Unbundling the University, Pre-commerical Research, and Speculative Technologies

An executive summary of a forthcoming piece

We’re working on a long piece about unbundling the university, pre-commerical technology research, and how that ties directly into Speculative Technologies (both capital S-T and lowercase s-t). This is the executive summary as an end-of-year teaser for subscribers and donors.

Speculative Technologies’ core mission is to create an abundant, wonder-filled future by unlocking powerful technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions. Since we launched in 2023, we’ve learned a lot about what is broken in our research ecosystem and how we can best execute on that mission.

One big thing we have realized is the blunt fact that over the past 50 years, universities have developed a near-monopoly on many types of research and, like many monopolies, they are not particularly good at all of them.

21st century universities have become a massive “bundle” of societal roles and missions — from skills training to technology development to discovering the secrets of the universe. For the sake of many of these societal roles and arguably for the sake of the universities themselves, Universities need to be unbundled and in particular, we need to unbundle pre-commercial technology research from academia and universities.

Universities have been accumulating roles for hundreds of years but the process drastically accelerated during the 20th century. (The history of the university is a fascinating tale for another time). A non-exclusive list of these missions might include: