia, but it mostly involves the implementation of instrumental reason, promoting hyperspecialization and the development and deployment of rhetorical dominance. While all the vectors you mentioned are indeed highly dangerous, Academia represents a supreme threat because it possesses the sophistical mastery to justify almost any Evil.
Mike: Can you expand on what you said on O.G. Rose’s podcast: that the technocapitalist function of academe is to create space between theory and practice?
Joshua: What we're seeing with technobureaucratic virtualization is that management (theory) and actual labor (practice) are becoming increasingly severed from each other at an almost unprecedented scale, only one heuristic for which might be CEO-to-employee pay ratios. At the forefront of this is where we see the rise of a new virtual class that's increasingly dominating terrestrial existence from the metaverse. In the meantime, academia is right there to provide its full stamp of approval for the entire thing, in spite of the fact that it'll likely result in the creative destruction of the university as we know it.
Academia rests atop a pyramid scheme of human immiseration and its ideological forms operate to conceal this lest everything be put into question. This is how a tenured yoga professor can roll into the campus sushi bar to talk “equity” while the university's endowment is soaring on the stocks of predatory corporations profiting from the contemporary equivalent of human bondage. Or how college presidents can nibble on charcuterie boards while making small talk about inclusion, this before going off to allocate the filthy lucre—which simply demands looking the other way to keep the charade alive.
Internationally, the university is strongly correlated with this mystified violence, in the sense that the resource and labor extraction is accomplished through a disparity of bargaining power impossible in absence of force. On the domestic side, the university system has become a front for student loan sharking by vested financial interests, and, of course, there's the issue of adjunctification coupled with massive administrative bloat that's been rightly excoriated by academics including Benjamin Ginsberg.
This hypocrisy is something we're all sadly benefiting from. The difference is that most people don't claim to be the very arbiters of equity and social justice contra even quotidian proclamations of academics and university administrators. I'll give them this: it's quite alluring to believe as they do.
For all the political right's talk of “Marxists,” Gramsci's march through the institutions was captured and re-routed towards multinational corporate benefit. I'd claim that if there isn't an explicit nexus between poststructuralism and the “ethics” of technocapitalism, it's certainly implied. Everything being advanced appears to threaten even more exploitative modes of arrangements, including increasing inequalities and unprecedented class separation with little-to-no push-back from you-know-who.
Mike: Critical University Studies are the au current critical valence shell of an “ethical non-morality amidst an increasingly technical system.” Could even the meta-critique of an outsider be then critiqued as but another onion layer of a critical cascade repetending in negative and positive infinitudes away from praxis? Aren’t all vital meta-critiques assimilated into a Colbert culture to lose their Spirit and Teeth?
Joshua: Reterritorialization is certainly an issue, for instance how the Marxist conflict thesis is used as a market segmentation tool for consumer capital—and anything that can be twisted will. Marx was an outsider, another was Rousseau, who critiqued the Arts and Sciences right in the thick of the Enlightenment, in a way that's still prescient, I'd claim. I draw a distinction between critiques, endless critiques, and the notion of Monumental Critique, the decisive engagements that come to shape an issue into the future.
Perhaps what I'm arguing can be interpreted as burning the libraries, closing the universities and then turning everything over to TikTok influencers. That is not what I'm arguing. In fact, because of how the recent history of the university has been allowed to unfold, I'd claim we've already burned those libraries—and that the hand on the torch belonged to the so-called faculty. Now we have to deal with it.
As Deleuze stated: “[...] everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods.” Even with a successful mercy killing of the university, this type of ideological domination shifts into the metaverse. My aim is to expose the illusion of academic authority, which is what brought about this result to begin with. The hollow corporate ethos is what arises out of extreme science and selective deconstruction—maybe not initially, but as a propensity of human nature.
I expect most bricks and mortar humanities departments to be destroyed by virtualization although this may offer modes of short-term liberation. Technologically enframed, new relations of dependence will be created, showing the flip-side of Hegelian “progress.” Initial emancipatory effects may morph into their opposite, a techo-rational totalitarianism on the way to open tyranny. As Julian Assange noted, that's why we'll need encryption. I also think that's why we'll need a Philosophy of the Metaverse.