Having a PhD in the algorithmic envirusment
The vast majority of PhD haven't and/or aren't paid enough to live as professors, while aggrandizing the title, that it hasn't crossed some kind of societal brain-body barrier.
It's a problem and deliberately shiney opaque product resulting from the inherently elitist process of professionalization as it pertains to embodying the accomplishment and leadership position of a PhD itself.
PhDs are both perpetually required to fake it until we make it, and hold an air of having already made it, being worthy, and being seen as an authority within a society that doesn't see most of us, no matter our titles, trainings, and skillsets, as being worthy of being heard.
Now, we're living in a moment where the system has bureacratized the authority gap to such an extent, paying the vast majority of our most educated people below the poverty line, while normalizing we work ourselves to death anyway, chasing the dignity destroying tenure track job.
And, yet, the public has been fed this hollow image of PhDs as either faceless titles behind expert interviews in newspapers, magazines, or humanless figures behind documentaries, podcasts, and speaking engagements, all pretending that what has happened to us is fine, to compete.
It's the ultimate inevitability of chasing shiny awards and a claim at embodying the ability to profess knowledge, while attempting to escape the inevitable extistential dread of being alive, as the world is burning hot, and most everyone pretends disease / genocides don't exist.
At the end of the day the question is: Is this what we want?
The opportunists say "yes," if it means they can have their voices heard. But what good is having your voice heard by masses miseducated / disinformed enough that you are intelligible, and critical findings are ignored.