🔖 Read What’s Dark about Dark Academia

I think the real power of dark academia is the way it compresses—and thus preserves—humanistic study at a time when the humanities are under constant threat… Creating and emulating dark academia content offers students a way to fantasize about a world in which higher education isn’t instrumentalized, but rather self-sustaining and inherently valuable.

An aesthetic that evokes the academy is more flexible, more malleable, than the academy itself.

But if dark academia commodifies education, they learned how from the corporate university itself. Their commodification as style has far less insidious ends than the university’s spreadsheets of departmental deliverables.