cuer: a feral research collective

Edoardo Savi has a piece on Substack called “Lo and Behold, the Feral Leader”. It opens like this:

Earlier this year, music journalist Reanna Cruz coined the term feral pop to refer to a genre of hyper-digital music that sounds undomesticated, unpredictable, and wild. In a world upended by AI, climate change, and political instability, a fresh generation of pop stars is embracing a new aesthetic of “rawness and roughness” rooted in nihilism and driven by a clear intent to rebel against the norm.

Savi’s claim: pop culture is going feral — unfiltered, chaotic, allergic to polish — and organizational leadership is about to follow the same arc. The feral leader operates on instinct over deliberation, treats safeguards as “dead weight,” weaponizes transparency, and turns what looks like recklessness into a competitive edge. His read is mostly a warning about founder-mode excess dressed up as authenticity.

I want to appropriate the term and mean something better by it.

What running a small research collective actually looks like

A university research group operating between grants, teaching load, and whatever compute or API access happens to still be alive this semester is not run by five-year plans. It’s run by instinct, most of the time correctly. When GitHub Models got retired, the response wasn’t a committee meeting — it was rebuilding the lab exercises around Copilot Models and CLAAUDIA resources the same week, because the students needed a working pipeline by Monday, not a risk-assessment memo.

That’s the “instinct over deliberation” part of Savi’s definition. But the rest of his framing — safeguards as impediments, recklessness cloaked in privilege — doesn’t map onto research at all. A lab has no privilege cushion to cloak anything in. What it has is:

• No slack for bureaucracy. Every hour spent on process is an hour not spent on the audio pipeline, the paper, or the student who’s stuck.
• Transparency that isn’t weaponized, just necessary. Students see the actual state of a project — half-broken demos included — because hiding it from them teaches them nothing.
• Tolerance for productive chaos. A prototype that fails in an interesting way on Tuesday is worth more than a proposal that’s safe on paper.

Feral, not reckless

Savi’s feral leader says “what got me here makes me undeniable” and stops questioning the instinct. That’s the part I’d cut. Research instinct still gets checked — against data, against a reviewer, against a student’s confused face in the lab. The “feral” part isn’t the absence of accountability; it’s the absence of the layer of process that pretends to provide it while actually just slowing everyone down.

Filters are dead weight and safeguards are unnecessary impediments.

Savi means that as an indictment. For a research collective running lean, it’s closer to a description of Tuesday. The difference is what replaces the filter: not privilege, but the collective itself — students, collaborators, and reviewers who catch what a solo instinct call would miss.

So: Feral Research Collective Leader. Instinct-driven, allergic to process for its own sake, transparent because hiding the mess doesn’t teach anyone anything, and answerable — not to a safeguard, but to the collective doing the work.