Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
Some years ago I heard from a friend that he needed to 'secretly' meet with his students in order to dodge authoritarianism and tribalism (in order to actually teach). Some hours ago in "Any space will do" Farnell, a former lecturer (he quit his job), told a similar story:
That sense of not having a "meeting place" is a horrible emotion I can relate to, not from homelessness but from work. Many of the hateful places I taught at were locked-down corporate hellholes. Universities became unrecognisable after the 1990s. Before that, you could just find and use any empty classroom or lecture theatre out of hours. There was a student union building. In and around Bloomsbury in the 1980s there were literally hundreds of societies, clubs, associations, and dozens of free, empty spaces with open doors, from Conway Hall to the Tavistock, to Senate House. The whole campus of the University of London was once an open community of learning.As a visiting professor I saw the change across a lot of institutions over 35 years. By 2010 most universities were high security gulags, accessible only by key-cards and turnstiles and covered in cameras. Booking a room was a technofascist nightmare, via awful "portal" websites, needing "apps", pre-arranging lists of students. To escape this Kafkaesque horror show in summer I took to organising my tutorials in the local park, or at a nearby pub. Any space will do. Anywhere we can sit in a circle and hear each other. By 2016, when Loach's film was made, I'd already soft-quit in my mind, recognising British universities no longer as fit places for teaching and learning. The university as a place had ceased to exist.
These two narratives still coexist. The populist idea that "digital technology connects people" is met in equal and opposite measure by the corporate project that uses technology to divide; To drive down wages. To oppose solidarity and unions. To herd people into walled gardens. To disrupt organisation, spontaneous meetings, unauthorised mutual support. To monitor, separate, discipline and punish. Nothing outside the matrix of control can be allowed to exist.
That sense of oppression, by a regime determined to stop groups of people meeting, discussing, or sharing, hangs in the air across "Western society" still. It came into sharper relief during the pandemic, but let's note that "social distancing" was already a thing before it had a name. The crackdown on protest and gatherings in Britain are telltale signs.
A lot of this article is about Ken Loach, whom I met in a festival when I was 18. I asked him some questions.
Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind" and I can relate to that because I soft-quit Sirius just more than 3 years before I formally quit. In 2019 the company did some truly horrible things. Then COVID-19 happened and working from home was invaluable. We did not catch COVID-19 until late 2023.
Some of us in the community - Alex Oliva for instance - left an employer after many years due to similar reasons.
As a side note, regarding academia, I quit my job in academia in 2012 not because of relatively low pay (that's considered "normal") but many other factors, including conflict of interest (my new boss was working part time in the university, part time in Google), the sysadmins were truly incompetent (they deleted all accounts, of all users, without prior warning, after server breach, so I lost some code of mine), and the labs were "funded" (controlled) by corporations like Intel. █