i don't know that any service has enjoyed an enshittification arc quite as steep as meetup.com, which briefly seemed like a revolutionary and essential utility and now seems like a scammy, spammy backwater. 1/

i'm sorry for it too, because in its heyday i think it genuinely did lubricate and encourage in-person civil society. nothing as convenient and effective has emerged to supersede it. /fin

i live in Florida, though probably not for all that much longer. i have such mixed feelings about stuff like this. 1/

the humans here are great people, like everywhere, even most of the Trump voters (most of whom, in my experience, tend to be apolitical and cynical about everyone, Ds/Harris just tweaked their stereotyped cynicism about stereotypical politicians a bit more than Trump/Rs did). 2/

at a personal level, i don’t wish any ill on the poly sci dept at FSU or on anybody else except the actual perpetrators of the crimes we are suffering under. 3/

but at a political level, i don’t want FSU, my alma mater New College, or the economy broadly in Florida to thrive under present (and continually worsening) policy and leadership. 4/

it may or may not be the case that you can do profoundly stupid, evil fascism and muddle through with a decent economy, for-the-most-part fine universities, etc. 5/

but i would rather it not be the case. 6/

i would rather changing the policy environment to shut up and threaten gender minorities, to round up even people who immigrated lawfully into camps while their status is resolved or changed beneath them, to elevate cronies to all positions of authority and overpay them, should have a cost. 7/

so i kind of want to root, at a personal level, for the spunky holdouts in various FSU departments, doing great work in obscurity, teaching great kids who are not remotely at fault for what’s going on. 8/

but i myself am going to vote with my feet, even though in many respects i still and will always love Florida. 9/

though @seandehrlich.bsky.social’s points about the professional costs of avoiding red states are correct at a personal level, i’d advise young academics to think about accepting those costs, to effectively boycott places under unusually fascist government, for the greater good. 10/

(of course the US as a whole is under fascist government now. the implications of that are left as an exercise to the reader.) 11/

i’m not going to hold it against academics and professionals who do have options but choose to stay and do the best work they can, just as i don’t hold ordinary, great-people, apolitical-ish Trump voters personally responsible for our fascism. 12/

but i do think the positions of those groups are perhaps uncomfortably similar. 13/

perhaps another anology would be to X. people still there tell me their feed, with their follows and blocks, is pretty well tuned to their interests, and they don’t see much ragebait or fascism. it’s just where their friends and professional communities are. 14/

and maybe so! at a personal and professional level level, X was certainly still the best place for me when I made my choice to leave it. neither Mastodon nor BlueSky has come close to replacing what Twitter once was for me. 15/

but we left anyway. and i think it has mattered. what is left of X is far less than what Twitter was, or what X would be if we were still there. boycotting the Nazi bar is not only moral vanity. it does have some effect. /fin