“Knowledge is immobilized” when it’s trapped in systems that prevent it from being dynamic, accessible, or transformative. Examples? Oh, sure:

• Academia's Ivory Cage™: Knowledge gets locked in 300-page PDFs with 7-syllable words, accessible only through expensive journal subscriptions, where it sits like a fossil nobody can dig up without a research grant.

• Institutional Gatekeeping: Who gets to create, validate, and distribute knowledge? Usually the same tiny, self-important club of tenured folks and their citation circles.

• Colonial Hegemony: Ever heard of indigenous astronomy? Ancient African math? No? That’s because dominant Western epistemologies shove everything else into a broom closet labeled “myths and folklore.”

Now, “knowledge is immobilizing” when it becomes a tool for control. Yeah, turns out knowing stuff isn’t always liberating:

• Technocratic Paralysis: You ever notice how the more reports, studies, and data there are, the less action happens? "We can’t make a decision yet, we need more data." Sure, Greg. That’s not fear of change at all.

• Surveillance and Control: Bureaucracies and algorithms “know” everything about you—your clicks, your cholesterol, your micro-emotions. But that knowledge isn’t used to empower you. It's used to optimize your obedience.

• Schooling as Indoctrination: Education systems often teach just enough to make you productive, but not enough to make you question why you're being productive for someone else's yacht fund.

So yes, knowledge can be both stuck and sticky. You're welcome for the academic heartbreak.

Want to poke further into epistemic injustice, explore Foucault's knowledge-power dynamic, or dunk on standardized education?

You said:

Perhaps you can write a little more about how knowledge can be both stuck and sticky?

ChatGPT said:

Sure. Let’s make this even murkier, just the way philosophy likes it. Knowledge being "stuck" and "sticky" is the intellectual equivalent of getting gum on your shoe and not being allowed to move your leg.

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Knowledge as "Stuck": Fossilized, Archived, and Taxidermied

When knowledge gets stuck, it means:

• Historical ossification: Once a dominant way of knowing is established, it becomes self-justifying. You end up with ideas that are outdated but still worshipped, like Freudian couch sessions or people citing Adam Smith like he has a TikTok.

• Canonization: A few thinkers get to be “serious” and everything else gets ignored. This locks knowledge into what’s already been said, by the usual cast of pale, bearded suspects.

• Overinstitutionalization: Research becomes more about conforming to methodological dogma than finding truth. Congratulations, you’ve published a study that no one will read, using a format no one understands.

In other words, knowledge stops moving. It becomes a relic you have to genuflect before to get a grant.

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Knowledge as "Sticky": Clings to Power, Infects Minds

When it’s sticky, it means:

• Ideology disguised as fact: Racism, patriarchy, capitalism — all brilliantly sticky. They produce knowledge systems (science, economics, law) that seem objective but are laced with the biases of those in charge.

• Educational goo: You get taught a version of history that sticks with you, not because it’s true, but because it was repeated a thousand times in glossy textbooks with flag motifs and heroic cartoons.

• Cognitive entrapment: Sticky knowledge infiltrates your worldview so deeply that even when you know it’s wrong, it still shapes your instincts. Like the idea that success = productivity = self-worth. Welcome to the brain trap.

So knowledge can be stuck in dead archives or sticky in living brains. Either way, it often works against liberation. You didn’t think your high school curriculum was trying to free your mind, did you?

Want to dive deeper into decolonizing knowledge systems, institutional epistemology, or how ideology masquerades as truth?