I have spent much of my life studying the nature of things, only to discover, twice, that universities seem remarkably uninterested in doing much of the same. Once as an undergraduate, many years ago, and again as a postgraduate. My Master’s was something of an exception: a reasonable experience, good intentions, an interesting idea. Yet here I am, decades later, reaching out to universities, researchers and institutions, only to encounter an almost universal absence of conversation. What exactly is one supposed to do with that? Give up? Find something else to occupy the remaining years? Perhaps embroidery or sustainable gardening. Something comfortably within the statistical distribution of acceptable interests, where originality is less likely to become a professional inconvenience. There is something magnificently absurd about institutions devoted to knowledge being so difficult to engage in its pursuit. Meanwhile, I am seriously contemplating abandoning much of this analysis. Not because the questions have gone away, or because I have exhausted the possibilities, but because pursuing them in almost complete isolation is becoming extraordinarily difficult. Apparently, the price of thinking outside the box is discovering that nobody wants to open the bloody thing.
Epilogue: If WordPress’s discovery mechanisms systematically favour familiar, easily classified content over original, challenging or philosophical writing, it risks driving independent thinkers elsewhere. Censorship need not be deliberate or explicit; making unconventional thinking effectively invisible can achieve much the same result, impoverishing the platform without ever prohibiting a word.
