Brains as Brand

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A double diagnosis of the present moment

Between 2016 and 2026, two phenomena that are usually read as opposed have moved in close formation. Elected governments wage open campaigns against universities, scientific agencies and the independent press — freezing research funding, proposing ideological compacts with private institutions, defunding public broadcasters, treating expertise itself as a slur. At exactly the same cultural moment, expensive handbags are sold with Madame Bovary embossed on the side, supermodels read Camus on the Métro for the cameras, and a TikTok subculture of more than three hundred billion views proclaims that being ‘disgustingly educated’ is the new aesthetic.

The cultural commentary of the period typically reads these scenes as paradox: politics goes one way, pop culture the other; reason has been driven out of public life but takes refuge in private consumption. This book argues that the diagnosis is exactly wrong. Performative intellectualism and political anti-intellectualism are correlative expressions of a single transformation — the marketisation of public reason under platform capitalism, and the correlative erosion of the institutional infrastructures (universities, public press, mass schooling) on which deliberative liberal democracy historically depended.

When the practice of reason loses its institutional homes, its sign flourishes elsewhere, as a luxury good. The book calls this configuration mausoleum culture: a structure in which the artefacts of intellectual life are reverently preserved precisely because the practice itself has ceased to be widely sustainable.