@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

Zeb_Larson

@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us

Hello! I'm a former #academic who still considers himself a #historian. While I've left #academia behind, I still work as a #writer, mostly of essays and history pieces. Some of my pieces can be found in Jacobin, Teen Vogue, Smithsonian, and Belt. My PhD is in #history, and I studied the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. Today, I write about a variety of topics. When I can, I listen to #music and play #games.

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inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

This place can be pretty special sometimes (always)

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@inquiline Moreso than other corners of the internet, people try to fight with me here over really niche bullshit, or the specific wording of my posts. The latter feels like maybe a gap between different language speakers, but the former…

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@inquiline somebody told me that Mastodon has no trolls but a lot of VERY earnest assholes, and it explains a lot. And I’ll be honest, while I deal with far fewer out and out trolls here, I deal with more rude people who aren’t doing it as a gimmick.

Anyway, I’m sorry that happened. It’s exhausting.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@inquiline Yes! In some ways, this place feels like stepping into a LAN party in 2005. It can be both pleasantly familiar, but also insufferable.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@inquiline The whole bit about avoiding bad hardware is hysterical.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

We’re witnessing the conservative migration from “woke” to “DEI” as their new N-word.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

People demanding we respect Lieberman’s memory are certainly managing to embody his spirit of being an unlikable turd who nobody wants to hear from.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

Oof, too true to academic life. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/class-is-canceled-until-further-notice-while-i-do-my-job

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

There was a thread here a while ago about how all unsolicited advice is criticism, and people predictably melted down over it (I suppose because they love offering unsolicited advice).

Here’s the thing: it’s not inherently bad to offer criticism — but it’s also not something you should do casually. It had better be important, or about something you feel really strongly about. In so doing, I accept the chance that they will disagree strongly. (It is worth pointing out that this never comes up).

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

The sad reality that I come back from vacation less equipped to deal with people’s bullshit. The mental calluses fall off and then it’s fresh and irritating anew.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

NBC offering Ronna McDaniel an analyst position is perhaps the clearest proof you could summon that mainstream institutions have no idea how to understand our current historical moment. Thinking that they'll actually protect us is a fantasy.

Zeb_Larson, to history
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

A former cooperante recently reached out to me about an oral project.

Cooperantes are people who volunteered to work in Mozambique and Angola when the Portuguese left in 1975. Basically all of the trained civil servants and others left with them, and as colonizers they never bothered to train anybody around them. It jumpstarted a lot of people's work in development spaces; it also created long-term links for people in Southern Africa.

(1)

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

I would love to be able to take this on. The stories need to be recorded, and it was a history I at least knew in grad school. Hell, I wanted to write about it at the time -- I had some article ideas, one dealing with ex-cooperantes who tried to lobby against U.S. support for UNITA in Angola. (Who helped UNITA in this country? Paul Manafort -- that Paul Manafort).

But I also need to find a way to balance it against the fact that I'm no longer an academic.

(2)

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

Simply put, I do not have enough bandwidth to do this the way I'd like to do it (probably making a glossy coffee table book and making it a pictorial history). I have no institutional funding. My time is split between work, my family, the computer book I'm desperately trying to finish, my own dissertation which I still want to publish, and then all the other freelance writing I do.

What I really need are grad students who could use it for their research and a university to archive it.

(3)

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

And this is one of the limits of independent scholarship -- we actually have NO INFRASTRUCTURE in place to support being an independent scholar. If you do it (and I don't really do it), you do it like a TT scholar but without any of those supports. Unless you're independently wealthy, it ain't happening. But even if you are, it still imagines a single author/lone genius model for producing scholarship, and that's not an effective way to work.

(4)

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

I come back to this piece again and again because I think it gets at so many Americans’ blind spots about dictatorship. There’s an implicit faith that “it can’t happen here” because people would find it to be intolerable, but for a lot of us (those who tend to be more privileged) it would be tolerable. There were white Republicans in the South during Jim Crow: they were gerrymandered into meaninglessness and grumbled about their lack of power, but they got by fine.

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/9/14207302/authoritarian-states-boring-tolerable-fascism-trump

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

That isn’t to minimize the consequences of this country’s authoritarian turn; rather, I’m all the more frightened because I think people will accept it because before and after (for them personally) will not look all that different. They’ll express sympathy for everybody who is being oppressed, vote in elections that are basically rigged, and grumble about how things never change. Admit it, that already sounds pretty familiar.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

And people are so indoctrinated into this belief that US is democracy is structurally superior and infallible that they’ll perversely end up defending that system. It will be impossible for some to admit that it’s completely failed.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

I’m really proud of two things I wrote last year, and one of them was a very straightforward attempt to troll the Cato Institute. It succeeded, and a bunch of car dorks were furious on Twitter.

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

I had to explain postdocs to another colleague and once again, there was no way to do it without everything about academia sounding truly bonkers

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@grimalkina I remember a senior historian years ago talking about how we were entering the “golden age of the humanities postdoc” as if that was in any way, shape, or form a good thing. It was almost a bolt from the blue, a perfect piece of evidence showing that the gatekeepers of the field have no idea how things actually or how dysfunctional they are. Indeed, they don’t even really understand the field at all.

Zeb_Larson, to random
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

Help hold me accountable, friends of Mastodon: I swear that I’m not doing anymore career conference panels. It doesn’t matter if the conference is free (because not having to pay to donate my time isn’t actually a perk of any kind). It doesn’t matter if I like the people organizing it. It especially doesn’t matter if they flatter me. No more. 2024 is the year I rid myself of this needless obligation.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@inquiline @seachanger These are salient points, and a good reminder that perspective matters here a lot. I never had a great conference experience (even the one where I got legitimately useful feedback), but I was always a grad student or an adjunct. They were expensive and a good reminder of my own career precarity. Had I gotten a TT job? Maybe I would have been fonder of them.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@inquiline @seachanger Oh it’s fine, it’s a good reminder that these don’t have to be all bad, and what makes them bad is also wrapped up closely in what’s hurting the profession as a whole.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@seachanger @inquiline It’s my goal to never attend a software conference for precisely this reason. My team discussed it for a hot minute and I think I actually threatened to shoot one of my toes off if they went through with it.

jordinn, to random
@jordinn@zirk.us avatar

Left hand: Wow, I seriously applaud people setting limits on the number of interviews they're willing to endure for a single position in tech

Right hand: You should see what happens to ministers and academics lol lmao

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@jordinn The most fascinating part of all is when an academic job search fails. A job search at U of Toronto-Scarborough failed the last year I was on the market because despite getting 250 applications, they “couldn’t find a good match based on the skill sets of the applicants.”

I mean, tech has dumb stuff: I’ve done a six-hour kata, which was good learning but a huge waste of time.

Zeb_Larson,
@Zeb_Larson@zirk.us avatar

@Cassandra @jordinn Tech does this; it appropriates stuff like “scrum.” Kata in this instance is closer to its original usage, which is supposed to be a practice or routine but for coding. Increasingly though it’s also a technical exercise as part of a hiring process.

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