I’ve had this line stuck in my head since watching this mediocre Pedro Pascal film over the summer. In a coked-up confrontation at a Hollywood party, one agent says to another that “We’re all fortressing up for the coming storms, mate”. While they were talking about changes to the industry which risked cutting out the agent class, it felt oddly resonant in a summer where climate anxiety really kicked in for the first time for me as an immediate response to present reality rather than an intellectual expectation of future change.
How many people see themselves as fortressing up for the coming storm? How are individualised responses to incipient crisis undermining collective responses? Are the people who are anticipating crisis breaking away from the those who are struggling to just get through the week? What about the gap between those who have resources to prepare individually and those who lack the material affordances to meaningfully prepare? What odes ‘preparation’ mean anyway? In many ways this is what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are exploring in End Times Fascism, suggesting that digital elites are fortressing up in a manner which is deliberately driving a resurgent fascism.
We can ask the same question about higher education. I increasingly notice a split in my professional life between those who discuss how bad things are going to get in the sector and those who don’t discuss it. Whether that’s because they don’t see it or think about it is a difficult question to answer. But I can think of lots of cases where I’ve raised this in a way that felt relevant only to generate evident discomfort. Much of the sector is already in the storm and I see little chance of it coming back given the political economy in late 2026. Those institutions and individuals not in the storm are in many cases fortressing up proactively. The institutions certainly are, to the extent they are able to. This dynamic is integral to understanding where we are at in late 2026, in higher education as in wider society, yet it remains somewhat difficult to talk about.
