Spoiler alert: That job security doesn’t exist anymore. A professor who isn’t winning grants, even if tenured, is functionally dead. Research doesn’t matter except as PR and teaching definitely doesn’t matter; the ability to raise grants is the singular determinant of an academic’s career.
Consequently, most academics despise university overhead because it reduces the number of grants to go around and they get nothing for it.
That does not, of course, mean they support Trump or Musk. Most do not.
As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.
My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.
The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
Some people get fired for making their bosses look bad. He screwed up by making them look good.
The way I explain it to my friends who only read contemporary literary fiction is that fantasy is what we’ve been doing as storytellers for thousands of years, which means there’s a lot of implicit knowledge in the craft when done at the highest levels. I also enjoy literary fiction for the writing and the sheer talent it takes to make ordinary, believable events nearly fantastic—or at least compelling—but it’s not either/ or and the idea that there’s some hierarchy of genres is hogwash.
LLMs are silent failure machines. They are useful in their place, but when I hear about bosses replacing human labor with “AI” I am fairly confident they are going to get what they deserve: catastrophe.
I’ve been following the technology economy since the 1990s, and I’ve always had a fascination with online communities like this one, where I’ve been a reader for more than ten years.One of my colleagues convinced me to go through the blog posts of someone who, although overall obscure, used to be prolific here. I hadn’t heard his name for a while, and when I learned that he had written a novel,...
Also, age makes you better at doing jobs but worse at getting them. You do not want to be on the open labor market after 50, especially if you’re specialized and probably (possibly undiagnosed) neurodivergent.
We’ve put a lot of private-sector expectations on people, but we sure don’t pay like the private sector.
A hobby project to keep current isn’t a bad idea, though.
The tenure system is necessary for it to function, because wages are so low relative to skill level and the job market is so unreliable, but it also makes things worse because the old hands mostly don’t fight evil changes (and there have been tons of evil changes recently) of only the young will be affected.
Of course, the current state of the US government and the rising anti intellectualism don’t help.
I have three. No regrets, but I didn’t do it to give my life meaning. They are their own people and I am responsible for giving my life meaning, no one else.
At some point, you are back with yourself and own thoughts. This is neither good nor bad. It simply is.
Unrelatedly, I just finished reading the semipublished novel of a member of our community, who I believe is in his late 40s and who could probably never get through today’s traditional publishing because he is clearly autistic. I had low expectations, but it’s shockingly good. As in, if it had the right people behind it, it would easily be one of the top books in a given year. And I think the books written by people of his age are slightly different from those written at mine, and of course both perspectives are radically different from a Gen Z 20-year-old’s.
When you read young novelists, you get the first draft of a new generation’s perspective. I barely understand Millennials and Gen Z is still opaque to me because so few authors of real talent have bubbled up. They exist for sure, but nepo kids get exposure first so I have really hard to find the good ones.
As they age, writers get better at writing. But writing is not the sole determinant of good fiction and it is even less correlated to relevance. Old writers tend to produce books that are technically fantastic and that critics and career writers recognize as superlative in craft, and often quite creative contrary to stereotype because these people don’t stop learning, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be relevant to any current conversation. Young authors tend to produce work that is more jagged and less technically accomplished, but extremely relevant to the time. Ellis is a prime example: he wrote the quintessential novel of the Reagan Era—it’s shocking and disgusting and not brilliantly written, but well-written enough.
That said, “bad sentences” are one of those issues that writers agonize about but the fact is that editors will catch them if they’re truly awful. It also doesn’t have much to do with age, because old writers who understand grammar extremely well also make mistakes, which 95 percent of the time are typos. Either they are removed by the proofreader or they become part of the history.
At that level, they’re in the club and guaranteed to advance as long as they don’t make enemies and get kicked out of the club (which is rare, but happens, and usually means they spend a year or so finding another club.) So while some of them do work long hours, they don’t have to. They’ve already been judged to be in the in-crowd and could work 10 hours per week from wherever they want, and they’d still make every promotion.
So why do they work so much, and why do they go to the office? Because most of those guys (a) mutually dislike their families, (b) have psychological disorders, and (c) have office affairs. To psychopaths, 70 hours per week sunk into high-stakes office politics is fun.
Land use is a complex topic, but you’re basically right. Everything good—not just land but social opportunities—is spoken-for and what we’re seeing in South Korea and Japan is probably the best solution: peaceful natural attrition and non-replacement of capital’s reserve army that is unwanted labor.
The difference is that medieval peasants knew their manorial lords had bigger houses and ate more meat, but the visible local differences were small and religion could operate (for worse or better) as a stabilizing force. People tolerated a caste system because they were information poor.
There’s no reason today, though, for people to put up with the kind of inequality that is not only extreme and senseless but constantly being shoved in their faces via social media. The only way the rich stay out of the guillotines is by creating new, weird cultural spectacles like litter boxes in schools (not even a real thing) for “furry kids.”
That said, AI is less than 2 percent of what has enshittified the internet. It’s a factor, but corporatization and algorithmic optimization have already done plenty of damage even without LLMs in the mix.
No one wants (and I don’t think anyone should want) bipartisanship, not really. Bipartisanship means the rich get everything they want—efficiently. It means the meetings of the club we aren’t in happen on time and no one ends up with a black eye. That’s also an unacceptable outcome. Of course, it can be argued that the outcome we are getting is basically the same thing, but with cheap depressing entertainment and widespread governmental dysfunction.
Of course, anyone who thinks voting for any of these right-wing figures will end oligarchy is delusional. Their charisma comes from the fact that, because they hate basically everyone, they also incidentally hate many of the other oligarchs. But nothing good happens when people vote for hate, and none of these pricks will ever end oligarchy since they are all part of it. The Nazis truly did present themselves as somewhat socialist (it was in the name) in the early 1920s to gain their first followers, but as soon as they were in power, they realized they had more to gain by siding with the industrialists and against labor, which is of course what they did.
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
And yet it’s causing massive disruption. The bosses have such a hardon for layoffs that they’re doing this on the slim chance that it might work for them. Having to hire programmers back in a panic is, as they see it, future someone else’s problem.