It’s fall. It’s beginning to rain. The temperature’s starting to get just cold enough that you’ll need a thin jacket while walking to your classes, but you’ll be slightly damp and sticky while sitting in your 300-person lectures. You’re always woken up at 6:30 in the morning from construction. You know it, you love it—It’s summer internship application season.

The internship process can be a very challenging and stressful period for an underdeveloped 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, or 30 year old. First, there’s the uncertainty of your resume—what if the recruiters don’t like the font you used, or how you were learning basic algebra in middle school instead of creating a Fortune 500 tech company? Then there’s the application itself, which begs the question: why should we, busy college students, spend our valuable time writing a curated cover letter for every single company we apply to, instead of getting drunk, while those companies get to reuse the same applications? Despite me typing otherwise, I am NOT passionate about writing code to program a live missile that will detonate the Amazon before AI inevitably does. Well, unless the pay’s good.

Frankly, and call me controversial, call me backwards, I don’t care—I don’t think that humans were meant to achieve this level of technological innovation, much less make the entire process of entering this field so competitive. Sure, I love playing the Sims 3 on my 15-inch MacBook Air, but after the seventh time my game crashes I occasionally snap out of my haze and I begin to truly understand the world around me. I begin to hear the birds chirping in the crisp autumn air, I feel the slight changes in the air as I shift in my seat and adjust my posture, and I feel the subtle clacking of my keyboard as I reboot the game.

OpenAI? Meta? Instagram Reels? When will we collectively realize that our time is much better spent pursuing more tangible solutions to navigating our convoluted world, such as reading difficult literature, speaking to other real humans from all walks of life, AND SUPPORTING A COMPLETE ANARCHO-PRIMITIVIST REVOLUTION.

WAKE TH3 FUCK UP, SH33PL3. T43 1NDUSTR101 R3V001101100 01110101 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110100 01110011 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01110011 01100101 01110001 01110101 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110011 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110010 01100001 01100011 01100101 00101110 00100000. 01010100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101001 01101110 01100011 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100110 01100101 00101101 01100101 01111000 01110000 01100101 01100011 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100011 01111001 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110101 01110011 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 00100010 01100001 01100100 01110110 01100001 01101110 01100011 01100101 01100100 00100010 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101110 01110100 01110010 01101001 01100101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01110100 01100001 01100010 01101001 01101100 01101001 01111010 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110011 01101111 01100011 01101001 01100101 01110100 01111001 01101 000 01— - –

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Logging you in…

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Wait, guys. What the fuck was that? Did you guys see that? No, stop writing down what I’m saying—did you guys fucking see that? 

You didn’t? Well… that’s awkward. But as I was saying, the process of getting an internship is becoming far more complicated and competitive than it was a decade ago, especially for those from underrepresented demographics looking to enter the tech sector. I ultimately think we ought to put more emphasis on making the process of learning about technology more accessible to a wider population, than continue to artificially constrain this rapidly growing field with, I don’t know, capacity-constrained major systems or ultra-competitive recruitment, just for the sake of holding onto this contrived, so-called prestige being in tech has. We have already seen the impact technology has on policy-making, and by extension, people’s lives; the least we can do is make sure the entire population is better-equipped to adapt to this new age of technology.

Thanks for having me… and I guess I’ll see you around. Or if not, you’ll catch me in Fairbanks Bus 142.