# If Academia Worked Like Music

2024-07-06

You are an associate professor at the Fakeland University of Common
Knowledge (FUCK). After years of hard work with your best friends Ethan
and Albert (they go by Et and Al), you have 12 manuscripts you call
"demos".

You rent a lab space, larger and more professional than the one in your
basement. The staff help you with cameras and stuff.

After a two-week-long lab session, you take everything to your producer
Oliver Leaf, who has every tool imaginable for LaTeX typesetting. He has
the ability to get Nature to accept a CVS receipt.

Over the duration of three months you sit together with Et, Al and Oliver
to discuss what looks best in print. Sometimes it feels like torture. You
commission artist Tik Zeichner to create a striking book cover.

At the printing press, the .tex files are compiled to .pdf, printed out,
and bound into a hardcover. You and your friends each take a copy and
shoot some promotional photos.

For the paper videos, you and Et Al do experiments in the most random
places: on a frozen lake, in bed, on top of a skyscraper, etc. Contrary to
what the video shows, the blowtorch doesn't actually melt quartz glass. At
the end you smash a few Erlenmeyer flasks in slomo just cause you can.

The opening paper is released along with its paper video. It's a smash hit
(pun intended), although you had to cut the discussion entirely for the
radio mix. One month later, you drop a more opinionated paper. It sparks
controversy among your fanbase, which is needed for hype.

The marketing team is working hard to plaster every billboard in every
city with your abstract. Soon it becomes impossible to end a conversation
without mentioning your name.

On the day the book drops, you announce a world tour, which would be quite
accurate if North America and Europe were the only two continents. But
hey, Mexico technically counts as "Latin America" right?

You show up at a surprise book signing party at a parking lot, before the
police show up and cancel it. Your 20,000 fans are disappointed and soon
riot. You narrowly escape.

After a dozen interviews and promotional photoshoots, you read on the news
that your book is "generally favorable". It's only been ten days but
there's at least a hundred videos reproducing your reactions (called
"reaction videos"), or cover a part thereof ("covers"). Most are cringe.

Like everything else, ticket prices skyrocketed over the pandemic.
A general admission ticket that used to cost 50 now costs 187. Your fans
are complaining how TicketPastor® monopolizes live research.

Opening for you on the tour are undergrads who work in the lab next door.
But they specialize in wireless communication, a topic you doubt your
audience is interested in. Their antenna had grounding issues and there
was a constant hum.

The crew help the undergrads clean up their workbench and leave. Then you
enter the stage. Thunderous cheering. Et and Al walk on stage. More
cheering. Neon signs that read "Your Research Saved My Life". You know
that isn't true; they saved themselves.

Your setlist opens with the opening chapter in the book, which segues into
chapter 2. You then perform experiments from your previous books. The
sixth paper requires a pot of beewax, so you move through the crowd to the
Bee stage. The crowd cheers as you pass, trying to touch you without
consent.

The crew shove a portable table into the mosh pit for them to hold up. Al
leaps off and surfs to the table, where he dilutes stock solutions into
0.001M phosphate buffered saline. At the end, he throws one empty test
tube into the pit. That's gotta sell for a hundred bucks on ebay.

The show is over and you are exhausted. Some diehard fans, who you recall
seeing just the night before, have waited two hours at the crew exit.
Sure, instagram, tiktok, whatever. You crawl back into your touring van
and basically just sleep there.

Eleven months later, just as the tour is over, the RIAA (Research Industry
Association of Anywhere) informs you that your book has been certified
gold, which means it has sold 500k copies, where 150 library checkouts
counts as one copy. It would have been way sooner if there wasn't so many
Sci-Hubbers out there, but then you remember Sci-Hub saving your ass as an
undergrad, so you can't really blame them.

Time for more manuscripts.