[spectre] ‘Defund Culture by Any Means’ Necessary' Minor Compositions Podcast

[Gary Hall]

That was quick. My discussion on Monday evening about /Defund Culture: A 
Radical Proposal/ with the independent artist and researcher Seth 
Wheeler for the Minor Compositions podcast, hosted by Stevphen 
Shukaitis, is online.

*Minor Compositions Podcast - Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Defund Culture by 
Any Means’ Necessary'
*https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1885
YouTube: https://youtu.be/mk-j2uh9cdk

Available on all the usual podcast platforms.

‘In this episode owe are joined by Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler for a 
wide-ranging conversation on cultural funding, radical publishing, and 
the changing conditions of collective knowledge production. The 
discussion begins with Hall’s recent book Defund Culture, which 
challenges conventional calls to increase arts funding by asking a more 
fundamental question: what – and who – is cultural funding actually for? 
Rather than defending existing institutions, Hall proposes that the 
current crisis in arts funding might be an opportunity to rethink the 
entire landscape, redistributing resources away from entrenched, 
upper-middle-class infrastructures toward more collective, plural, and 
relational forms of cultural production.

 From there, the conversation moves into the practical and political 
challenges of radical publishing today. Reflecting on projects such as 
Open Humanities Press and Agit Press, Hall and Wheeler discuss the 
tensions between openness and enclosure in contemporary publishing, the 
uneven realities of open access, and the difficulty of sustaining 
collective, non-commercial forms of intellectual work. Wheeler draws on 
experiences from worker movements to highlight the historical role of 
print media – newsletters, pamphlets, and leaflets – as machines to 
produce consciousness, capable of expanding political dialogue beyond 
academic and activist enclaves.How do these earlier forms resonate with, 
and diverge from, today’s digital platforms? What happens when knowledge 
production becomes entangled with the logics of content creation, 
personal branding, and algorithmic visibility? The conversation explores 
how financial precarity and platform economies shape what can be said, 
by whom, and under what conditions: raising questions about whether 
genuinely collective and autonomous forms of media can exist within, or 
beyond, these systems.

Ultimately this is a question of infrastructure: how to build 
alternative networks for producing and distributing knowledge that do 
not simply replicate existing hierarchies. From decentralized publishing 
models and cooperative platforms to the enduring importance of print as 
a social and organizational process, the episode maps out both the 
challenges and the possibilities of creating new cultural forms grounded 
in collaboration, redistribution, and shared intellectual life. Rather 
than offering definitive solutions, this conversation opens up a space 
for thinking through what it might mean to defend/defund culture by 
transforming it – experimenting with new modes of publishing, new 
institutional arrangements, and new ways of working together.’

/Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal/ (open access): 
https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-hall-defund/release/4
Open Humanities Press: https://openhumanitiespress.org
Agit Press: https://www.agitpress.net

Intro / outro music – Mischief Brew, The Reinvention of the Printing Press


-- 
Gary Hall
Professor Emeritus of Media @ Coventry University
Founding co-director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org 
Blog:http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/

Latest:

Books: Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal:https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Blogpost: ‘"The Most Spoiled Generation": Boomer Theory, Algorithmic Hustle and the Drive Toward Something Else':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2026/2/10/the-most-spoiled-generation-boomer-theory-algorithmic-hustle.html






    




















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