it's a real feeling, to watch people you admire - entire crews of them - get fucked again and again by parasitic industries and self-important executives whose pockets are as deep as they themselves are shallow
the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise
you're not a pedagogue, you're not a scholar: you're a glorified scantron tasked with ensuring student retention and who can get fired because some vindictive little shit decided to take the C+ you gave them on a baldly racist paper to management or Campus Reform
you're not a journalist, you're not a critic: you're a producer who's on quota to drop daily SEO-optimized content as frequently as a pigeon shits. and if you or someone on the masthead pissed off some VC asshole? goodbye, fuck you
no one I know went into journalism or academia to get rich. nobody. but this is a different thing from yoking yourself to a "career" where all you make is debt and agita. and it's not like you get less tired or damaged as it goes on.
I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.
but OC it has nothing to do with the choices or metaphorical fortunes of workers as individuals - it's the whims and literal fortunes of owners and management, and market forces that mean universities are hedge funds with a sideline in teaching, publications ad spreads with words
I think a lot these days about what oceanologists call "whale falls." you see, when a whale dies, its enormous corpse slowly drifts to the bottom of the ocean, dropping into darker and deeper waters till finally it comes to rest on the ocean floor.
a whale can weigh tons upon tons. the amount of carbon and nutrients bound up in a single corpse can be more than a given expanse of ocean bottom can see in hundreds of year. even before it finishes settling, creatures start to pick at it.
in those cold temperatures, under that kind of pressure, decomposition is slowed. the whale sits there, and as it does, for years - literally years - a micro-ecosystem of scavengers and bottom dwellers blossoms into being around it.
an entire grotesque bestiary emerges. hagfish with bugging eyes and needle teeth, blind eels, crabs of every shape and size, clams, "zombie worms," more. teeming in the cold darkness they crawl all over the corpse, feeding on it, and on one another.
eventually all that's left are bones, picked clean, riddled with holes from tiny invertebrates. a skeleton in the pitch-dark, gleaming white for anything that could have eyes to see it. but there's no light down there and nothing passes by anymore anyway because the food is gone.
you don't need me to unpack this metaphor much. I'll just say: in the ocean, at least, the process sustains life, feeding carbon back into the system overall. or at least it would or should. but in metaphor and in fact there are fewer whales every day.
all right. I gotta sign off for a while. I'm overwhelmed and I don't remember the last time I felt this tired. solidarity and love to all you comrades - teachers, educators, journos, writers, editors, more - amid this grim, grinding shit.
