5 Cultural Capital, Gender and the Marketisation of Intellect
The chapter develops two intersecting analytical claims.
The performative-intellectualist phenomenon described in Chapter 4 is illuminated, not exhausted, by Bourdieu’s apparatus of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986). What the phenomenon manifests is a mutation within Bourdieu’s typology: the conversion of embodied into objectified and finally commodified cultural capital under platform-economic conditions. The mutation is not new in kind but is novel in intensity, scale and explicitness; and it recomposes a field that empirical sociology had already shown to be structured along an elite/peripheral split far more than along an economic axis (Anheier et al., 1995).
The phenomenon is constitutively gendered. The ‘smart-is-sexy’ register operates within and against the patriarchal binaries that have, for two centuries, structured who gets to display intellect, on what bodies, with what penalties and rewards. On the argument advanced here, the gender pattern is not incidental: the cultural recoding of intellect as aesthetic surface is in part a settlement of the older cultural cost-curve under which intelligent women were marked as unsexed. The settlement, however, has costs of its own, and those costs are not symmetrically distributed.
These two claims combine to produce the central diagnostic of the analysis: the contemporary marketisation of intellect is a regressive democratisation. It widens access to the performance of intellect along gender lines while reinforcing access to the substance along class lines, and while attaching a price tag — the £2,400 Madame Bovary tote, the £300/year Substack stack, the £45 ticket to a literary festival panel — to the visible signs of cultural belonging. The phenomenon is not the democratisation of culture but the inflation of its currency.
5.1 Bourdieu redux: forms of capital under platform conditions
Bourdieu’s typology of cultural capital in embodied, objectified and institutionalised forms (Bourdieu, 1986) remains the most productive analytical vocabulary for the phenomenon under examination, but it requires two extensions to register what platform conditions have done to the field. The first is empirical; the second is conceptual.
The empirical extension: the topography is bipartite, and the split is not principally economic. When Anheier, Gerhards and Romo (Anheier et al., 1995) subjected Bourdieu’s social topography to relational empirical test on a population of German writers, they recovered a finding on which the argument that follows depends. The dominant structuring axis of the literary field was not the distinction between economic and symbolic capital, as a casual reading of Bourdieu might predict, but a deeper bipartition between elite and marginal positions; even the canonical distinction between high and low culture turned out to be embedded within this elite/marginal split rather than transversal to it. Cultural and social capital, not economic capital, did the heavy lifting in producing the structure. Three decades on, this is no longer merely a result about Cologne writers: it is the structural template against which the contemporary mutation must be read. What the platform period has done is not abolish the bipartition; it has reorganised the currencies through which membership of the elite cluster is signalled, while leaving the underlying split in place.
The conceptual extension: a fourth form of cultural capital. A fourth form deserves recognition here. Commodified cultural capital, characteristic of the platform period, defined by three properties: (a) detachment from its institutional bearer (the credential, the chair, the years of disciplinary practice); (b) circulability as content, that is, as a unit of attention available to algorithmic distribution; and (c) explicit pricing, in the medium of subscription fees, advertising rents, affiliate commissions and luxury-good markups on cultural objects. The fourth form is not a replacement of the previous three but a derivative traded in a market that the previous three generated yet do not control. As in any derivative market, the price of the derivative can move independently of the value of the underlying — which is the condition under which the visible signs of intellectual seriousness can inflate even as the labour that originally produced those signs becomes more precarious.
The mutation can be illustrated through a concise case typology:
- Embodied cultural capital: the reader who has internalised a literary tradition through years of disciplinary training; the scholar whose habitus tracks an interpretive community.
- Objectified cultural capital: the home library as status object, recognisable to the visiting peer; the well-curated bookshelf visible behind a domestic Zoom call.
- Institutionalised cultural capital: the credential, the editorial board, the professorial title, the named lecture.
- Commodified cultural capital: the visibility-monetised display of reading as personality trait — the BookTok account, the Substack literary persona, the £2,400 Madame Bovary tote, the bookshop-bar event ticket sold in sixty seconds.
A clarifying distinction should be drawn here from a parallel recent debate about digital capital. Pitzalis and Porcu’s empirical analysis of OECD-PISA data (2024) argues, on careful evidence, that digital skills and digital assets cannot be treated as a straightforward dimension of cultural capital in the Bourdieusian sense, because they do not function as a sign of distinction aligned with the legitimate culture of educational agents; their value is conditional on the institutional setting in which they are deployed. Their argument, transposed to our case, sharpens the conceptual point. Commodified cultural capital is not the analogue, in adult cultural fields, of digital capital in education; it is the signalling residue of legitimate cultural capital under conditions of platform circulation. The commodified form depends on the prior existence of the embodied, objectified and institutionalised forms — it derives its symbolic charge from them — but its economic dynamics are governed by the attention market, not by the field of restricted cultural production (Bourdieu, 1986). This is why it can inflate, exhaust and re-cycle visible markers of seriousness on monthly turnover cycles, while the embodied substance it imitates accumulates across decades.
5.2 The marketisation of intellectual production
The mutation just described is not an autonomous cultural fact. It is downstream of three decades of marketisation operating on the institutions that, until recently, held the monopoly over the production of cultural capital in its three older forms. A short diagnosis of that marketisation is necessary, because without it the gender and class arguments that follow lose their causal weight.
The knowledge economy as pseudo-market. A line of critique traceable through Liessmann, Münch, Brown and, most recently, Díaz (2021) has argued that the late-twentieth-century recoding of universities and research as a ‘knowledge economy’ was less a paradigm shift than a rhetorical operation: it took an activity — knowledge production — whose autonomy was the condition of its critical capacity, and forced it into the metrics of a tradable-goods market. The result was not the production of more or better knowledge but the production of a pseudo-market of knowledge in the image of a commodity market, complete with monopolies, intermediaries, citation rankings as exchange-value indices, and the speculative valuation of academic outputs by indicators that increasingly diverge from the quality of the underlying work. The diagnosis is severe but it is no longer eccentric: it has migrated from radical critique to mainstream sociology of higher education, and the empirical record of academic precarity, adjunctification, predatory publishing, manufactured citation rings, retraction rates, and reviewer fatigue offers continuous corroboration.
The paradox of open access and the commons. A counter-current that should, on its own logic, have mitigated this dynamic — the Creative Commons movement, the open-access mandate, the rise of preprint servers and disciplinary repositories — has had a sociologically more ambivalent effect. Digital reproduction brought the marginal cost of distribution close to zero, and the commons movement built a normative framework around that technical fact. Yet the institutional capture of open access by the article processing charge regime has, in many fields, transferred costs from readers to authors without dismantling the rent-extraction architecture; smaller learned societies have lost revenue without gaining bargaining power; and freelance intellectual producers — essayists, translators, public philosophers, critics — find that the same digital abundance that has made their work universally accessible has also made it universally unremunerable. Neither the public institutions that were the historical patrons of cultural production, nor the private entities that have absorbed substantial parts of its distribution, have made full use of the cost-reduction afforded by digitalisation; the rents have been displaced rather than abolished, and the cultural producer is the residual claimant. The visible market for commodified cultural capital, on which the analysis of §5.2 will turn, must be read against this background of structural underwriting failure: the commodified market grew partly into the space that the public and quasi-public underwriting of intellectual production vacated.
The aggregate effect on quality. Three decades of empirical work on academic capitalism, from Slaughter and Leslie onwards, converge on a picture that need not be rehearsed in detail here. The headline patterns are now well documented: permanent academic posts have contracted while doctoral production has expanded; casual and short-contract staffing has risen across Anglophone and European higher education, with global estimates placing the sessional share between 16 % and 70 % across systems and trending upward (Squire et al., 2025); bibliometric pressure has intensified, and with it the documented turn from monograph to article and from synthetic argument to citable unit; the temporality of research has compressed, narrowing the time available for the slow, accumulative habits in which embodied cultural capital is classically formed (Diaz, 2021; Holt, 2025). The most recent UK evidence makes the qualitative consequence explicit: as Esson and colleagues report from a sector-wide survey, ‘embedded precarity’ is now diminishing research quality directly, because staff on short-term contracts rationally avoid the more critical or ambitious work that would jeopardise their next contract (Ross, 2026; Squire et al., 2025). None of this entails that contemporary academic and intellectual production is in absolute decline; the empirical literature is more mixed than either nostalgic or boosterish accounts admit. What it does entail is that the institutions historically charged with sustaining the substance of cultural capital have been weakened at precisely the moment when the signs of that capital have become most aggressively marketed. The asymmetry is the infrastructure of the regressive democratisation thesis.
5.3 Downstream consequences of the mutation
Three downstream consequences of the mutation merit careful statement, because the cultural commentary often misses them.
Inflation. Like all derivative markets, the commodified-capital market inflates. The signs of intellectual seriousness become generic, then ironic, then exhausted, in turnover cycles measured in months rather than decades. The Penguin Classics spine that signified taste in 2018 is the basic-bitch register of 2026; the Fitzcarraldo Editions blue is on its way; the Substack masthead that conferred seriousness in 2022 has become, as a category, a marker of self-marketing tendency rather than of judgement. The inflationary dynamic is not incidental but structural: the more frictionlessly a sign can be copied, displayed and circulated, the faster its discriminatory power decays, and the faster the field demands new signs.
Accessibility under price. The mutation produces a paradox of democratisation. The forms of intellectual belonging are more widely accessible than ever — anyone with a smartphone can post a BookTok video; anyone with a credit card can subscribe to a stack of Substacks; anyone can carry a tote bag. Yet the price of belonging visibly is rising in real terms. A £2,400 tote bag is not democratisation; nor is a £45 panel ticket; nor is the quietly compounding monthly burden of paid subscriptions through which contemporary literary attention is now monetised. The appearance of democratisation operates principally at the threshold of entry; the cost of remaining visible inside the field rises with each cycle of inflation.
Substitution effect. Where commodified capital is cheap to acquire and embodied capital is expensive to acquire, agents in the market substitute rationally. Visible signalling rises; sustained practice falls. This is precisely what the empirical reading data record. Surveys by the Reading Agency in the UK show a sustained decline in adult leisure reading over the past decade (Reading Agency, 2024); the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States has documented a comparable contraction in literary reading since the early 2000s (Iyengar, 2023); and the Australian survey literature reports the same pattern, with particularly sharp falls among adult men (Cartner-Morley, 2026). Against these aggregate declines, the visibility of reading-as-identity has risen on the platforms that monetise it, sales of heavily photographed editions of canonical novels have grown, and the bookshop-bar and literary festival sectors have expanded — alongside continued contraction in serious literary criticism, mid-list publishing and the readership for difficult contemporary fiction (Cartner-Morley, 2026). The substitution is not collective deception; it is an entirely sensible response to the relative price of the two goods. The problem is what that substitution does, in aggregate, to the cultural infrastructure that the commodified form depends on.
5.4 The gender argument
Drawing on Banet-Weiser’s Empowered (Banet-Weiser, 2018), on Gill’s postfeminist analyses (Gill, 2017, 2024), and on McRobbie’s earlier diagnoses (McRobbie, 2009), the gender claim can be developed in four arguments.
(a) The patriarchal binary that the performance contests. For two centuries the cultural cost-curve attaching intelligence to women was steep. The intelligent woman was either de-sexed (the Bluestocking, the schoolmarm, the spinster reader) or pathologised (the bas-bleu, the hysteric, the over-educated daughter). The contemporary ‘smart-is-sexy’ performance is, in part, a refusal of this curve — a culturally significant refusal, precisely because the curve was real and its cost on intelligent women’s lives across that period was real. Critics who treat the performance simply as vanity miss what it is responding to; the performance carries the historical weight of two centuries of forced choice between visibility and credibility.
(b) The performance’s costs. The refusal is not free. Intelligent women in the contemporary cultural economy pay the double tax of being judged simultaneously on two registers — intellect and attractiveness — where men are judged on one. As Cartner-Morley observes (Cartner-Morley, 2026), intelligent women remain newsworthy as intelligent in a way intelligent men do not; and this newsworthiness is itself a form of patriarchal subordination, because it marks intellect as the unexpected property requiring commentary rather than as the default state of the speaking subject. The ‘smart-is-sexy’ frame, however liberating in tone, retains the structural feature it claims to refuse: it makes intellect, in women, the object of aesthetic evaluation.
(c) What gets coded as intellectual. A more subtle argument concerns the gender economy of the platform period. Certain forms of intellectual labour are read as more ‘feminine’ — literary, affective, confessional, interpretive — and others as more ‘masculine’ — analytical, technical, political-economic, philosophical-systematic. The cultural visibility of reading, and the relative cultural invisibility of, say, mathematical or philosophical work, intersects with this coding. This is part of why the ‘smart-is-sexy’ phenomenon is so heavily literary, and so heavily female-led: literary reading is the form of intellectual labour that the gender economy of the platform period most readily aestheticises. It is also the form whose infrastructure of sustained practice — the slow novel, the literary quarterly, the editorial apprenticeship, the small publisher — is most fragile under the marketisation diagnosed in §5.3.
(d) The performance and the stereotypes it claims to refuse. A fourth argument, which I take seriously precisely because it cuts against the celebratory readings of ‘smart-is-sexy’, is that the performance economy can reinforce, rather than displace, the stereotypes against which it positions itself. Lawless and Cole (Lawless, 2021) document how anti-intellectual rhetorical circulation in right-wing media attacks recasts intelligent women, trans people and other visible non-dominant intellectual subjects as performers rather than as thinkers, and uses the very visibility of the performance as evidence that nothing serious lies behind it. The mechanism is unforgiving: a culture that has aestheticised intellect into a luxury sign supplies the misogynist and transphobic critic with exactly the discursive ammunition they need — if it’s a luxury sign, it isn’t serious thought; if she’s wearing the tote, she hasn’t read the book. The performance, in other words, does not neutralise the patriarchal binary; it converts the binary into a question of authenticity, which is a register on which the patriarchal critic has historically been comfortable adjudicating women’s credibility. This is the cost the chapter must register honestly: the ‘smart-is-sexy’ refusal is a real refusal, but it does not exit the patriarchal economy of judgement; it changes the metric by which that economy operates, and the new metric has its own hostile uses.
5.5 Class, access and the rising cost of belonging
A class-analytical section returns to a question deferred in §5.2: who can afford the tote, the subscriptions, the Substack stack, the literary festival ticket, the bookshop-bar in Islington, the tube of niche perfume named after a literary character. Following Reay’s work on cultural reproduction in education (Reay, 2017) and Sandel’s critique of meritocracy (Sandel, 2020), the marketisation of intellect under platform conditions can be read as a vehicle of cultural reproduction of a particular fraction of the educated middle class — a fraction whose labour-market position has been eroded over the past two decades but whose cultural-symbolic position is being reconsolidated through these exact mechanisms. The signs have become a hedge against the substance.
The class argument matters most acutely when one looks at the cost of acquiring embodied cultural capital under contemporary conditions, that is, the price of the formal education that remains its principal route. The cost has risen on three margins simultaneously, and the rises compound. Direct higher education costs — tuition fees, registration, materials, in those systems where they apply — have climbed faster than wages across most of the Anglophone world over the past generation, even when, as in England, headline fee caps appear to have stagnated; the real value of the £9,000 fee introduced in 2012 has fallen by approximately 26 % over the past decade, with the resulting shortfall absorbed not by public reinvestment but by the cross-subsidy of higher international fees, by the build-out of purpose-built student accommodation as a financialised asset class, and by the rising effective burden carried by domestic students themselves (Morris, 2025; Russell Group, 2025). The average debt of UK graduates becoming liable to repay in 2024 stood at £53,000, the highest of any country in the OECD’s comparative analysis (Bolton, 2025). Indirect costs — housing, in particular, in the small set of cities that host the institutions where embodied cultural capital is most efficiently acquired — have risen sharply enough to function as a sorting mechanism in their own right; the recent CBRE and HEPI sector analyses estimate an unmet UK demand of roughly 600,000 purpose-built student bedspaces, with average rents for an en-suite room rising 27 % over six years and for a studio 37 % (Morris, 2025). The urban housing crisis is, inter alia, a cultural reproduction crisis, because it prices out of the relevant cities the very students whose admission was supposed to mark the democratising achievement of higher education; and the incidence of that crisis, as Watt and Minton document, is modulated by class, race and gender, not borne uniformly across the student body (Watt and Minton, 2016). Opportunity costs — foregone earnings, foregone family-formation timelines, deferred independence — have lengthened, and they fall unevenly across genders and generations. Women, who continue to bear disproportionate caring obligations later in their lives, absorb a larger share of the lengthened opportunity-cost period; younger generations, whose accumulated wealth at any given age falls below that of the comparable cohort a generation earlier, absorb the rising direct and indirect costs without the intergenerational cushion their predecessors could rely on.
The real cost of access to credentialed intellectual life is now plausibly higher than at any point since the postwar expansion.
The OECD’s Education at a Glance series (2015–2024) tracks the sustained rise in the real cost of higher education across OECD economies, with a particularly steep climb in the private cost share borne by Anglophone students. Goldrick‑Rab’s Paying the Price (2016) shows in US longitudinal data that the aggregate cost of access — tuition, accommodation, opportunity cost — now exceeds any comparable point since 1945, with the heaviest incidence on first‑generation entrants. Marginson’s The Dream is Over (2016) supplies the structural diagnosis: the postwar settlement has been displaced by an individualised debt regime. UK‑specific corroboration comes from the House of Commons Library briefing Student Loan Statistics (SN01079, 2025), which records an average graduate debt of £53,000 — the highest figure in the OECD comparison.
The lengthened acquisition curve falls more heavily on women.
Dwyer, McCloud and Hodson (Gender & Society, 2013) establish through US longitudinal data that student debt interacts with gendered expectations to produce divergent completion and repayment trajectories. The AAUW’s Deeper in Debt (2017, updated 2021) supplies the headline figures: women take on average two years longer than men to clear their loans, and after twelve years of repayment the average Black woman’s balance has grown by 13 %, the average white woman’s has fallen by 28 %, and the average white man’s by 44 %. Britton, Dearden, Shephard and Vignoles (IFS Working Paper W19/06, 2019) confirm for the UK the sustained graduate earnings differential that drives this divergence; Callender and de Gayardon (Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 2025) add qualitative evidence on its differential effect on partnership and family formation.
The housing-driven geographic sorting falls more heavily on first-generation and minority students.
Bathmaker, Ingram, Abrahams, Hoare, Waller and Bradley’s Higher Education, Social Class and Social Mobility (Palgrave, 2016) is the foundational longitudinal study of the contemporary UK student body, documenting how indirect costs operate as a post‑admission filter that erodes the formal gains of widening participation, with the heaviest incidence on first‑generation entrants. Reay’s Miseducation (Policy Press, 2017) supplies the broader frame on cultural reproduction in British higher education. Watt and Minton (“London’s Housing Crisis and Its Activisms”, City 20(2), 2016) demonstrate that the severity of the housing crisis in the principal university city is modulated by class, race and gender, not uniformly distributed. HEPI and CBRE sectoral analyses (2022–2024) supply the quantitative scaffolding: an unmet UK demand of roughly 600,000 student bedspaces and rent rises of 27–37 % over six years.
The labour-market thinning at the upper end of credentialed intellectual employment falls more heavily on younger cohorts.
Loveday’s “Luck, Chance, and Happenstance?” (British Journal of Sociology of Education 39(6), 2018) provides the principal UK ethnographic account of the fixed‑term academic generation, documenting how perceptions of success and failure within a stratified labour market shape the trajectories of younger cohorts. Courtois and O’Keefe (“Precarity in the Ivory Cage”, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 13(1), 2015) extend the diagnosis across the Irish system. The most recent UK sector‑wide evidence comes from Squire et al., States of Precarity in UK Higher Education Geography (Royal Geographical Society / Antipode Foundation, 2025): 84.9 % of staff on fixed‑term contracts report negative effects on wellbeing, and 43.5 % of permanently employed staff who previously held such contracts report sustained downstream effects on their professional lives.
The gendered incidence is not anecdotal but well documented in the UK student-finance data. Women hold roughly two thirds of outstanding UK student loan debt, despite making up only a modest majority of the graduate population, because their lower average graduate earnings, more frequent employment gaps and longer time spent on lower-paid or part-time contracts mean that loan interest accrues for longer than it does for men (Callender and Mason, 2017). Maternity leave does not pause the interest accrual, with the result that the loan functions, for a substantial cohort of women, less like a debt to be repaid and more like an open-ended graduate tax that compounds across the years in which men are already clearing the same balance (Reilly, 2020). The pattern is visible across the full intersectional range: in comparable US data, the average Black woman’s student loan debt grows by 13 % in the first twelve years of repayment, while the average white woman’s shrinks by 28 % and the average white man’s by 44 % (Miller, 2017). The marketisation of credentialed intellectual life is not gender-blind in its incidence, even when its institutional design is.
The aggregate is that the real cost of access to credentialed intellectual life is now plausibly higher than at any point since the postwar expansion. The £53,000 average graduate debt in England, the largest in the OECD comparison, places British graduates in a structurally different position from any cohort that preceded them (Bolton, 2025). This is not intentionally gendered, but it is necessarily so in its incidence. The lengthened acquisition curve falls more heavily on women, for the gendered debt-dynamics just described (Callender and Mason, 2017; Reilly, 2020); the housing-driven geographic sorting falls more heavily on first-generation students, for whom the indirect costs of attending the major research universities increasingly approach the threshold at which the credential ceases to be financially viable (Morris, 2025; Watt and Minton, 2016); and the labour-market thinning at the upper end of credentialed intellectual employment falls more heavily on younger cohorts, for whom the proliferation of fixed-term contracts and the contraction of the permanent academic appointment have changed the meaning of completing a doctorate (Ross, 2026; Squire et al., 2025). The marketisation of the signs of intellectual belonging is, in this light, not the alternative to the rising cost of the substance; it is its complement. Where the substance cannot be afforded, the signs can be bought.
The argument is sympathetic to high cultural standards, and its moral is not that fewer people should read Camus. It is anti-marketisation: the problem is not that some people read Camus visibly; the problem is that doing so visibly costs more than many can pay, and that the market has captured the signs by which once-public belonging — the public library, the WEA class, the Mechanics’ Institute lecture, the broadsheet review pages, the BBC adult-education broadcast — was historically negotiated. Jonathan Rose’s social history of working-class reading life in Britain shows in detail what those institutions actually delivered: not philanthropic uplift but a working infrastructure through which cultural belonging was acquired without the price of admission (Rose, 2001). That infrastructure has been systematically defunded over the past four decades; it is the negative space against which the contemporary commodified market for cultural capital has expanded. This is, again, why the term ‘regressive democratisation’ is the right one: the formal threshold of entry has fallen, but the real cost of remaining inside has risen, and the public institutions that once made the difference between the two manageable have been allowed to decline.
5.6 Aestheticised intellect, brutalised politics
The closing argument inverts Walter Benjamin’s classic diagnosis of the aestheticisation of politics under fascism (Benjamin, 1936). Benjamin’s claim was that fascism aestheticises politics — turns it into spectacle to neutralise its substance, to absorb the masses into ritual rather than into deliberation. Under contemporary competitive authoritarianism, the aestheticisation runs in the opposite direction.
Competitive authoritarianism names a regime that retains formally democratic institutions — elections, opposition parties, a press — while systematically tilting the playing field through legal, administrative and informational means (Levitsky et al., 2025).
The contemporary variant differs from the 1990s–2000s “first wave” Levitsky and Way first described: it operates through algorithmic amplification and platform-driven agenda-setting as much as through overt coercion; it works through rule-by-law (weaponised regulators, selective enforcement) rather than the suspension of legality; it is gradualist and deniable; and it treats polarisation not as a by-product but as a governing technology. Genuine pockets of pluralism survive but are structurally disadvantaged.
Politics has been brutalised and de-aestheticised. The degraded rhetorical register of contemporary right-populist leadership — the fragmentary syntax, the open performance of cruelty as governance, the deliberate cultivation of vulgarity as authenticity claim — is not the failure of an aesthetic project; it is the success of a counter-aesthetic project. The register signals that the substance of governance has been released from the constraints of public reason. The speech is not beautiful because beauty was always the cover-story for the exercise of power without consent.
Intellect has become the site at which aestheticisation now takes place. The cultural recoding of intellect as luxury sign, the wearable canon, the photogenic bookshelf, the curated literary persona — these are the mirror image of the political recoding. The aestheticisation has migrated from the domain where Benjamin saw it to the domain where it had not previously operated at this intensity. Both movements empty the public sphere of substantive deliberation; both consolidate into private goods what were once public capacities.
The mirror-relation is not metaphorical; it is causal in both directions. The de-aestheticisation of politics generates the demand for an aestheticisation of intellect, because the public sphere no longer offers a register in which seriousness can be performed without being read as elite contempt; the aestheticisation of intellect, in turn, supplies the de-aestheticised politics with exactly the target it needs — the out-of-touch, performative, luxury-class reader against whom populist authenticity can position itself. The two phenomena are each other’s condition.
The argument extends, however, beyond the populist register. What contemporary technocratic and consultancy elites supply on the other side of the ledger — the Davos panel, the policy white paper drafted by a strategy firm, the ministerial speech written by a former management consultant — is not the substance of public deliberation either. It is the same aestheticisation under a different costume: a gestural seriousness performed by actors who, on the evidence of their decisions, are no more substantively engaged with the relevant disciplinary expertise than the populists they oppose. Heumann’s analysis of epistemic divides in rural Switzerland documents the populist node of this phenomenon — alternative epistemic frameworks rooted in proximity, manual practice and common sense — but the elite node is structurally analogous (Heumann, 2026): a strategic-class epistemology that reads expert consensus as one input among many, to be balanced against narrative considerations, optical considerations and donor considerations, but not to be granted the deliberative authority that public reason classically extended to it. This is what the closing chapters of The Technological Republic (Karp and Zamiska, 2025) register, from inside the elite formation, as the absence of any substantive political vision capable of deliberating about the technologies the same formation is producing — though the diagnosis there is offered without the structural analysis that would explain it.
The convergence of the two registers — the brutalised populism and the aestheticised technocracy — is what makes contemporary competitive authoritarianism distinctive, and it is what makes the cultural recoding of intellect, the principal object of analysis here, so politically consequential. The elite that owns the luxury-tote register and the elite that owns the consultancy register are, in many cases, the same people, drawing income from the same firms, educated in the same institutions, sharing the same cultural calendar. The performance of seriousness is calibrated for their internal market; the substantive deliberation that intellectual life classically claimed to enable does not take place either at their dinners or in their offices. The public is, in both registers, the audience.
This is the deepest sense in which the contemporary marketisation of intellect is a regressive democratisation: it widens participation in the spectacle while narrowing participation in the deliberation. The two trends are not in tension; they are the same trend.
A new actor — generative artificial intelligence — has, between 2023 and 2026, entered the field analysed here and is beginning to transform the very labour of reading, writing and thinking on which the older forms of cultural capital depended. Chapter 6 takes up that transformation.