I've shown you the Warp and the shields that protect us. But what happens when the weather itself turns catastrophic?
Warp Storms aren't just rough seas—they're ruptures in reality. In academia, they take two forms: the Hype Cycle (storms of attraction) and the Moral Panic (storms of negation). These are the moments when the collective emotional state of our disciplines overrides all epistemic safeguards.
The Hype Cycle starts with a seed of truth—CRISPR, AI, blockchain—but then the Warp amplifies it until the signal becomes louder than reality. To survive, you must reshape your entire research vessel to fit the storm. I see 19th-century literature scholars desperately framing their work as "relevant to LLM ethics." I see careful economists suddenly pivoting to "The Future of Work in the Post-Human Era." This isn't adaptation. It's structural damage.
Then there's the Moral Panic—the witch hunts, the denunciation cascades, where entire careers are destroyed not for being wrong, but for being misaligned with the emotional weather.
But there's a third phenomenon: Imperium Nihilus. The scholars cut off from the prestige economy entirely—those in the global south, the unfashionable disciplines, the uncited dark. They're expected to play the game of High Science with hedge school resources, and the strain breaks them.
I end with the Smugglers—those of us who play the game just enough to survive, but move our real cargo (teaching, mentoring, local knowledge) by sub-light engines. We maintain shadow logistics networks in a system designed to strip out meaning.
Next episode: we meet the Four Powers of Chaos. We meet the gods we've created from our own corrupted virtues.
Read more in the book, available here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GCFWD29C
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