Fabulous — On Jason Arday

And on Nathan Cofnas, AI Philosophy, “Effective Altruism”, the Ethics of Paywalling, and the Stifling Atmosphere of the “Managerial Humanities”

1.

There is a silence these past 24 hours that must surely be explained by the power of shame. Nearly everyone who until early yesterday had delighted in the feeding frenzy on Jason Arday, triggered when Nathan Cofnas pricked first blood, has gone mum. I hope shame is what explains the silence, anyhow. It is the appropriate human reaction to this obscene display of inhumanity, which had as its direct result the death, evidently by suicide, of a blazing and beautiful soul.

May his memory be blessed. And in the wake of this whole grotesque display of all that is worst in humanity may real room be made in our institutions, or may new institutions be made that are able to make real room, for the fabulous — which I mean in both senses, designating those who style themselves larger than life, who set themselves apart with their exquisite locks and threads and general self-display from the ordinary run of little nerds who dominate in academic life; and designating those whose primary mode of knowledge transmission, like Arday’s, is not data-mongering, but storytelling.

I suppose now is the appropriate moment to run through the expected reassurances. No, I don’t condone plagiarism or fabrication of data. And neither do I share, at all, the institutional priorities that got Arday hired in the first place. His dissertation looks like a hot mess — a simulacrum of a contribution to a slapdash field that itself, in my view, should have no place in any institution bearing the name of a university. But who gives a shit? The integrity of our institutions —obviously, unquestionably— is not worth a single human life.

It is likewise obvious to me, even from my relative distance (I have crossed paths with Cofnas in my professional life, about which more below), that Arday only ended up writing this fake dissertation in this fake field because doing so was the only way for him to fulfill a perverse expectation — to distort his nature, which again is the nature of a storyteller, in order to fit himself to the mold of the 21st-century university.