Post 1
The future of geography
AI. Demographics. Politics…I believe an academic extinction event is looming. Most disciplines won’t make it through the bottleneck. On the other side, there will still be something like universities, something like professors, something like tenure. AI will not replace the human factor. But the human factor will be different compared to our situation today. The disciplines will be different. Something called “Geography”—weak and amorphous today—will be strong tomorrow, sharply defined and oriented at a mysterious frontier. As it was in the past. Other disciplines seem strong today but will disappear on the other side of the bottleneck. Disciplinary cycling, like on two sides of a war, is what’s coming.
I am a geographer. The fate of the geographer is what this Substack is about.
“The human being doing geographic exploration, and geographic thinking, that other human beings value”: what does this look like a bit later on in the 21st century? That’s our central theme. The theme is not for everybody. Maybe some existing academic geographers today will find this interesting—or maybe not. For the most part, it is not them that I imagine as tomorrow’s geographers. Oh…many of them despise those whom I have in mind.
There is a lot to say. And much happening in my life these days, preventing me from going on 18-hour writing marathons (which is how I’ve always written books and long-format articles in the past). So: I’ll be splitting this up and stretching this out. I’ll be adding more every few days. This is just post #1. I think there will be dozens.
Now, not all “Geography” is university Geography. There are explorer-entertainers and explorer-athletes promoted by, say, National Geographic, or self-promoted through Youtube or other video social media. Leave that aside for now…we’ll return to this very interesting, info-tainment or spectated-sports style of being a geographer later. The “sporty” type of geographic exploration even used to be supported as a serious academic discipline!
But begin with the present academic situation. “University Geography” today is widespread at public US unis; barely even present at the elite private unis. Tomorrow it will vanish. It’s been a solid “proletarian” discipline in many ways, focused on teaching some technical computer skills: spatial statistical visual projection and the like. Governments and some big companies have somewhat valued these skills, though not enough to make anybody rich. During the 2010s these skills could fetch a graduate a job with a so-so middle-income salary ceiling—no better than this though, because the computer skills were shallow, not “Silicon Valley”-level computer skills.
This geography skills pipeline won’t last much longer. The work can be and has been outsourced to places where people can do the exact same software manipulation for a tenth the wage. At any rate, the geography software will be streamlined by AI. It’s already happening. And just as there’s no need for college-level classes in how to use Microsoft Word, within a few years there will be no need for college-level classes in how to use ArcMap. Furthermore: any attempt to make the computer skills more complex will simply turn the geography departments into comp-sci departments. But all the relevant universities already have comp-sci departments. That ecological niche is already occupied.
The skills situation isn’t the only thing making the departments strategically vulnerable. In addition to teaching “prole” digital skills which are on the cusp of full automation, the geography departments are ideologically monolithic. “Left wing”—but I mean the fuzzy, basically sociological kind of “left-wing” where really it’s a label for a wide ecosystem of people who approximately get along, sharing in common a vague distaste for past order (and a distaste for Republicans and “whiteness” and all that). I think everyone reading grasps what I mean. So the discipline is organizationally left-wing on race, climate, borders, gender and so forth. Everybody interprets the meaning of colonial history in more or less the same way. Everybody believes the nation-state is bad. Everybody believes “climate” renders all other concerns second-order concerns, or turns all concerns into the same One Concern. Everybody knows that redlining is something you’re only supposed to be bring up as if it were white against black (not banks divesting from industrial working class neighborhoods regardless of race). In recent years everybody knew to politely avoid certain topics like COVID origin or the crackdown on Ottawa protesters. Well, almost everyone knew.
The leading academic geography journals have not published debates in over twenty years. I even did a beancounting project some years ago demonstrating this, that journals like Environment + Planning, Antipode, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, etc, used to publish grand debates and then around 2000-2005, they all stopped doing that.
No alternative ecosystem of ideas has been developed. This lack of an intellectual “menu,” of “optionality,” is rather unusual among disciplines. In Poli Sci there’s the Straussians (and other such organized weirdos). In Anthro there’s the archaeologists who just want to dig up bones. In the Humanities there are the people who, this whole time, have just wanted to teach the western canon. In History there are various apologists and revisionists. In most disciplines there’s been an antithesis, however marginal, to the thesis of the times. But not in Geography. At least not lately. (At least one geographer has written a complete book manuscript over the last year or so, articulating an alternative—but the manuscript’s still seeking its proper publisher.)
So academic Geography is doubly weak today, for being overreliant on teaching proletarian computer skills which are in the process of being automated, and for being monolithic and uncreative on the ideological end, a monolith which makes it a natural target for conservatives in power looking to eliminate fields which are openly partisan and hostile.
The figure of the future geographer, by contrast—maybe to be professionally situated in something we’ll call “academia,” or maybe we’ll have some other word on the other side—looks strong to me. Who is this person? This person is a mountaineer, mule-packer, elephant-rider, canoer, fordmaster…a student of grand geomorphological cycles, a seeker after enduring Earth Mysteries…an advocate of a new “populist” environmentalism of culture-making and deep symbolism; of environmentalism as means of new nation-making. The future geographer champions a struggle for (conquest of) a frontier-commons. Hunters and fishers will be the geographers now. The coming geographer seeks out those physical spaces of refuge—James Scott’s “Zomia” of mountain fastnesses, or Ernst Jünger’s “Forest Path” (Waldgang), or the swamps to which a many-headed-hydra of escape artists flee—from which to watch the coming storm within the inner state. AI can’t do it.
The emerging politics will embrace this figure.