Looking up

Just one year ago, around this late spring period, he would have been sitting around at an outside coffee table in the sun chatting with colleagues about the never-ending cuts in research budgets, hiring committees, a notable new paper on climate projections for the end of the decade, wealth inequality, or simply about a recent hike in the mountain made memorable by the appearance of a bear at close range. But now suddenly felt different.

There had been this dreaded election, and it had not ended well as he and his friends had feared. A few weeks after her plebiscite, right in the middle of the first heat wave of the year, the new president had taken executive orders to shut down social and environmental research labs and facilities. His was one of them, and the new governement was now offering financial packages for academics agreeing to leave their position. Not that this was unexpected. In the US, The Trump administration had provided a blueprint for just that merely 3 years before. Still, it was now the new reality here too.

Several of his long-time academic friends had quickly accepted these packages. After all, zealous neoliberal university administrators had already been hard-working for several years to make university teachers feel like a burden to their institutions and to replace them by AIs to save (or make more ?) money out of tuition fees. Doing research and publishing papers was increasingly becoming meaningless anyways, in the ongoing, exponentially increasing stream of AI-generated slop. The weekly deliberate humiliating announcements of new seemingly high-profile, important research results that Big Tech AI companies had now been making for almost a year had achieved their goal of sucking out the drive and joy of working on any problem at all.

Young precarious researchers had been starting to quit in droves before ending their PhD over the last months already. At the same time, every thought and effort invested in making the world a slightly better place was seemingly dwarfed by never-ending announcements of new political decisions and government actions doing the exact opposite, actively undermining democracy, the very notion of society, and destroying the environment. It didn’t make sense to stay and resist within the system anymore because the system itself was irreversibly turning into a degenerate AI dystopia fed by an army of sad collaborating academic clowns delegating their brain to AI agents. It was perfectly understandable that everyone with a remaining sense of self-respect and moral compass would seize the opportunity to leave rather than be part of the new authoritarian shitshow.

For a moment, blinded by a progressive education and the philosophy of enlightenment engrained at school in his mind since his young age, he and his friends had thought that ideas, the collective endeavour of research, work and ethics could still make a little difference to the world and the planet in the twenty-first century. But there was almost nothing left of fulfilling that hope within what remained of their professional lives, and nothing he and his friends could do now. Their thoughts had officially become undesirable to a majority of society, their scientific and human aspirations would perhaps soon be listed as terrorist motives, and their technical skills were under increasing threat of soon being made redundant by a new central generative AI on which the previous minister for research and higher-education, in partnership with the interior minister and with the military, had spent half of the last national research budget as a last, tragic act of self-harm. Nobody cared anymore, except for their own short-term security.

Sure, he and his friends would continue to think and create in secret for just the sake of that. Guerilla research is a thing. Still, it’s hard to think about the broader world when looking for new means of subsistence in an hostile society. And when the prospect of the future of your children, and of an actual civil war and guerilla, one with real guns, haunts you all day.