Yes. Academia historically represented a compromise: lower pay than in the private sector in return for more intangible benefits like the satisfaction of teaching and the freedom to pursue scholarly questions restricted only by the demands of the scholarship itself. Now, increasingly, it isn’t a compromise; it’s just exploitation and endless conversations about Flair with people cosplaying business leaders.

I (US prof) would 100% take a job at a Canadian university, even if we weren’t sliding headlong into ur-fascism. The corporatization, anti-labor policies, constant erosion of faculty autonomy in how and what to teach, and the general aggressive conversion of US higher ed into a collection of anti-inrellectual authoritarian hierarchies has turned what used to be a respected and satisfying (if difficult, underpaid, and frequently organizarionally insane) profession I into a Kafkaesque parody of Office Space.

I loved my job for years. I fucking hate it now, and there are hundreds of thousands of us in this situation.

100%. The mechanism is (I think) this: legally, there’s nobody to prosecute or sue, now.

In the early 2000s some of us who were Way Too Online learned this lesson: A major pillar of internet security, a company whose entire reason for existing was to protect its customers’ personal information, went bankrupt and sold all its customer data to the highest (or possibly just first) bidder.

No matter how “trustworthy” the company, no matter what their Terms and Conditions say, no matter how “solid” their “values,” everyone sells your data when they go bankrupt.

(And most of them will do it long before then)

Does this mean kernels will be less stable? Big changes all at once seem to imply that, generally.

Oh, has he had a change of heart? A few months ago he was being dragged on mastodon for telling everyone to stop complaining about AI.