The public imagination and the dictatorship of ignorance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Authoritarianism is no longer imposed largely through military repression; it now takes place by undermining the public imagination and using culture and its various apparatuses to weaken civic literacy and the public institutions fundamental to civic culture. This article argues that in the 21st century democracy has become fragile. Under the onslaught of what I call disimagination machines, education in its most repressive educational and cultural forms has shaped a mass consciousness that is susceptible to lies, conspiracy theories, and the anti-democratic values and social relations endemic to right-wing populist movements and emerging demagogues. The article argues that the United States is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of political culture and form of depoliticization that are more dangerous than the damaging public policies that emerged in the United States since the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s. Equally alarming is the fact that the crisis of neoliberal capitalism has not been matched by a crisis of ideas, even as the United States has increasingly been organized on fascist principles for the last few decades. The article concludes by arguing that culture follows politics and that we live in an age when education has to become central to any strategy for engaging politics in the age of emerging authoritarianism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it