Totalitarianism no longer needs a tyrant — it only needs an API

Attention Conservation Notice. A thousand or so words for anyone who’s ever suspected the system is not just broken but has achieved a state of sentient, malevolent stupidity.

There’s a particular smell to a university staff meeting where a soul goes to die. It’s a mix of stale coffee, low-grade anxiety, and the faint, metallic tang of a PowerPoint presentation that has achieved a state of pure, weaponized boredom. It’s the scent of proceduralism, of good ideas being ground into a fine, gray dust by the relentless machinery of governance. For years, we in the faculty have breathed this air, treating the slow suffocation as a quirky, unavoidable feature of academic life. But every now and then, a moment of such sublime, soul-crushing absurdity breaks through the haze that you can’t ignore it.

Kafka meets two-factor authentication

It’s 10 p.m. I’m sitting at my dinner table, clearing my inbox because, as we all know, the modern academic workday is a gas that expands to fill all available containers. My mission tonight: to wrestle with a digital portal called “ResearchMaster.” I need to fill out a “My Proposal” for a grant that I only intend to apply for. This isn’t the application itself, mind you. This is the application for permission to think about applying, a…