solarpunk memes

I remember when I was in college in the early 2000's, one of my close friends found work under the table writing original research papers for students at more prestigious universities. That way, the rich kids could plagiarize a paper but since it was wholly original and had never been seen anywhere else, they couldn't get caught for plagiarism. It helped my friend out a lot when he was in a tight spot trying to get his Masters degree, but... I've thought about it a lot over the years and the long-term impacts.

I think this is one of the long-term impacts. People who have credentials, but credentials essentially mean nothing because a lot of the "work" they did to get those credentials was paid-for or faked. This has lead to a world where the people "running the show" as it were are deeply uneducated while the people doing the actual labor and thought who are often getting underpaid are wildly more educated than the people they have to suffer under working for.

The wealthy have become so privileged that they don't even need to know the details of how anything actually works and now they are going to make all of us suffer because they don't believe the evidence that would have been presented to them at some point if they had actually gotten a real education.