Time to move on
tl;dr: I handed in my resignation back in early July and will be leaving my job - and the UK - at the end of October to go on a sabbatical.
This could have been a long and rambling post about all the problems with academia and/or the tech industry, but at the end of the day Lucidity’s Quitting My Job For The Way Of Pain already made most of the aspects in a more fun way than I could hope to deliver them, so I’ll try to keep it short.
Firstly, I strongly sympathize with Lucidity’s points about beliefs and standing up for them. Wanting to sleep well and being able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning is also quite important for me, something which had become harder and harder in the last months. For 10+ years, most of my research and work has focused on making science more open & accessible, particularly to people and communities working outside traditional institutions - from data and results to the actual process of creating knowledge. Which is to say, I have a very strong belief that this work has an explicit activist, political angle to it.
A lot of this work is already at odds with much of how institutional science operates generally, but particularly in academia under austerity - where the death cult of metrics reigns supreme. At best, this type of work that doesn’t make any quantitative metrics (ideally measured in $/₤/€) go up, can feel “useless” and at permanent risk of being made redundant, with all the lack of psychological safety that comes with that. At worst, and a lot more cynically, it can act as a fig-leaf by providing an open/engagement-washing example to point at.
All of this made it hard not to feel that the best case is just the moral injury of having a bullshit job, as the alternative interpretation is being complicit or even aiding a system that one considers likely to be harmful. In particular, when being embedded in and confronted with an academic environment that is full of belief in techno-utopian “solutions” - those that one might find highly problematic and that would need a very different vision to deliver for society. Or in the words of Robyn Speer - maintainer of wordfreq: “I don’t want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI”.
Beyond not wanting to have to follow orders in a larger academic system I do not want to support (and already having first-hand experience with the burnout that can cause), the other big reason for leaving is the United Kingdom itself. The impact of years of austerity are obviously not limited to academia. Instead, the results of the resulting neoliberal hellscape can be felt everywhere and anywhere: Social services, healthcare, cost of living, crumbling infrastructure, all the fall-out of Brexit, etc… And now the new (allegedly “left”) government continues to double down on the existing policies, including letting millions freeze in the upcoming winter and copying the immigration policies of the fascists in Italy.
All of that doesn’t make it appealing to stay in the UK for the long-term - that’s even before considering the (ridiculously large) monetary and mental cost of the right to live being tied to a visa. Especially not if one has the big privilege of a European Passport (even if Germany is ripping down Schengen as I type this…)
Which is to say: It’s time to move on. What’s next? To stay with Tom Petty, “What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing”. Which is equal parts exciting – and terrifying. For now, the plan is to take the next few months to think about where I want to dedicate my efforts to next, while also using my freed-up time for some applied field research on digital commons and other cooperatively, worker-run knowledge work.
