THERE is a problem in science funding. Either you fund an idea, and assume your ability to understand the solution surpasses that of the experts (and risk foreclosing their imaginative potential), or you fund the experts, in which case you sustain the status quo, from which new results may or may not emerge as you would hope.

The balance of this decision fluctuates with trends among those who hold the purse strings. The argument for funding so-called “smart people” is often much favoured by the people who suspect they themselves may be smart. It’s an idea also upheld by the “great man” theory of science, which highlights the importance of individual personalities in driving great discoveries.

Historical materialists reject the notion that these special personalities are independent of the forces of economic and social history, highlighting the importance of the whole network that produces the personalities. But even those who believe in the importance of special geniuses recognise that they need the right environment to produce the best kind of results. This is why, even as capitalists prefer to cut state funding of vital services such as health and social care, public expenditure on R&D has been growing since the ’90s (certainly as a proportion of the budget, also officially in real terms. Understanding this is somewhat complicated by changes in how it is counted). 

The most powerful capitalists in the world right now have used new technology to accrue their wealth, and so they support the investment of public funds into further technological advancement, in an attempt to free “great minds” from the grip of the market. However, this is not as progressive as it might seem. In fact, many scientific subcultures have been described as remaining essentially feudal.

Some anthropologists have described German academia, which is even more extremely unbalanced than its British counterpart, as having more in common with the courts of kings than the capitalist marketplace. This is thanks to the extreme power imbalance between those who lead science, and those they hire on temporary contracts, often treated as disposable. 

The question of who is a “great mind” is a fraught one. It has become common practice for more senior scientists to acknowledge the contribution from junior colleagues and students to their work — habit that can seem to make a virtue of the feudal structure. Nevertheless, in academic, publicly funded science, the prominence of “big names” is still of huge importance.

The Matthew effect describes how the more prominent a scientist is, the greater their contribution to any project they are involved in will be assumed to be, and the more their prominence will be accumulated. 

This is a big problem for scientific culture, which suffers from huge imbalances in power and influence. The acceptance and development of ideas in these cultures is necessarily affected by this power structure, a phenomenon related to the aphorism that “science advances one funeral at a time.” Prominent researchers can in fact hold back, or even destroy interest in an entire field of research, by pursuing their own idea to the exclusion of everything else. This is enhanced when their own idea is also a dead end. This is the case held against Simon Baron-Cohen, a prominent academic in the study of autism.

Baron-Cohen has built a career as a world-renowned expert on claims like the idea that autistic people have “mindblindness,” a difficulty with or no theory of mind, and that autism is the expression of “the extreme male brain.” These views are significantly out of step with contemporary understanding of disability, neurodivergence and gender, but his research has been so bizarrely prominent and his influence so large that it seemed that until he left the field through retirement or death, alternative understandings of autism would be overlooked.

However, in an inspiring turn of events, the research programme headed by Baron-Cohen is facing genuine and effective resistance. In 2021 autism self-advocacy activists effectively boycotted a project called Spectrum10k which, using £3 million mostly from the charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust, was going to collect genetic data from 10,000 autistic individuals. The huge number of autistic activists who boycotted the research indicated they simply didn’t trust work led by Baron-Cohen to lead to good science.

The study has been delayed (but its funding timeline has been extended, and websites associated with it are currently down), and another study on an autistic teenager’s diary by Baron-Cohen was also abandoned after heavy criticism from activists last month. It remains to be seen whether collective understanding and organising by can change the way that science evolves by overturning its feudal power structures.

The emboldened feudalism of academic institutions may be part of a broader societal trend. Theorist Michel Luc Bellemare and politician Yanis Varoufakis have recently been prominent proponents of the idea that we are living through a global transition to neofeudalism, or techno-capitalist-feudalism. The idea is that the revolution in technology has plunged us into a new sort of extreme inequality, where a very few ultra-elites have power over the vast majority, through their power over technology, producing a new type of feudalism. This is where we return to a fascination with key personalities, with power concentrated in the hands of a small number of techno-aristocrats. 

This month Aria has gone public. This is a new funding agency with £800 million to spend on research over a few years, inaugurated by a parliamentary Bill proposed in 2021, passed in 2022 and set up in 2023. It is unusual in that it is independent of government; it can’t be dissolved until 2032. Its most striking feature is the purposeful concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, from outside of — or at least not the established world-leaders of — the research programmes they intend to fund.

Rather than a system of committees and peer review, a few people apparently chosen for their individuality and ambition have been put in charge of around £40 million each to spend over five years on what they believe to be high-risk high-reward research projects. 

Aria’s launch appeared to be heavily influenced by sentiments like Facebook’s old motto “Move fast and break things,” emphasising that the projects have been released from public procurement regulations, and that they will prioritise speed and urgency. It hopes that handing huge power to a few “freethinking” individuals, and attempting to reduce the pressure to short-term success and profit, will be able to incentivise the sort of revolutionary ideas that are mythologised in high-intensity science programmes, such as the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb. The idea is that this is what will allow scientists to tackle the really big questions of challenges to humanity as a whole, the sort that can’t be met by markets. 

Freeing research from market logic is a great idea if it can really be implemented. However, ideas are the product not just of the individuals that invent them, but also the system they are working within. Feudal logic is its own sort of bind. For real radicalism, we should look to the communities like the people who rejected Spectrum10k, who refuse to accept a system that produces bad science, and actively work to remove scientific power from a very few people.