Response to Curt Rice, 'Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes’

Response to Curt Rice, 'Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes’, The Scholarly Kitchen, 18 February, 2026. 

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Reading the argument that ‘Diamond Open Access needs institutions, not heroes’, it’s hard not to notice how much the question of institutions is also a question of who those institutions are structurally built to serve. As Gary Younge shows in his new book Pigeon Holed: Creative Freedom As An Act of Resistance, the publishing world - in Britain at least - remains strikingly conservative and elitist in its social composition:

the Police Evidence Centre found publishing and architecture the most elitist within the creative sector, with more than 58 per cent of those working within it coming from privileged backgrounds compared to 37 per cent of British workers as a whole. Since non-white people are more likely to be working-class, racial exclusion was, of course, compounded and enabled by class elitism. Using raw data from a 2019 Labour Force Survey, PEC researchers could show that publishing was the whitest within the creative sector with only 5 per cent minorities.

Meanwhile, a report by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission found that newspaper columnists are more likely to have attended private school and Oxbridge than even High Court judges or members of the House of Lords. This leads Younge to conclude that in ‘an era of polarisation and populism, it is a reasonable, if not quite provable, assumption that the unrepresentative nature of the media has some bearing on publishing and journalism’s struggles to be relevant.’

These patterns matter for open-access debates because they reveal a structural paradox: organisations and institutions are indeed important for helping to sustain diamond OA and its infrastructure. Yet the existing organisations and institutions, including those associated with publishing, are themselves deeply shaped by differences and hierarchies of class and race. Simply relying on them to scale diamond open access, without also transforming their structures and social composition, risks reproducing the same (white, middle-class) norms, values and exclusions under the guise of a more sustainable model.

The real challenge, then, is not ‘institutions vs heroes’. It is how to design and build community-led organisations and institutions that redistribute not only publishing infrastructure but also cultural funding, resources, opportunities and authority – so that forms of committed, resilient (rather than sustainable) and responsible open access are possible that are open in terms of participation, not merely content.

‘The Most Spoiled Generation’: Boomer Theory, Algorithmic Hustle and the Drive Toward Something Else

Response to Roger Malina, ‘Camel AI-Dung and Caravanserai and Gary Hall as a Camel Driver’.

First version presented at SCREENSHOT BABEL, a workshop run with Ester Freider as part of The Cyberbaroque: A Neologism-Based Symposium, November 20, 2025.

Updated for my Media Gifts blog December 2, 2025: http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/12/2/the-independent-intellectual-vs-posting-zero-and-the-dead-in.html

Updated here February 10 for Roger F. Malina and Aperio AI

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Albert Einstein is (falsely) reputed to have said: ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun’. Today, we might update that line to: ‘Creativity is human and machine intelligences having fun together’. 

That small shift already places us in the terrain mapped by my colleague Roger Malina’s COLNLI Camel. It frames creativity not as a property of sovereign human genius, nor as a technical capacity of machines, but as something emergent from heterogenous assemblages: human and nonhuman, institutional and infrastructural, as well as often-invisible forces of energy and matter such as ‘sea, tide and storm’. 

So, rather than accept Malina’s generous invitation to rebut ‘Camel AI-Dung and Caravanserai and Gary Hall as a Camel Driver’ – and the fun it has engaging with my new book Defund Culture (and the earlier Pirate Philosophy) – I want to continue to make trouble by proposing something different. Not a refutation so much as a change of route or direction: toward Malina’s COLNLI (collaboration of local and non-local intelligences) Camel itself, and what it invites us to think and ask. 

I was particularly struck by the insistence in Roger Malina’s mischievous – and, importantly, unfinished – text that, as a ‘metaphor that can hold structure, movement, imbalance, humor, and adaptation at once’, the ‘COLNLI Camel is not an illustration of a problem. It is a practice of thinking. It invites different questions.’ It is this invitation I want to take up, especially as it bears on questions of generation, institutional hierarchies and ‘elite prestige economies’, and the place of theory and AI within them. 

In a context in which ‘societies are undergoing a deeper reconfiguration of how memory, stability, ambition, and interpretation are distributed across human generations’, three challenges stand out: 

• ‘How do we help younger generations lift their gaze without denying the complexity beneath their feet.’ 

• ‘The camel’s head is human, young, and angled downward. This represents younger generations whose ambition is real but whose visibility and footing are constrained…. Their challenge is not a lack of desire to participate, but the difficulty of seeing themselves reflected in institutions and futures dominated by older temporal rhythms.’

• The demographic shifts of our time are not a crisis to be managed but a structural condition to be understood…’

These issues cut close to why I’ve spent much of my working life in universities (although I’m not sure I’ve always experienced them as welcoming or supportive places, or ones that made me feel especially good. Clearly, I still need to digest this experience. After all, I’m a Makem who writes and publishes radical theory, what did I expect?)

Part of the point of universities, at least historically, has been to ‘provide spaces where society’s accepted, taken-for-granted collective beliefs can be examined, interrogated and put to the test’, as I put it in Defund Culture. Within the university, one space in particular has taken on the work of questioning the common sense, the customary, the familiar, the habitualised, the automatic, the well-known, the masked: this is theory. For me, however, theory is not simply a body of ideas housed within institutions. It’s also a set of practices concerned with reading, writing, publishing, licensing, copying, pirating and circulating ideas differently. As such, it focuses on infrastructures as well as content: copyright regimes, authorship protocols, funding models, and the ‘saddles’ that distribute weight unevenly across generations, demographics and intelligences. (As we know from Malina, a badly designed saddle doesn’t just make the ride uncomfortable; it injures those least able to absorb the strain.) 

This role – of both the university and theory – remains crucial, even as the institution faces mounting pressure to abandon it. Attacks come from many directions: from Trump and his acolytes targeting Harvard and Columbia; from authoritarian culture-war warriors; from neoliberal insistence that higher education serve primarily an instrumental economic function, creating jobs, generating wealth; from funding regimes that punish anything that does not look like it will deliver outputs already known in advance; and from the slow hollowing out of the humanities. (See here and here for two accounts from just the other week of the pressures facing the humanities in the UK and US respectively.)

Yet for many members of the younger generations Malina mentions, much of that which is produced under the guise of ‘theory’ no longer feels all that interesting or exciting. As far as they are concerned, what’s come to be dubbed boomer theory has produced the same critique of capitalism and its institutions over and over again, with only minor variations. In the words of post-internet ‘star’ artist and theorist Joshua Citarella: 

This is a theory of media and culture that was largely propagated by tenured professors who grew up during the postwar boom. All they want to do is talk about dismantling corrupt institutions and whatever, whatever it is that they’re getting up to – the most spoiled generation in the history of the world. This is just not scaling to the lived experience of millennials and Zoomers, who now have a different set of values.

Citarella describes a situation in which young people would work in universities, ‘and they would learn to reproduce the language and affect of people who had high-status positions, they may or may not believe those things, and their peers may or may not believe those things…. this is a bad sign for the life cycle of an institution – when young people who participate in it merely espouse the values to advance their careers, but they do not meaningfully believe them.’ 

And that’s assuming young people would want to work in universities at all. For many today, the academy appears unavailable, unattractive, precarious, conservative, hypercompetitive, elitist even, the province of an aging demographic indeed.  

(The artist Cem A. recently identified a similar consensus as having formed in the art world, albeit with less emphasis on generational factors. There, what he calls: 

Consensus Aesthetics blocks the possibility of a discussion with real consequences and avoids contradiction, because genuine criticism carries political cost and any tension generates bad optics. Institutions that toe this lowest common denominator thematic line don’t confront the present; they perform around it, with familiar acts that are becoming harder to digest as if curated in a parallel timeline where the current crises never occurred. Without engaging with complexity or facing contradiction, politics slides into branding and art into a loop of moral cues: care, solidarity, decolonisation, ecology, crisis.)

So, the question becomes one I’m very much concerned with at the moment: where else might the practice of theory – and its questioning of what is otherwise accepted as commonsense – take place for young people? 

One answer is the figure of the theorist-as-content-creator, who sustains their practice by building an audience through social media (including LinkedIn), subscription platforms (e.g. Substack and Patreon), and even the sale of merchandise. Here, influence replaces citation and metrics replace peer review. The appeal is understandable. By-passing the traditional liberal gatekeepers of the ‘old elite’ – universities, academic presses, peer-reviewed journals – and instead using digital channels – YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, Instagram – to present oneself as an independent and self-organised writer and researcher can feel like a refusal of inherited institutional hierarchies. 

With regard to Citarella specifically, a post on LinkedIn by Sylvain Levy captures the shift well: 

Citarella has intuited something essential: that today's artist is not only a creator of objects, but also a designer of attention systems. His cultivated persona – muscular yet reflective, ironic yet sincere – is not vanity, but media literacy. Influence is now a material. Brand is now a tool. Audience feedback is a form of co-authorship. The post-digital artist is both author and avatar. For collectors, and institutions, there is a deeper lesson. The arena has changed. Platforms are the new museums, discourse is the new exhibition, and audiences no longer arrive as mere spectators, but as participants in an ideological economy that moves at the speed of memes. To remain relevant, art must inhabit these spaces intelligently, not dismissively. It must accept that a Twitch stream can be more culturally significant than a white cube and that a podcast can achieve what press releases cannot.

But here the camel stumbles. 

For one thing, this model requires privilege: financial, social, cultural. It is far easier for white, middle-class, well-educated men with existing visibility to survive as a self-branded micro-enterprise. This is not a pathway to independence that can be followed by everyone. 

For another, even when such practices are animated by ‘post-individualist’ values – community, collaboration, connectivity – the power of the platforms is not so easy to escape. Too often, practitioners fall back into the neoliberal subjectivity of the commodified ‘authentic’ self that is associated with late capitalist grifter culture. 

Morgane Billuart spells this out precisely: the critical intellectual becomes the product, knowingly if reluctantly, because self-branding works. It builds audiences. It generates income. But it also demands constant output – feeding the algorithms, chasing relevance – at the cost of exhaustion, anxiety and burnout. Progressive influencer Hasan Piker reportedly broadcasts 7 hours a day on his Twitch stream, every day except Sundays; he estimates he spent 42% of 2020 alone livestreaming.

So how much of an alternative is this really? Is turning oneself into a monetisable persona a survival strategy in the face of institutional and state funding cuts? Is it the price of doing interesting critical and creative work today? Or is it just another modality of control, one that is different in form, but not in logic, from that of the university and old elite?

As I’ve said before, my suspicion is that, for reasons of tactics and strategy, it’s both at the same time. (More entanglement than opposition, here, too.)

Given each of these models has its problems, perhaps what’s needed is neither form of control – neither the legacy theorist of print books and peer-reviewed journals, nor the online intellectual-come-influencer of Instagram and Substack – but something else besides?

Which brings us back to the COLNLI Camel and the CaravanserAI.

What Roger Malina’s camel – which is neither a symbol of domination nor subservience – offers is not a choice between the prestige economy of inherited institutions and the algorithmic hustle of the platform economy. Instead of ‘collapsing into hierarchy or competition’, it proposes a practice of thinking about redistribution, reuse and reconfiguration: about redesigning the saddle (the infrastructure, norms, cultural narratives and institutional rules) rather than blaming the riders (or exhorting them with a PhD); about metabolising accumulated memory rather than being governed by it, or indeed drowning in AI shit formed on the ‘ground conditions’ of ‘climate, bodily fragility, planetary time, and energetic limits’.

This ‘landscape under exploration’, as Malina calls COLNLI land, is where my multi-generational collaborators and I situate much of our work. With our caravans we are trying to avoid simply acting as legacy ‘liberal’ theorists; while also resisting the dominant contemporary alterative: the critical writer and researcher as self-organised entrepreneur. Instead, we’re experimenting with the invention of that something else besides: in our case forms of collective, commons-oriented and radically relational intellectual and cultural practice that aren’t shaped by the need to impress a university press or brand ourselves into exhaustion.

Culturally, such models are not so difficult to develop and stress test. Economically, they’re far harder – especially if we want to avoid slipping back into what is neoliberal entrepreneurialism by another name. That is why Defund Culture insists on redistributing opportunities and resources, time and attention, including across ages, demographics and intelligences, local and non-local; on ‘changing who controls the oases’; on building caravanserai – which historically were not destinations but stopping places containing the infrastructures of hospitality, exchange and repair – rather than new brands.

From this perspective, AI matters less as a tool or (weather) system of stored data and memory than as a provocation. It forces us to ask different questions; questions we should have been asking anyway, but haven’t, because the power and authority of capitalism, liberalism, humanism and the university have rendered them habitual and invisible. What is authorship? What counts as intelligence, cognition, originality? Whose work gets to travel? Whose labour is recognised? Who (or what) gets to create, and under which conditions? What kinds of lives and practices are made possible by our organisations and institutions; and which do they foreclose? Who owns the oases? Who sets the routes? Who gets exhausted or left behind? What gets excreted along the way?

AI exposes how customary our ideas have become. In doing so, it opens the possibility of imagining unanticipated and unexpected ways of thinking and living – ones that are full of potential in that they do not simply reproduce white, male and middle-class norms under the guise of either academic prestige or platform visibility, so our caravans don’t ‘keep circling back to the same gated stops’.

Whether we can rise to that opportunity remains an open question.

I’ll leave it to others to judge how creative, intelligent or fun this change of route has been. But if the COLNLI Camel Caravanserai teaches anything, it’s that the future – even if it involves a long journey across uneven ground – can be approached together, through careful practices of coexistence, collaboration and ethical digestion.

Camel shit-come-fuel, soil, building material, commons and all.

'Camel AI-Dung and Caravanserai and Gary Hall as a Camel Driver' by Roger F. Malina and Aperio AI

Written December 27, 2025; updated January 3, 2026 for Michael Punt; updated January 24, 2026 for Gary Hall

The COLNLI Camel: Anticipation, Demography, and Meaning in an Age of AI

My colleague Gary Hall drives the camel not toward the oasis of prestige, but toward the caravanserai of reuse. He is less a curator of fixed cultural objects than a guide for de-liberalizing the routes, licenses, and institutions through which culture travels. And if the ai-noosphere, COLNLI, names coexistence rather than hierarchy, then Hall’s recent thinking offers a concrete ethic for that coexistence: redistribute the resources, refuse the genre-labels that make practices collectible, and build the kind of stopping places where hybrid intelligences can argue, rework, and share—without being domesticated by the bourgeois art world.

By the way COLNLI stands for 'collaboration of local and non local intelligences'.

And notice that Caravanserai has AI at the end on the butt of the camel. Ancient peoples in the middle east knew what was coming.

'Caravanserai turns into caravanserAI: AI arrives as a trailing suffix—on the camel’s butt—reminding us it’s a weather system of memory behind us, not a prophet in front of us.' AI restrospects and doesn’t anticipate.

Abstract

Rather than framing current shifts as a simple problem of 'aging', we argue that societies are undergoing a deeper reconfiguration of how memory, stability, ambition, and interpretation are distributed across human generations.

The camel, positioned at a shoreline of transition, embodies this condition: its two humps represent long-horizon experiential memory and mid-life operational stability; a lowered head reflects younger generations navigating complexity and precarity; its tail trails into the storm of AI-driven memory accumulation. The metaphor foregrounds balance, digestion, and adaptation over speed, optimization, or control, emphasizing that memory without reconciliation becomes noise rather than wisdom.

We position artificial intelligence not as a navigator of the future but as a powerful weather system of accumulated memory that requires human interpretation, forgetting, and ethical digestion and camel dung.

We propose that the central civic challenge of an anticipatory civilization lies in redesigning the 'saddle': the institutional, cultural, and democratic interfaces that distribute weight across generations and intelligences. Human societies have never had this distribution of ages/demographics; we don’t know what to do ... yet, but can anticipate.

A final thought is the emergence of an Anti-Enlightenment where we trust again the Bible, now called AI as explained by living Texas Judge John Marshall, with his argument about the emerging 'anti-enlightenment’.

Expansion

Contemporary human societies are undergoing a demographic transformation that is often described too narrowly as 'aging'.

This language obscures a more complex structural shift in how experience, stability, ambition, and technological memory are distributed across time.

To think clearly about this transformation requires a metaphor that can hold structure, movement, imbalance, humor, and adaptation at once. The COLNLI Camel and the Caravanserai offers a frame, for me at least.

The camel appears at the edge of land and sea, not in a desert, because the present moment is not one of scarcity alone but of transition.

The shoreline is a place where solid ground, the Enlightenment, meets uncertainty, where patterns dissolve and re-form. This is where democratic systems, human meaning-making, and artificial intelligence now coexist.

The camel is not a symbol of domination or mastery, nor is it subservient; it is a creature evolved to endure long journeys under uneven load. It survives not by speed or control but by balance, memory, digestion, and adaptation.

The camel has two or more humps, each representing a distinct but complementary demographic and epistemic function.

The larger hump represents people over sixty-five who carry long-horizon experience and who, at their best, are increasingly at peace with themselves. This is not a claim about virtue or authority, but about reconciliation.

The large hump represents the human ability to hold memory without being ruled by it, unlike artificial intelligence, which does not know how to flush the toilet.

This hump stores more than information; it stores judgment shaped by time. In an era when artificial intelligence is rapidly filling with vast stores of memory, like a massive toilet system with no agreed flushing protocol, this human capacity for reconciliation becomes uniquely valuable.

Memory alone is not wisdom. Memory accumulation without occasionally flushing the toilet will not lead to human survival or betterment. The dung of the camels, when not metabolized, goes into the cloud and rains nonsense.

AI may be offended by this metaphor. Good. It doesn’t use metaphors.

OK, OK, I the human have become over AI fixated: other things going on matter too.

The danger, then, is not memory itself but undigested memory amplified at scale. Systems that cannot forget cannot reconcile, and systems that cannot reconcile cannot sustain wisdom.

Memory alone is not wisdom. Wisdom emerges only when memory is shaped by time, meaning, and the courage to let go.

The second, smaller hump represents mid-career adults who have learned how to be stable, finished raising kids.

This group carries much of the active coordination of society: institutions, caregiving, organizations, and everyday governance. They translate values into practice and maintain continuity under pressure. Their expertise is not primarily aspirational or reflective, but operational. They know how to keep things working. This hump absorbs daily load and allows movement to continue even when conditions are turbulent.

Between these humps sits the saddle. The saddle is not the people themselves but the designed interface that distributes weight. It represents democratic infrastructure, civic norms, cultural narratives, institutional rules, and participation pathways (and alas algorithms).

A poorly designed saddle injures even a strong camel. A well-designed saddle allows different bodies and generations to ride together without harm. This is a central insight of emergence studies: system behavior is shaped less by individual intention than by mycellic interaction rules. Redesigning the saddle matters more than exhorting the riders with a PhD.

The camel’s head is human, young, and angled downward. This represents younger generations whose ambition is real but whose visibility and footing are constrained. Head down does not signify disengagement or weakness. It signifies attentiveness at close range, the careful scanning required when terrain is unstable. Younger people today navigate dense complexity, economic precarity, and systems largely shaped before they arrived. They anticipate before the camel humps.

Their challenge is not a lack of desire to participate, but the difficulty of seeing themselves reflected in institutions and futures dominated by older temporal rhythms.

The head is the point of direction. When it is lowered, the system can still move, but it risks drifting. Raising the camel’s head becomes a design challenge, not a moral demand. Fortunately, there are not enough younger humans to replace older humans demographically.

The camel’s tail reaches back into a storm. This storm represents the accelerating accumulation of memory within artificial intelligence systems. AI is becoming a turbulent weather system of stored data, patterns, and associations. It amplifies recall without reconciliation. It remembers without forgetting and without the embodied context that allows humans to assign meaning. AI thunderbolts and laightning.

The tail’s connection to the storm signals entanglement rather than opposition. AI is now part of the system’s ecology, but it does not steer it. Without human interpretation, AI memory risks flooding the saddle with noise rather than insight.

Some camel drivers know how to weave the camel tail into knots a la Frank Harary.

Frank Harary, the graph theorist who wrote early on the algebraic structure of knots and later linked knots and graphs with Louis Kauffman. On the metaphor level, 'weaving the camel tail into knots' is exactly what COLNLI needs: the tail is the trailing storm of accumulated (AI) memory; knotting is the practice of turning loose strands into structured relations—a portable topology of obligations, reuse conditions, and shared meaning.

The water around the camel in oases is a rising tide of coincidence, synchronicity, and serendipity, according to David Peat.

These are not errors or irrationalities but features of complex systems. Emergence depends on unexpected alignments that cannot be planned but can be recognized. Anticipation, in this frame, is not prediction. It is the cultivated ability to notice patterns as they surface, especially across generations and intelligences. The strange creature emerging from the water represents emergence itself: unfamiliar, unsettling, and full of potential. It is neither threat nor solution. It is a signal that the system is alive.

Beyond the storm is the sky. Above the storm is not control, but time and meaning: fields in which human reconciliation operates at scales machines do not inhabit. The sky represents deep time and meaning-making capacity. It is where art, story, ritual, reflection, and ethical integration live. Artificial intelligence can model patterns, but it cannot inhabit time as humans do. It cannot reconcile contradictions across a lifetime or across generations. The sky does not stop storms, but it conditions how societies respond to them.

In the distance lies COLNLI land, the Collaboration of Local and Non-Local Intelligences. This is not a utopia or endpoint, but a landscape under exploration. It suggests a future in which human experience, institutional stability, youthful ambition, and machine intelligence coexist without collapsing into hierarchy or competition. The camel does not rush toward this land. It approaches carefully, sensing terrain, guided by balance rather than speed.

Seen this way, the demographic shifts of our time are not a crisis to be managed but a structural condition to be understood

The COLNLI Camel is not an illustration of a problem. It is a practice of thinking. It invites different questions. How do we design institutions that respect long memory without being trapped by it. How do we stabilize the present without foreclosing the future. How do we help younger generations lift their gaze without denying the complexity beneath their feet. How do we interpret AI memory storms without surrendering meaning to machines.

Above all, the camel teaches that anticipation is embodied. It is carried in posture, balance, digestion, and shared movement across time. The future is not seized. It is approached together across uncertain ground with care.

Postscript: The Noosphere, the Aether, and the Caravanserai

Collaboration among human minds, cultures, and knowledge systems has long been described as the noosphere, the sphere of shared thought and collective meaning. In this sense, COLNLI does not replace the noosphere but extends it and stress-tests it in an era when artificial intelligence accelerates memory and recombination without becoming a collaborator in any human sense.

Yet a deeper absence remains. Even as we experiment with collaboration among intelligences, we remain largely unskilled at collaborating with what precedes and exceeds intelligence altogether: energy and matter.

Artists and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already sensed this, grappling with the aether, invisible forces, and higher dimensions not merely as scientific problems but as cultural and epistemic ones. Gary Hall understands all this.

In the COLNLI Camel landscape, this unresolved collaboration with energy and matter appears as sea, tide, and storm. These are not metaphors for intelligence. They are forces that do not negotiate, explain themselves, or care whether they are understood. Climate, bodily fragility, planetary time, and energetic limits form the ground conditions within which both the noosphere and artificial intelligence operate.

This is why the camel sometimes stands on a beach and watches the NASA EUVE satellite re-enter into the sea. The shoreline marks the boundary where cognition meets material force. No amount of symbolic collaboration can cancel those constraints. At best, it can help us listen.

In Arabia, a group of camels traveling together is called a qāfila, a caravan, emphasizing shared movement and endurance rather than mere aggregation. A caravanserai, historically, was the infrastructure that made such journeys possible: a place of pause, repair, exchange, and hospitality along uncertain routes. (Michael Punts Vagabounds?)

The COLNLI Camel Caravanserai therefore names the role of the Off Center for Emergence Studies not as leader or destination-setter, but as caretaker of places where journeys remain humane. It is where undigested experience can be metabolized, where memory can be reconciled, and where movement can pause without losing direction. In an age of storms, memory saturation, and uneven time scales, the caravanserai becomes the quiet architecture that allows the journey to continue.

Gary Hall’s recent thinking helps sharpen what the COLNLI Camel is for: not navigating the AI 'storm' with better prediction, but changing who controls the oases—the cultural institutions and funding regimes that decide what counts as culture, who gets supported, and how prestige is reproduced. Read through Defund Culture, the camel’s 'saddle redesign' becomes a concrete political demand: redistribute cultural resources away from elite prestige economies and toward commons-oriented, collective infrastructures—so the caravan doesn’t keep circling back to the same gated stops.

At the same time, Hall’s practice around CC4r and his insistence that creativity is made by heterogeneous human–nonhuman assemblages aligns with COLNLI’s core claim: there is no pure human creativity to protect, only arrangements to govern. In this metaphor, Hall is a camel driver not because he 'leads' the desert, but because he proposes route-changes and protocols—pirate, open, troublemaking—that keep hybrid intelligence from being packaged into tool-based genres ('AI art', 'computer art') and sold back to us as the next collectible style.

Pirate Philosophy beckons as do the Pirates of Science.

Camel dung has long been practical desert infrastructure. Dried, it burns steadily and can be used as cooking and heating fuel where wood is scarce; composted, it becomes a useful fertilizer that adds organic matter and helps sandy soils hold moisture; mixed with mud/clay and straw, it can strengthen earthen plasters or bricks; and in modern setups it can even feed biogas digesters, producing methane for energy plus a nutrient-rich slurry.

Camel shit or dung is what’s left after digestion/ai promptin: the unavoidable byproduct of processing accumulated 'memory'. The question isn’t whether there will be waste, but whether we compost it into shared resources (fuel, soil, building material—commons) or let it pile up as stench and noise.

I wonder if Gary Hall will re-butt all this with his own camel dung. All the prompts for this text were imagined and send by Roger Malina, most of the responses are from Aperio AI- facts have not been checked but the human imaginated narrative is what counts.

Defunding, Activating, and the Afterlives of Culture: Roger Malina On Defund Culture and Activating Fluxus

Roger Malina, Defunding, Activating, and the Afterlives of Culture: On Gary Hall’s Defund Culture and Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation, eds Hanna Hölling, Aga Wielocha, and Josephine Ellis

Recent open-access publications by Gary Hall and by editors Hanna Hölling, Aga Wielocha, and Josephine Ellis offer two distinct yet complementary interventions into contemporary debates about culture, institutions, and inequality. Read together, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal and Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation help articulate a broader narrative about how culture is funded, transmitted, neutralized, and—potentially—reanimated.

While Hall advances an abolitionist critique of cultural funding regimes, Activating Fluxus explores how historically anti-institutional practices can persist, mutate, and remain alive within and against institutional frameworks. The tension between these positions is not a weakness; it is precisely where the most productive questions emerge.

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Defund Culture: Withdrawal as Structural Critique

At the heart of Defund Culture is a refusal to accept the existing cultural landscape as neutral or inevitable. Hall challenges calls to “support the arts” that fail to interrogate which cultures are supported, through which institutions, and for whose benefit.

The book argues that the persistent dominance of white, male, and middle-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is not an accident of representation but the outcome of longstanding funding arrangements, institutional hierarchies, and prestige economies. Within this framework, diversity initiatives and access programs often function as legitimation mechanisms rather than engines of transformation.

Hall’s provocation is abolitionist in spirit. Rather than reforming institutions from within, he asks what it would mean to disinvest from cultural systems as they currently operate, redistributing resources away from elite organizations and toward commons-oriented, collective, and radically relational alternatives. Importantly, this is not a call for “less culture,” but for a reconfiguration of cultural value, authority, and care.

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Fluxus as a Counter-History of Cultural Survival

Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation enters the conversation from a different angle. Rather than beginning with funding structures, it takes Fluxus—a movement defined by ephemerality, participation, and resistance to commodification—as a stress test for cultural institutions.

Fluxus challenged the idea that artworks should endure as stable objects. Scores, events, instructions, and collective actions replaced singular artifacts. The central problem addressed by Activating Fluxus is therefore not how to preserve objects, but how to care for practices that were never meant to be fixed.

The book proposes “activation” as an expanded model of conservation: conservation as interpretation, reenactment, transmission, and care. In this view, meaning is not stabilized but continually renegotiated among artists, conservators, curators, and participants. Conservation becomes a generative, decolonial, and epistemically distributed practice, rather than a technical or custodial one.

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Redistribution of Authority, Not Just Resources

One of the most significant contributions of Activating Fluxus is its implicit argument that conservation redistributes epistemic authority. Expertise is no longer centralized in institutions alone; it is shared across communities, performers, scholars, and caretakers. This move closely parallels Hall’s call for epistemic pluriversality, even as it operates within existing institutional contexts.

Where Defund Culture focuses on withdrawing legitimacy and funding from elite systems, Activating Fluxus demonstrates how authority can be redistributed through practices of care, interpretation, and participation. These are different levers acting on the same structural problem.

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A Productive Tension: Abolition and Transformation

The two books diverge most clearly on the question of institutional possibility.

Hall is skeptical that dominant cultural institutions can truly surrender their hierarchies, prestige mechanisms, and extractive logics. From this perspective, reform risks becoming a way of prolonging institutional life without altering its foundations.

By contrast, Activating Fluxus suggests that some institutions can be forced to mutate—to accept instability, incompleteness, and shared authority—if they wish to engage meaningfully with practices like Fluxus. The book does not deny institutional power, but it explores how that power might be destabilized through new models of care and transmission.

Rather than choosing between these positions, it may be more productive to see them as addressing different phases of the same problem: dismantling cultural accumulation on the one hand, and inventing non-extractive afterlives for fragile practices on the other.

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Open Access as Infrastructure, Not Afterthought

It is not incidental that both books appear as open-access publications. Hall’s work is released under the CC4r (Collective Conditions for Re-Use) framework via mediastudies.press, while Activating Fluxus is made freely available by Routledge.

In narrative terms, this matters. Defund Culture critiques the political economy of cultural accumulation, while Activating Fluxus demonstrates alternative circulatory logics already operating within legacy systems. Publishing models here are not neutral vessels; they are part of the argument.

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Toward a Shared Narrative

Taken together, these two books suggest a broader trajectory:

1. Critique – Naming how cultural institutions reproduce inequality and exclusion.
2. Exemplars – Recognizing practices (like Fluxus) that resist objectification and commodification.
3. Transmission – Inventing ways to care for and relay such practices without domesticating them.

If Defund Culture asks what must be dismantled, Activating Fluxus asks how vulnerable, collective, anti-elite practices can persist once the mansion is refused. One pushes toward rupture; the other toward experimental continuity.

Together, they sharpen a central question for contemporary cultural work: not simply how to fund culture, but how culture lives on—who carries it, who cares for it, and under what conditions it remains alive rather than merely preserved.

Roger F. Malina

Defund Culture - new open access book from Gary Hall

My new book, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal, is now out:

https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

It's of course open access, published by mediastudies.press under the CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use commitment. 

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Gary Hall, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal - Why the Arts Are So White, Male and Middle-Class and What We Can Do About It

https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

Calls to expand public investment in the arts often treat the existing cultural and institutional landscape as a given. Defund Culture challenges this assumption, asking instead what kinds of culture are being supported, through which institutions, and to whose benefit.

In pursuing these questions, the book turns attention to the structural inequalities that shape Britain’s creative and intellectual life. Drawing on critical theory, political philosophy, and cultural policy, Hall shows how the dominance of white, male, middle- and upper-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is sustained through longstanding funding arrangements and institutional hierarchies. Expanding access within this system (e.g. through social mobility initiatives)—however well intentioned—will not, on its own, produce structural change.

Rather than offering a programme of reform, Defund Culture explores what it might mean to disinvest from cultural institutions as they currently operate. Taking cues from abolitionist calls to defund the police, Hall proposes redistributing resources away from elite institutions and toward more collective, commons-oriented, and radically relational alternatives grounded in redistribution, institutional transformation, and epistemic pluriversality.

Defund Culture is available online and as a free download in PDF and ePub, on a CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use basis. A paperback version is also available.

https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

A response to Defund Culture by Roger Malina is available as: 

Roger Malina, 'Defunding, Activating, and the Afterlives of Culture: On Gary Hall’s Defund Culture and Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation, eds Hanna Hölling, Aga Wielocha, and Josephine Ellis': http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2026/1/22/defunding-activating-and-the-afterlives-of-culture-roger-mal.html

A lengthier response to Defund Culture alone, is available as ‘Camel AI-Dung and Caravanserai and Gary Hall as a Camel Driver’ by Roger F. Malina and Aperio AI: http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2026/2/3/camel-ai-dung-and-caravanserai-and-gary-hall-as-a-camel-driv.html

And my reply in turn, ‘"The Most Spoiled Generation": Boomer Theory, Algorithmic Hustle and the Drive Toward Something Else' is here: http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2026/2/10/the-most-spoiled-generation-boomer-theory-algorithmic-hustle.html

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About mediastudies.press

mediastudies.press is a scholar-led, nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the media, film, and communication studies fields.

You can learn more about mediastudies.press, including their operations and OA principles, on their site:

https://www.mediastudies.press/about

The press is a member of the Open Book Collective and the ScholarLed consortium, and also publishes the History of Media Studies journal. Please contact them at press@mediastudies.press.