Appendix D — Glossary

This glossary defines the principal technical terms used in the book, in the senses in which the book uses them. Where contested, the contestation is noted briefly; the body of the book provides fuller discussion.

Anti-intellectualism: Following Hofstadter (1963), ‘resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind, and of those who are considered to represent it’. The book distinguishes four historical phases — populist, reactive, market and platform-authoritarian — and treats the present (Phase IV, post-2016) as qualitatively novel. See Chapter 1.
Aesthetic mode of knowing: Inbar, Jablonka, Ginsburg and Zeligowski’s term (2025) for a legitimate mode of cognition distinct from but complementary to the scientific image, irreducible to mere ornament. The book uses the concept to locate the analytical bite of the mausoleum critique: the problem is not the aesthetic mode itself but its commodification under platform conditions. See Chapter 4.
Anti-mausoleum: This book’s complementary term to mausoleum culture: a space in which the artefacts of intellectual life are not preserved as luxury signs but circulated as conditions of ordinary practice; in which access is distributed rather than priced; in which the reader is a citizen rather than a brand. The contemporary public library, in its institutionally serious form, is the paradigm case. See Chapter 8.
Aspirational consumption: Hasell and Chinn’s diagnostic category (2023): social-media consumption oriented towards lifestyle emulation, empirically associated with anti-intellectual attitudes and inaccurate beliefs even when content is non-political. Provides the empirical hinge for the book’s argument that performative intellectualism is, structurally, one form of anti-intellectualism rather than its opposite. See Chapter 4.
Attention economy: The political-economic order in which user attention is the principal commodity extracted by digital platforms, and the imperatives of attention extraction (engagement, virality, affective intensity) structure the prevailing information ecology. See Chapter 3; cf. Citton (2017), Williams (2018), Wu (2016).
Autocracy, Inc.: Anne Applebaum’s term (2024) for the transnational network of contemporary authoritarian states bound not by shared ideology but by mutual interest in suppressing independent civil society, protecting kleptocratic wealth and propagating disinformation. See Chapter 2.
Brutalisation / aestheticisation: The book’s inversion of Benjamin’s classic diagnosis: under contemporary conditions, politics has been brutalised while intellect has been aestheticised. The pairing names a single transformation, not two parallel ones. See Chapter 5.
Cognitive debt: Kosmyna et al.’s term (2025) for the accumulating cost incurred when AI assistance substitutes for, rather than supplements, the cognitive operations it accelerates. Distinguished from cognitive offloading by its emphasis on the deferred and cumulative character of the loss. See Chapter 6.
Cognitive offloading: The delegation of cognitive tasks to external systems, with measurable consequences for memory, comprehension and problem-solving when the systems in question are AI-based rather than note-based or organisational. See Chapter 6.
Commodified cultural capital: A fourth form proposed by this book to extend Bourdieu’s typology (embodied, objectified, institutionalised): cultural capital that has been detached from its institutional bearer, made circulable as content, and priced. Characteristic of the platform period. See Chapter 5.
Competitive authoritarianism: Levitsky and Way’s category (2010, extended in 2025) for regimes that retain formal electoral competition but in which incumbents weaponise state institutions to tilt the playing field. The 2025 Foreign Affairs article (Levitsky, Way, Ziblatt) classifies the United States in 2025 as having entered this regime type. See Chapter 2.
Cultural capital: Following Bourdieu (1984), the symbolic resources — knowledge, taste, credentials, embodied dispositions — that confer social position and are distributed unequally across classes. The book extends Bourdieu’s typology to a fourth form (commodified cultural capital). See Chapter 5.
Cultural surface: Used in this book in a semiotic register, not a moral one: the dimension of the sign detached from its referent — opposed not to “depth” in the moralising sense but to practice. The recoding of intellect as cultural surface is the operation of which mausoleum culture is the result. See terminological note in front matter; Chapter 5.
Democratic backsliding: The gradual erosion of democratic institutions, norms and practices by elected leaders, characteristic of the post-2016 period. See Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018, 2023); Bermeo (2016); Haggard and Kaufman (2021).
Democratic competence: Robert Post’s term (2012): the standing capacity of public opinion to be informed by reliable expert knowledge, without which democratic legitimation empties out. Distinct from, and supervening on, the elementary epistemic competences of individual citizens. See Chapter 8.
Democratic legitimation: Post’s complementary concept (2012): the responsiveness of democratic decision-making to public opinion. Forms, with democratic competence, the irreducible double criterion of legitimate self-governance. See Chapter 8.
Epistemic disorientation: The cognitive condition under platform-mediated information environments in which citizens are not so much ignorant as incapable of coordinating justified belief across the politically relevant population. See Harsin (2024); Hadarics (2025); Chapter 3.
Halbbildung (pseudo-culture): Adorno’s term, recovered by Díaz (2021) and Han (2018) for contemporary purposes: the dominant form of contemporary consciousness, in which Enlightenment and the spread of information do not produce, but on the contrary stabilise, the conditions of anti-intellectualism. See Chapter 1.
Inconspicuous consumption: Zhang’s reconstruction (2021) of Cultural Revolution consumer culture: the ostentation of poverty rather than wealth as a politically reactive aesthetic strategy. Provides the historical analogy through which the book reads contemporary inverted cultural-capital flows. See Chapter 5.
Inhabitation: Used in this book as a verb of practice opposed to consumption: intellectual life is reproduced through becoming the kind of person, in the kind of community, under the kind of conditions, in which it is constitutive of ordinary life. The luxury sign of intellectual seriousness is, on the present account, not a route into inhabitation but its substitute. See Thesis 1, Chapter 8.
Mausoleum culture: This book’s term for the contemporary cultural formation in which the artefacts and surfaces of intellectual life are aesthetically preserved as luxury signs precisely because the substantive practice of intellectual life is being defunded, attacked or unattended. See Introduction; Chapter 4.
Mausoleum-adjacent metaphors: The book occasionally deploys complementary figures to locate distinct facets of the phenomenon named by mausoleum culture: showroom intellectualism (curated brand-adjacent display cut off from the workshop in which the goods were made); vitrine or display-case culture (the distance between the cultural object and the practice of using it); theatre of erudition (the performative grammar of staged thinking); cargo-cult intellectualism (the faithful reproduction of visible forms in the absence of the conditions that gave them their function); taxidermy intellectualism (the careful preservation of postures with nothing inside them moving); Potemkin library (a frontage convincing enough to be photographed, with very little behind it). These are not interchangeable; each highlights a different facet. See Chapter 8.
Performative intellectualism / performative reading: The cultural formation in which the practice of reading and thinking is rendered visible, social and monetisable through platform-mediated display (BookTok, Substack, the literary turn in fashion). The book treats the phenomenon as real (not falsifying the reading it makes visible) but structurally aligned with the marketisation of public reason. See Chapter 4; cf. Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo (2019); Jerasa (2025); Steiner (2024).
Platform capitalism: A political-economic order in which a small number of digital platforms hold infrastructural positions of market and information-flow control, monetised primarily through attention extraction and behavioural-data appropriation. See Srnicek (2017); Zuboff (2019); Dean (2024). The book treats it as the technical infrastructure of competitive authoritarianism in its current phase.
Post-truth: A regime of public discourse in which assertions are made and circulated without primary regard for their truth-value, typically engineered for affective effect. The book follows Harsin (2024) in treating post-truth as a regime of attention rather than a regime of truth: the failure is in the conditions of coordination of justified belief, not (only) in the propositional content circulated.
Public reason: Used in this book in a register modelled on Habermas (1962, 2023) and Rawls but corrected by Fraser, Mouffe and Honneth: the institutionally mediated practice of mutual contestation, peer review and warranted-belief coordination through which deliberative liberal democracy reproduces itself. See Chapter 3.
Recoded: Used in this book in a semiotic sense, not a moral one: the substitution of a sign-relation, in which intellectual practice is replaced by its visible markers, rather than the trivialisation of substance. The recoding is direction-bearing — from practice to surface — and is the structural operation that the book analyses. See terminological note in front matter; Chapter 5.
Soft guardrails (of democracy): Levitsky and Ziblatt’s term (2018) for the unwritten norms — particularly mutual toleration and institutional forbearance — that prevent democratic competition from degenerating into no-holds-barred conflict. Their erosion is the proximate cause of the democratic backsliding that the book analyses. See Chapter 2.
Surveillance capitalism: Zuboff’s term (2019) for the political-economic order in which behavioural data are extracted from users without compensation and converted into predictive products sold in behavioural-futures markets. Adjacent to but distinct from platform capitalism and attention economy: the three are connected but analytically separable. See Chapter 3.