Computer Science is Under Attack, They Want Everyone to be a Consumer
So yesterday in private chat and in IRC we had a very lengthy discussion about how academia was dying and Computer Science education had been reduced to buzzwords like "hey hi" and nonsense culminating in crack-pottery like "vice coding" [sic].
This was motivated by a disturbing "news article" (in a network notorious for slop, The Times of India) about how GAFAM would not require computer-related education or higher education for coders. That's the sort of mentality that made planes a lot less reliable in the name of "cost-savings" (to improve profits; the "cost" being offloaded to dead passengers and their families).
The non-IRC discussion was private, but it highlighted how academia got subverted to the point of being controlled by GAFAM (for marketing) and IT departments in universities being outsourced to GAFAM, even sending all the data to a foreign company in another continent. That makes no sense at all.
It got so bad that sysadmins aren't being pursued by universities anymore; instead they look for people to negotiate contracts with GAFAM "suppliers", then send all the responsibility to some other company that profits from people's data and starts engaging in vendor lock-in against students just like a drug dealer. While it's difficult to prove some sort of high-level planning or intent to turn it in a censorship and surveillance apparatus, this is what ends up happening, in practice. Sooner or later Microsoft starts "correcting" people in universities for "political correctness" (while Microsoft itself is funding Donald Trump and obstructing judges for him).
If people can no longer acquire Computer Science education and real Computer Science experience, they will not know how to control their own digital destiny or emancipate the very same universities that now control the syllabus and instead of teaching Computer Science encourage the outsourcing of systems. █