Reengineering universities around industrial agendas forgets that contributing to economic growth and social impact are secondary to the fundamental function of the university as a place where knowledge—and more importantly, reason—are contested, and where individuals participate in the life of the spirit through collective learning, debate, and synthesis. Knowledge doesn’t only serve as a means to a practical end, like finding a job. Rather, knowledge allows us to realize a higher end, one that demands both contemplation and action.

To see sleep streaming as sex work is to miss something fundamental about how sleep streamers propose other modes of being. The same holds true, reciprocally, for sex itself. We think we know what sex is as a discrete act—did they have sex? did they not?—but historically, sex acts have existed on a spectrum. A sleep stream positions a viewer somewhere in this expanded field—somewhere between sleepiness and sex and stranger-friendship and care.

Fantasies do not contain symbolic messages, but instead nest in the motor reflexes of our muscles, nerves, and senses. For this reason, they always find their most articulate, most advanced form of expression in the work techniques and forces of production found in a given historical era. According to Adorno, fantasy offers a way to reestablish the connection between art and work that was severed under capitalist regimes of rationalized production.

Fantasy reassembles the living scraps and the deadened remains of disparate lives into a divergent synthesis. Fantasy is vitalized “morphology.” It socializes the replaceable commodities that have been isolated into their economic function, the binary sexes that have been secured into their stately legality, the native labors that have been ruptured by their imperial colonization, or de-actualized into being modernity’s backstory.

We must rediscover another militant tradition: that of collectively building the institutions that satisfy our needs. It is no longer a question of adopting a supplicatory stance towards a state apparatus, but of taking advantage of historical moments when this apparatus, or the legitimacy of the ruling class, is weak. I believe that we are entering such a moment.

Although it is true that the laws of physics and biology aren’t homogeneously applied, interpreted, and internalized across earth’s many peoples and societies—much less by potential alien civilizations!—these laws are universalized through storytelling. It is only through the many traditions of storytelling that science is, in fact, lived. Science, one could say, is a negotiation between universe and world.

This dialogue takes the form of a web of voracities, vertigo, and metabolisms in which the human is the flesh of a body straining with heteroglossia and polyphony, grotesque like Rabelais’s giants and their carnivals, where the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin sees “pregnant death, a death that gives birth.”