JOHN CARTER's POSTCARDS FROM BARSOOM 'Of Science and Shitposting' A retrospective review of the second year of Postcards From Barsoom, and thoughts on the strange path that brought me here'

The writing by this author continues to be in a league of its own, to me matched only in content and style by Dr. Naomi Wolf; I share Carter's recent posting for it is such a joy to read, exhilarating

Apr 13, 2024

Of Science and Shitposting - by John Carter (substack.com)

The postcards, photos, drawings remain unmatched.

Start here:

‘When I started writing Postcards From Barsoom two years ago¹, I was in a pretty different place in my life.

At the time I was still thoroughly immersed in my career as an academic scientist, something I’d devoted over a decade of my life to at that point. There was a lot to enjoy about that vocation.

The money was finally starting to be decent, which was a first for me.

The professional freedom offered by that life was wonderful. I hadn’t had a boss in any meaningful sense since I was a master’s student; by the time I was into my PhD, I’d matured enough that my doctoral supervisor could check in on me every week or, in the last couple years, every month or so. He wasn’t so much telling me what to do as seeing what I’d done, giving a few suggestions, and letting me take it from there. That’s nothing to turn your nose up at, at least if you’re wired the way I am and absolutely hate having people tell you what to do with the irreplaceable moments of your short mortal existence.

Beyond that, there was the sense of discovery. Our world is fully mapped at this point. There are no blank spots in the parts that humans can easily get to. Everything is owned space; everything has been seen; everything has been done. There are no explorers anymore, only the accursed tourist. But in that line of work I really was seeing things that no human eye had ever beheld before, or seeing them in a way in which no one had previously looked at them, and using this to understand things about them, and therefore about the world, that no human mind had yet grasped. Oh, none of it was major, nothing earthshaking that would grab hold of the imagination of the masses – these were all footnotes in the grand scientific enterprise, of no interest to anyone outside of my tiny international collaboration. But that matters less than you might think when you’re working at the coalface of the unknown.

And yet, all was not well.

You’ve heard it all from me before, at this point. The rot of Didn’t Earn It, Demoralizing, Expropriating, and Infiltrating its way through our Demented and Enervated Institutions. That was the first thing I wrote about, and I’ve returned to the subject of the DIEing academy on several occasions since that inaugural post. When you’re an early-career scientist working postdoctoral contracts, this stuff isn’t theoretical – it gets shoved in your face, every day. It was particularly disheartening when I was trying to find a job at the next career stage up, as a tenure-track professor, and being told I had to compromise my integrity and compose a diversity statement first ... with the knowledge that in all likelihood I’d be nevertheless be passed over in favour of the diversity to which I had written the humiliating paean. For the record, I simply refused to do this. That limited my options to the few institutions that didn’t demand obeisance².

Then there was all the COVID stuff – the lockdowns, working from home for weeks that turned into months that turned into years, watching my colleagues lose their collective minds, fighting with the university to try and keep my paycheck while also keeping the needle of eviljuice out of my arm. You know the drill.

I wasn’t in an emotionally good place when I started writing this. To the contrary, I was full of wrath, frustration, and anxiety. And that came out, I am sure, in the writing ... indeed a large part of the reason I put myself out there was to scream that emotional volcano out into the void, to finally express all those things that had been bottled up for so long. I didn’t care that much if anyone listened.

As it turned out, there were people who listened. There are far, far more of you than I ever would have thought. And you have no idea how grateful I am for that.
Writing on Substack has been lifechanging,, in numerous ways, all of them positive. A few years ago it would never have occurred to me that I could get paid for writing, well, whatever I want to write about, that there would be people out there who would actually give me money because they enjoyed what I write. That’s simply amazing. Every single one of you that has contributed has my deepest appreciation and gratitude. And yes, that includes those of you reading this who, for one reason or another, chose to withdraw your financial support – whatever your reasons, the fact that you supported me at all with your hard-earned money is incredibly meaningful.
Then there’s the emotional support. I’ve been a writer since I was a kid – I read a Larry Niven autobiography when I was in grade school, and decided then and there that I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I’m the only person I know who dropped out of a lit program to study theoretical physics instead (usually people switch majors in the other direction), and I’m also the only person I know who majored in theoretical physics specifically because he thought it would make him a better science fiction writer³.
People have always told me that I write well, although I don’t really think my prose is anything particularly special ... no one is as acutely aware of their shortcomings as a writer, as the writer himself. With the exception of a brief foray into the world of spoken word poetry, however, I never really put myself out there. After my undergrad I wrote a couple of novels⁴, which I never submitted. In retrospect it’s probably for the best: by the time I was ready to start writing in earnest, the publishing world had gotten eaten by Woke, as evidenced by the whole Sad Puppies fiasco⁵. I had no real idea this was happening at the time, having drifted away from science fiction as the offerings on the shelves of the bookstores had already become rapidly less appealing by the late oughts. The last decade or two in scifi has been something of an interregnum. And, well, not just in sci-fi; the first part of the 21^st century has been a cultural dark age in general.
The point that I’m getting around to stating, in my usual long-winded fashion, is that having such a remarkable number of you praising my writing has meant a lot to me. It has been a vast boost in confidence, giving me the motivation to stretch my capabilities, tackling larger projects that require deeper and longer treatment, and experimenting with different writing styles.
Thank you for that.
I’ve also met a wide range of impressive and fascinating people thanks to this blog. Some of them I’ve been reading for many years, and having them reach out to compliment my writing, knowing that I have some small measure of their respect, has been quite the experience. Others I discovered here as they were building up their own audiences, and they have become close friends and comrades. Still others got their start in my comments section, or have told me that they were inspired to write because of this blog. It’s very difficult for me to think of something more humbling, as a writer, than that, especially when you’re quite certain that some of them are better writers than you are.
There were other sources of discontent with the academic life, beyond the contextual problems of ideology and medical tyranny, predicaments that were deeper and more systemic. A few days ago, I came across this video by the science YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder: My dream died, and now I'm here. I’ve been vaguely aware of Hossenfelder for a few years; having first being introduced to her by a very feminist undergraduate student with a Future Is Female sticker on her laptop, I wrote Hossenfelder off as probably another lame Woman In Science with boringly conventional takes on both science and gender politics. I may have been a bit hasty in that evaluation: while Hossenfelder is certainly some variety of feminist, she’s explicitly opposed to quotas or other systems that seek to artificially increase representation in science. That’s not really the point of her video, however, which is a brutally honest retrospective on her own scientific career, one that she says she almost didn’t post, but which I am glad that she did.
Hossenfelder sees quite clearly the structural problems in academic science. She describes how most of the scientific enterprise has devolved into an elaborate and cynical combination of parlour game and financial scam. Principal Investigators get grants, in order for the bloated university administrations to rake off their overhead surcharges. In order to get grants, papers must be published. Since the PIs spend much of their time either writing grant proposals or schmoozing with the other PIs who may well end up on the committees that decide whether or not their proposals are approved, the PIs need postdocs and doctoral students to write the papers. It doesn’t matter if the papers are true, or interesting, or useful. It doesn’t matter if they advance human understanding. It doesn’t matter if they represent significant advances with profound real-world applications. All that matters is that they pass peer review, get a few citations, and can be added to the PI’s publication list.
This, I think, was really at the root of my disquiet when I started Postcards From Barsoom. I’m something of an idealist, but by that point in my career I was starting to realize what life as professor would actually be, and the foundational dishonesty of what academic science had become elicited nothing but a great weariness and nausea within me. I was looking at a life of writing grant proposals, of sitting on proposal review committees, of travelling to conferences to hear the same old talks about the same timid, marginal, impossibly narrow ‘progress’, and of grooming students to go down the same ultimately meaningless path. All in service of the sordid imperative that the mediocrities in admin be kept floating in the unearned luxury of their warm ocean of overhead cash.
It was demoralizing, and I think my soul had sickened as a result.
There was this nagging sense that I wasn’t made for this. That life was supposed to be more than this. That I was off track.
And you, my wonderful readers, saved me from that.

Because of you, I’ve largely been able to put that behind me.
Because of you, I can see the possibility opening up before me of a life in which I never have to worry about grant committees or peer review or diversity statements or vaccine mandates or sensitivity training or any of that nonsense ever again.
A year ago, I wrote Isekai, as the one-year retrospective on the highlights of the blog to date, doubling as a handy one-stop shop for new readers to find my best work: