"It's a really kind of heartbreaking time to live in because we're so fragmented." In this episode of Beyond Gender, filmmaker Michael Nayna shares his journey documenting pivotal moments in our changing cultural landscape. From viral videos to exposing academic hoaxes, Nayna offers a unique perspective on how ideological capture has transformed institutions across media, academia, and technology.
About Michael Nayna
Michael Nayna is an Australian filmmaker and media creator with a background in news and communications. His work has focused on documenting cultural shifts and ideological movements affecting major institutions. Nayna is perhaps best known for his work on the Grievance Studies Affair, where he collaborated with Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay to expose ideological bias in academic publishing. His early viral video capturing a racist incident on public transport in 2012 launched his exploration of media narratives and their impact on public perception. Nayna has also co-founded Letter, a platform for long-form dialogue that was later acquired by Substack.
The Viral Bus Incident and Media Narratives
Michael recalls how his journey began with a viral video in 2012 when he filmed a racist incident on a bus in Australia:
"It was like 2012, I was on a bus and a racist incident took place and I filmed it and it went viral all over the world. It went insanely big."
This experience gave him insight into the power of viral media and how narratives form:
"You've set off a chain reaction that you didn't actually, you don't have control over anymore. And I think it was the lack of control. It was like, oh shit, what, what is this?"
He later made a documentary for ABC Australia exploring how people outside the incident made sense of it, showing his early interest in media construction and narrative formation. This film titled Digilante, premiered on ABC TV and was praised by author and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson.
The Grievance Studies Affair
Perhaps Nayna's most significant project was his involvement in the Grievance Studies Affair, a series of hoax papers submitted to academic journals to expose ideological bias in certain academic fields:
"The grievance studies affair was a hoax project. So these grievance studies, these cultural studies departments... have a strange form. It's an ideology and their journals and their disciplines are just ideological generation mills."
He explains how the project worked:
"Peter, Helen and Jim were able to... write the most absurd papers you could ever imagine and get them published at the highest rated journals within these disciplines."
The project successfully placed seven papers in academic journals with several more in the review process before being exposed by The Wall Street Journal. Notable examples included:
Nayna documented this project in a series called The Reformers, drawing parallels between their work and the Protestant Reformation challenging institutional corruption.
Ideological Capture of Institutions
A central theme of Nayna's work is documenting how various institutions have been captured by ideological movements:
"You've got this, this kind of like, what is it? It's like a patronage network that's building through this ideological mindset. And this... is a giant propaganda machine."
He describes how this process works through what he calls "critical theory infiltration":
"An activist who is adept at critical theory... will go to the field of dietetics and then they will establish themselves within the sociology of dietetics."
Eventually, this creates parallel structures:
"So they, they created their own journal, their own journal because there's a dietetics as a discipline. Now there's critical dietetics... they're like a cancer."
Nayna sees this pattern repeating across academia, medicine, psychology, the arts, and journalism.
The James Damore Google Incident
Nayna was coincidentally present for the aftermath of James Damore's firing from Google, another significant cultural flashpoint. Damore had written a memo questioning Google's gender equity approaches:
"He had, he was experiencing the greater opening within Google and he was getting confronted with all this equity stuff... he created a memo saying, well, I don't believe in this, this ideological version, but if we, if we want to make Google more appealing for more women, then perhaps we can do this."
The memo leaked, went viral, and resulted in Damore's firing despite Nayna noting:
"There's nothing wrong with his memo. I remember when that happened and reading his memo, I was like, I can't actually see the spot where why people are angry."
Media Transformation and Substack
Nayna describes how journalism has fundamentally changed:
"That was a really interesting time to be in the newsroom because that was when the Internet was just coming. And so what you had was this old guard journalists... actually investigating. They're leaving their desks, which is something that just doesn't just stop happening. And then you have this, this new kind of Mean Girls journalism of the younger cohort."
This transformation has created space for alternative platforms like Substack, which Nayna had a connection to through his earlier platform Letter, co-founded with Clyde and Dayne Rathbone:
"We thought of it as a kind of long form Twitter... and the guys down at Sub Stack really, really like this. And then they acquired that company."
He notes that Substack gained significant momentum when established journalists began defecting from mainstream outlets:
"Barry Weiss is really useful to the platform because you started getting these really high-ranking journalists, their resignation letter from say, New York Times or Washington Post was their first Sub Stack post."
A Historical Perspective on Cultural Change
Nayna offers a fascinating historical framework for understanding current cultural shifts, comparing our moment to the Protestant Reformation:
"I think it's like the Protestant Reformation and the printing press. The printing press came in, you've got this structure... like the Catholic Church. And they became pretty degenerate when the printing press came in."
He suggests that just as the printing press allowed individual interpretation of religious texts, bypassing established authorities, the internet has created a similar fragmentation of cultural and ideological authority:
"The Internet comes along and all of a sudden you've got people, rogue academics who were part of the system... We're all living in [information] Protestant denominations... and we're all interpreting reality in our own ways."
This historical perspective aligns with what writer N.S. Lyons explores in "American Strong Gods", which Nayna recommends during the interview as an important perspective on current cultural shifts.
The Current Cultural Moment
When asked about the current state of culture, Nayna expresses particular concern about Australia's situation:
"Being in Australia is not being in the right place at the right time. I think Australia is like one of the most pure, pure managerial regimes there is."
He sees parallels between Australia and Canada in how deeply institutional capture has progressed, while noting the US has more independent industries and resources to potentially counter these trends.
On the broader cultural trajectory, he sees the fracturing as inevitable given technological changes:
"I don't think we can live in the end of history kind of 90s land. I think that that it doesn't have the technological base. I think that the mass media infrastructure was something that that worldview required and it's not there now."
While cautious about stability, he acknowledges the period is fascinating from a filmmaker's perspective: "I'm positive from a filmmaker's perspective, because I love wild stuff."
Follow Michael Nayna
For those interested in exploring Michael's work further:
Substack:
X: @mikenayna
His documentary work can be found on his YouTube Channel
His involvement in the Grievance Studies Affair is documented in The Reformers
If you've ever felt like something bigger is happening but struggled to make sense of it, Beyond Gender is for you. This podcast cuts through the noise with honest, thoughtful discussions about one of the most pressing topics of our time.
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