Underground Theory Introduction pt. 3 - Professors Going Underground | The University vs. The Attention Economy
Learning webs of solo projects, collaboration, and a DIY scene - by David McKerracher - includes reflections on Angela Nagle, Justin Murphy, exit, and learning-webs
This is a continuation from pt. 2, which you can read for free here.
Learning webs of solo projects, collaboration, and a DIY scene
The status quo is not static—it is change itself. This is not pure progress or regression, but is a complex set of tendencies and forces tangled up in a complex system that goes far beyond anything any of us are capable of comprehending. Yet we all have our sense for whether the general movement of history is positive or negative. This comes from our basic mood perhaps, our fundamental disposition, the spirit of the times we are tapped into—in either case, it is probably pure ideology.
Because we have some kind of a conception of why or how things are shitty and how they could be better, or of why we’re utterly fucked no matter what, it is worthwhile to turn to philosophy and theory to deconstruct our presuppositions and biases, so as to better hone in on the essence of the major tendencies playing themselves out.
To understand the tendencies of the current situation will give us a sense for how to counteract or ride those tendencies in ways that help us make some kind of difference, if not for the whole world, then at least for our own survival. I think part of the point of living the examined life is so that one can adjust expectations and strategies so as to lead a less miserable existence.
Authors and underground theorists in this work, such as Bryan Weeks, Ann Snelgrove-McKerracher,
, Phillip Shinn, are keen on the fact that the institutions are failing us, that the existing system has no real future, and that we have to either take collective or at least personal action so as to break from its general inertia. We want to hack our way through the existing systems into something freer. What we want is freedom, but we also need structures. The structures exist, but are being mirrored and borrowed off of in uncritical ways that undermine the radical potential of leavers.“Leavers” are those who “exit” the academic institutions.
said that we are likely to see mass leavers from universities the same way we have from mainstream media:One vulnerability [the PMC has] is people of quality voluntarily leaving if the conditions allow it. An economically viable exit strategy that allows greater freedom, which is already happening in media, could conceivably happen in other institutions like academia, if someone figures out the right model. How long will [PMC] prestige last - the only thing they have to sell - if all the best scholars and thinkers that people want to hear from and that come up with new innovations leave and then use their years of pent up frustration to expose the institutional rot from the outside, as some break-away figures are doing with the media today?[i]
A year or so after writing the above piece, Nagle appeared as a guest on the What’s Left podcast. In that conversation she references Justin Murphy as a solid example of this academic exit strategy.
In my first book, Waypoint, I also suggested that Justin Murphy might be an example of a radical alternative to the current academic situation. I like the idea of academics going their own way. The issue is that academics need administration, so they trade out their university’s admin for a platform. The goal with Theory Underground is to not be reliant on any of the platforms, but to have my own. When academics become free from the university they are too easily turned into functionaries of the attention economy. Seduced by the platform’s algorithms, we become little more than influencers. I used to be one. I felt its effect on me. The medium is not just the message, it also makes the messenger (political steamers like Vaush, Destiny, and Hasan are the medium! They are the algorithms personified!).
Genuine learning can be obtained to some degree on one’s own, but structures are necessary to coordinate efforts between lots of people. And lots of people, ideological diversity, and a robust plurality in the discourse of truth seekers, are all necessary grounds for overly corporate and risk averse spaces to become unique and potent places.
Non-belongers need to leave the non-places to experiment with making their own places for robust networks. Ivan Illich, in his Deschooling Society, proposes that “learning webs” could be the solution to break from the model of compulsory schooling that has done so much to undermine genuine education. What would that look like? Not a podcast. Not an individual brand, nor learning cooperative either.
What we need are a million experiments. Instead, most leavers do nothing to genuinely counter the tendencies of the attention economy or truly experiment with the technological means at our disposal. Thaddeus Russel calls his podcast Renegade University, but it’s just a podcast. Justin Murphy says he started a liberal arts college, but it was really just some one-off courses that are not available on demand after the fact, so once he burnt out, it went away. Nor was it obvious that they were part of a coherent and grander vision for fostering the conditions necessary for a community of truth-seekers, much less cutting edge theorists. Rather than just sit on the sidelines and nitpick at other people’s experiments, I wanted to do all of the things I wished someone else would try.
Universities may be here to stay, but there is a possible future wherein those who have exited do the work to counter both the worst tendencies of the university and the attention economy. By showing that the bureaucratic glut, commercialization, and censorship at universities are unnecessary and can be dispensed with, we prove what is possible. This will force change. But instead of doing anything that can do that, leavers get seduced by the algorithmic incentives of the attention economy and become edgy culture warrior content pumping machines.
The contradictions in the university have led to an explosion of new projects as individuals leave the institutions and new groups form. But those groups become new institutions that, in their own ways, mirror the worst tendencies of what they have exited. The thing is, I owe a tremendous debt to all of those who have courageously attempted to do something different. In the same way that I see things that I want to correct for, there will be people like Michał Rams-Ługowski in this book will have critiques of how centralized Theory Underground is. I guess this just comes down to a difference in perspective because I don’t think small media projects are effective when decentralized. For instance, those who have tried to unionize, collectivize, or “democratize” Current Affairs or TYT (The Young Turks), or even a small business like Mina’s World[ii] or a pizza shop in downtown Boise, completely miss that such singular entities built around individual personalities and their networks would exist in any ideal society. The point is to not let them rule the world, of course, but if people don’t have the freedom to do what they want on an expanded scale, then it wouldn’t be a society worth living in. Yet “decentralization” is upheld as a supreme value. I just do not think of them as effective or fun.
All of the existing alternative theory education organizations I have seen so far are no exception—most courses are in fact little more than discussion groups. Their on-demand content is mostly just people name-dropping, free associating, and assuming everyone else “gets it” all without any way of providing introductory on demand-courses, accountability and assessment structures, or a way to keep the discourse going on after the fact in spaces dedicated to the specific subject-matter. These are all tendencies Theory Underground aims to counter, though I’m sure the failures will be myriad. Hopefully my failures will inspire others to do better than me.
Every leaver sees what needs to be fixed in different ways, understanding the problems in their own terms. I think any genuinely robust “movement” would be made up of hundreds of singular experiments doing things that nobody in existing institutions would have ever dreamed of doing. This is why I am for one person colleges in a network of what Ivan Illich called “learning webs.”[iii]
Learning webs don’t need boards. Learning webs don’t need massive funding or big teams. Those only slow things down with administrative nonsense and more interpassive knowledge games where nobody does the work because everyone else supposedly did it already, where everyone takes ownership for each accomplishment so nobody makes their own.
In a world where everything is always falling apart and accelerating, what we need are the kinds of structures that help us corral certain flows of energy, interest, and research into contained spaces that are themselves considered experiments dedicated to specific outcomes. If in the Sixties the idea was that everyone knows enough and we don’t need lectures, just flipped classrooms and “dropping out” to “tune in,” today we need the opposite: lectures that assume an audience supposed-to-have done the reading and be confused.
Anything less lowers the bar and we have nothing genuinely worth tackling to rise against. In the original version of this book there were going to be a lot more of my writings theorizing the underground. I have written a few pieces that critique tendencies that are fostered by the attention economy, that are ultimately self-undermining for underground theorists. For anyone interested in countering self-defeating tendencies in themselves when it comes to doing philosophy on the internet, I recommend “Three Principles of Study as a Way of Life” and “Mastery vs. Students Supposed to Know.”[iv] For now those are available on the Theory Underground website; they will be published in a future volume. Suffice it to say, I am very critical of my own tendency to take the easy way out. These articles are meant to get me to step up my game but hopefully encourage fellow travelers to do so as well.
Most of what leavers do hardly takes advantage of what’s truly possible. They fail to make their own learning platforms and instead get seduced by the attention awarded to influencers by the distraction economy. The solution is to instead become genuine participants in learning webs.
Genuinely cutting edge learning webs will probably look like professors being one-person colleges confederated in a larger underground DIY scene where genuine discourse is engaged in over decades and real contradictions get fleshed out over time. To do this, we don’t need more “boards.” The administration can be replaced by AI. We aren’t quite there yet, which is why we need people like me to experiment with juggling virtually all aspects of the operation simultaneously.
What I bring to the dynamic is absurd amounts of obsessive energy and being just good enough at a lot of different things to pull off essentially building a one-person college that is both online and offline, has its own social media platform (and app!), is independent of corporate and state sponsorship, and even has a publishing house. As I said, AI will replace most of the administrative bullshit, but for now, people who can DIY the whole thing are needed. I consider myself an experiment in what one person can accomplish. Those who are interested in what’s going to be possible in the very near future are already taking note.
With all that said, though, it’s of course not just me. I have collaborated with everyone in this volume, I have co-taught courses, and everything I have accomplished relies on the buy-in from at least 20 to 50 pretty dedicated and obsessive fellow travelers. Nothing I do would have ever been possible without Bryan Weeks, Michael Downs, Elton L.K., and Ann Snelgrove; the same goes for Bryce Nance, the one student who has taken all of my courses so far! You guys make it possible, for real, because otherwise I’d just be talking to myself.
My point is simply that none of my fellow travelers need to concern themselves with administrative nonsense. None of them have to build the website and keep it up to date. Everyone gets to use the course-gated social media site without having to worry about all the WordPress plugins it requires, the constant trouble-shooting, and all the rest of the developer nightmares that I have undertaken as a daily chore for these last six months. In the future, I think we will all be able to have what I have with Theory Underground, and network from our own little course-site islands (or, in the theme of neofeudalist realism, we’ll all have our own fiefdoms!), without having to worry about all this administrative and developer bullshit that I am currently wrestling with every day.
But why do I feel the need to make it what it is? A lecture-course gated social media site and publishing house is meant to counter the fact that all spaces online are non-places where mere chatter lowers the bar even further while making us feel like something has been achieved.
Philosophy and theory being mixed with courses on practical living and diverse subject matters coupled with principles from language learning communities is meant to counter how all the above have lost something special in isolation from one another.
By utilizing gamification, social media, and YouTube in strategic ways, I hope we are able to counter the worst tendencies of the attention economy while doing something that matters. Ways of using the master’s tools that become beneficial. Something something. I hate this paragraph. Whatever. I get more into this stuff in the article on “Three Principles of Study as a Way of Life” (cited earlier).
The point is to compensate with what positive manifestations expose as lacking while utilizing the tools and tendencies in the current situation to overcome its worst dynamics. Most of the worst tendencies are ones that we feel every day. Turning education into a form of social or cultural capital used to hoard virtue over working people while creating a prestige class of discursive Taylorists[v] is one of the most noxious tendencies undermining any approximation of the idea of the university. Exposing the PMC for its function in meritocracy, virtue hoarding, division, and the overall reproduction of a class society, has therefore been put front and center with everything TU does (and I defend my use of this term “PMC” against the cheap and dogmatic dismissals in my piece within this volume called “Lefter Than Thou”).
Likewise, the tendency to challenge reifications of the two-party, two-ideology, two-side lesser-evilest establishment, (in a word, “duopoly”) and all the alternative, indie, and leaver spin offs who mirror it, has been central to Theory Underground.
“We” have experimented with horizontalism and group collaboration enough for a hundred years. What is needed now are trees with rhizomatic root systems, islands with strong shipping routes, and micro dictatorships with reliable rail systems between city states.
There was a time when I used the term “we” instead of “I” in some kind of way that deflected attention from the subject of enunciation. Now I’ll just say it: I am doing a lot of experiments that achieve things nobody is even thinking about trying to undertake right now. Sorry to toot my own horn, but I just spent six months building an app and getting it live on the Google Play and Apple Stores, but when I announced it there was virtually no response besides a couple of my buddies who “get it.” Educators having their own apps, their own platforms, their own networks, is new. And I think it’s the most exciting thing ever! I believe that doing stuff like this will spark radical imagination for others by showing them what is plausibly within reach. (April 2024 note: The app is now obsolete, for the time being… It was too expensive and buggy. I learned a lot by trying to make TU have its own app, but the tech is not quite there—unless I had some bigger funders who made it possible for me to hire my own full time programmers. Until then, we’re using an intermediary “good enough” platform).
There are those who are scared of anything singular, they want universality only and they see anything singular as particular only. What they forget is that we are all potentially singular, and that a robust dialectic between particular and universal is necessary to hone singularity, and vice versa.
If the punk scene was made up of leavers and rejects who all had their own DIY projects, then underground theorists and renegade academics who give a shit about combating the worst tendencies of a class society while experimenting with alternatives need to learn how to build their own platforms, corral their own interests, and contain conversations in a way that moves them from the plain of non-places into bases from which to develop structures into the realm of height.
The goals of Theory Underground are twofold:
1. First, to follow up on the promise I set myself in my first book Waypoint, when I gave myself 5 years to develop the theory before trying to write to a broader audience, much less The Book I feel the need to write. Theory Underground is, in a sense, my own little obstacle course, or way of life, that is developing me towards that goal I had set myself.
2. The second goal of Theory Underground is to see what a solo admin and professor can do in five years. That’s the experimental aspect of all of this. After the five years are up, I plan to make it so that anyone who gets seriously involved will also receive a crash course in how to do it themselves. What I hope will come from this is a whole lot of other experiments. I’m going to be transparent about funding, the budget, and tools used. Anyone else will be, ostensibly, able to achieve more using less, because I will have done the work when it was more costly and difficult. I’ll set up a course eventually to show others how to do it themselves.
Everyone in this volume is experimenting with these new frontiers and possibilities in their own ways. This book was originally going to be just a collection of my own essays and some of Michael Downs’s blog posts, but when Slavoj Žižek told me he was going to gift me a manuscript to publish, I decided to invite some fellow travelers and renegade academics to participate. I did NOT expect that most of the people I asked for submissions would actually follow through. I expected that only half would follow through. Instead, they all did! So this is a huge volume. No apologies!
The material in this volume spans a lot of topics and is composed of many different styles. The content has been carefully selected and combined to be read as a Whole. What matters more than peoples’ “takes” or “positions” is the subject-matter itself, all of which will be the basis for future courses, conferences, and conversations.
This is where Underground Theory really gets started. What you’re holding in your hands is the product of a whole lot of research, consideration, passion, and fun! I admire all of the people in this volume for different reasons and in different ways, and am proud to call them fellow travelers. I hope that, whether you are reading or listening to this book, that you find something in it life-changing for the better. I hope it inspires you to think and write on your own, for yourself. Maybe you’ll even end up taking some Theory Underground courses, or we will meet up on tour. Either way, I look forward to either talking about this work with you, or at least hearing your thoughtful reflections on its chapters via the form shared throughout volume.[vi] In conclusion, I would just like to say, welcome to the underground. Let’s get started!
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This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of The Introduction (by David McKerracher) will be published over the next of the Theory Underground tour in Europe (photo below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work draws heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Because “Timenergy Theory” requires a more robust theory of libidinal economy and ideology, McKerracher has spent the last few years learning Žižekian and Lacanian theory of ideology from his compatriot Michael Downs. Theory Underground is McKerracher’s vehicle for cultivating the kind of research and conservation necessary to take this project to the next level, the long-term goal of which is to overcome the current culture war deadlocks by inquiry into their conditions of possibility. The goal of this work is to pave a way forward for humanity to maintain the conditions of a robust cultural plurality, harness automation-for-all, and ultimately, explore the universe.
[ii]https://www.34st.com/article/2022/08/minas-world-lgbtq-coffee-shop-black-malpractice-philadelphia-queer-sonam-parikh-kate-egghart
[iii] Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society.
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