Half-baked thought, continuing along the lines of WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN PHILOSOPHERS?

Now that the free money of QE/ZIRP has dried up, many pointless projects and pointless IPOs are going away, starting with the huge totally pointless project of bitcoin. Corporations are suddenly realizing that they need customers. Free-money woke idiocy doesn’t work any more, but the practitioners haven’t stopped. They’re still running on the vapors of Share Value and ESG, even now that their idiocy cuts both profits AND Share Value. Ask Budweiser and Fox.

The change is more gradual in academia, where the free money is less direct. VC donors are gone now, and normal interest rates make student loans much less attractive. Colleges have to cut expenses ruthlessly, and of course they won’t cut administrations. Parkinson. Admins always grow regardless of purpose.

When the ax starts to fall, subjects and projects with no OCCUPATIONAL purpose are the first to go.

Facebook’s metaverse had no commercial purpose. Gaming companies had already developed VR-controlled games, which were only marginally popular. Facebook’s version was blatantly inferior to the marginally popular existing products.

Academic philosophy has no philosophical purpose. Everyone practices philosophy. Most real occupations have their own well-developed philosophical frameworks, learned in training courses or in apprenticeship.

Academic philosophy is given plenty of chances to be useful, and it fails every single time. This Reddit discussion of Slavoj Zizek shows the arrogance clearly.

One commenter complained properly:

This is why not many do with philosophy. Just on the first few sentences 98% of the people will say what the fuck is this guy talking about. Sounds just like spitting some intellectual stuff. If we want more people to study philosophy, we need to start speaking to them and not to the selected few who spent their whole life studying it.

He was met with a firestorm of responses, all basically saying “our job is not to provide solutions.”

Okay, you’ve just stated openly that your profession is pointless. Now you can’t complain when the budget ax falls.

Here’s where the guild comes in. A guild or a labor union is a SKILL HOARDER and SKILL MAINTAINER. In order to preserve and maintain a skill through hard times, the guild needs to USE its skill to SOLVE REAL PROBLEMS, and needs to make those solutions VISIBLE.

Nobody wants to eliminate the entire professions of plumbers or hairdressers. Both SOLVE REAL PROBLEMS for real people. An occasional fuckup doesn’t spoil the whole skill-bank because real people have real experiences with non-fuckups.