Thousands of student visas cancelled by the government! Legal residents snatched off the streets by masked agents, detained and deported! Federal research grants to universities scrapped! The government asserting its right to oversee academic departments and curriculum decisions! The frequency of events like these across the country are dizzying, and the pace is accelerating. Academic freedom is in the cross-hairs. The First Amendment says that you can say any idiotic thing that you want to in the public square, pretty much without constraint; academic freedom includes that, but goes far beyond: academic freedom is the right to interrogate the world, the right to teach, and the right to learn. Academic freedom is the right to think at all. We’re joined by Katherine Franke, renowned law professor, courageous scholar, and human rights champion who has endured a relentless campaign of threat and harassment because of her intrepid support of Palestinian rights.

To be ruled is to be spied upon and inspected, quantified, measured, and ranked, and then registered and regulated with all the inherent structural violence packed into those arrangements. To be free is to abolish all of it, to reject that system’s hold over our minds as well as to defeat its power in the world. What kind of society do we want to live in? What world will we build? Today we’re joined in conversation with Anita Say Chan, a feminist, decolonial scholar, and author of Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and our Fight for an Independent Future, as we think about techno-surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, the noisy echoes of the anti-immigration and eugenics movements of the 19th century all around us, as well as alternative data practices and projects developed by minorities actors in pursuit of justice.

What is your North Star? What are you fighting for, and what are you struggling to overcome, or leave behind? The goal is not a precise and detailed roadmap—that way lies dogma, orthodoxy, and worse—but rather a vision and a hope with which to gauge and partially frame our work in the here and now. The great Uruguay revolutionary, Edwardo Galeano, tells a story of being confronted by a person accusing him of being a utopian, and asking contemptuously, “What good is Utopia?” Galeano says, “It’s true that if I walk 2 steps toward Utopia, Utopia walks 2 steps away, and if I walk 10 steps toward her, she walks 10 steps away. So what good is Utopia?” His reply: “It’s good for walking.” We’re joined in conversation by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, authors of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a novel that is so imaginative, so challenging, and so surprising that it reorders our conception of what’s possible to write—and to think.