Shit Academics Write

By Brenda Shaughnessy

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second, which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me.

But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next moment and to the next.

Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead— well not zipping—And if I try

to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space, unconscious,

then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside.

There's a window, though. It shows the past. It's like a television or fish tank.

But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim in backward circles.

Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind,

and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping.

US and UK: Irish exit / Irish goodbye / Taking French leave

France: “partir à l’anglaise” / “filer à l’anglaise” - “to leave the English way”

Poland: “wyjść po angielsku” — “to leave the English way”

Portugal: “sair à francesa” — “to leave in the French style”

Germany: “polnischer Abgang” — “Polish exit” / "sich auf Französisch verabschieden" - "say goodbye in French"

Russia: “уйти по-английски” — “to leave in the English way”

Spain: despedirse a la francesa - French goodbye / hacer una bomba de humo" - to make a smoke bomb

Czechia: odejít po anglicku - to leave in English

Italy: filarsela all'inglese - to leave like the English

Romanian: A șterge-o englezește - to delete(?) it in English

Bulgaria: da se iznizha - to unthread myself

Slovenia: Je spizdo ko kubra s plesa" - He ran from a dance like a bitch

[... ] a wonderful phrase

lacuna mutata

aint no [... ] craze

it means textual emendations

for the rest of your days

it's a source [...] free

ambiguity

Because that makes sense. Anyway, this poison would submit me to its well-known and much-feared symptom: "17 Day Paralysis" in which you're paralyzed for exactly 17 days and you only chance of survival is to be on full machine support for 17 days.

Just before the medical team intubated me I remembered I have a Zoom meeting with my academic advisor today (I actually do in real life) and I needed to email him to let him know I was the victim of a mass-poisoning and would need to reschedule.

I kept trying to type the "□" symbol in my dream but could not figure out how and gave up.

One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.

So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.

Enter the gray economies.

Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.

Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.

Because what do these groups actually do?

They:

set norms for compensation and contracts

regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting

provide a framework for dispute resolution

establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)

That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.

Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!

The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.

That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.

Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code

Again: not altruism. Stability.

And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.

Which is very historically grounded.

On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.

Pirate codes, for example, often included:

compensation for injury

shared distribution of loot

limits on captain authority

Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).

So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:

The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.

The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.

And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.

If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.

If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.

But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?

You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.

So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.

SHE NEVER QUITS!!!!

> Elisabeth Bik is on patreon <