Michael Maffie

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

"Every aspect of it seeks to dictate decisions that have traditionally been left to each university — a degree of control over higher education that is characteristic of authoritarian countries."

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

For example, making a digital platform increasingly awful for gig workers.

#labor

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My lab is crowdsourcing journal review times to increase transparency in academic publishing. If this journal is on Manuscript Central, would you upload it to the Coauthor project website? coauthor.fly.dev Thanks!

A statue of Touchdown the bear, Cornell University’s mascot, wearing a red scarf.

Opening day! Here we go, Big Red!
@scjohnsoncollege.bsky.social

I think this is right. Tech elites have largely insulated themselves from the economic consequences of their actions. Yet they are deeply bothered by social pressure, criticism, or isolation. So they use money to shape culture (eg influence elections, buy social media platforms, etc.).

My lab built the Coauthor plugin to help people make informed decisions about how long they will wait for a manuscript decision.

Would you be willing to upload your manuscript data from this journal?

coauthor.fly.dev

I agree this is an important issue -- and the Coauthor dashboard will soon display the average number of rounds before a paper is accepted.

If you have suggestions for other metrics that may be useful, let me know. We are always looking for new ways to improve the dashboard.

Thanks!

Promising way to crowdsource data on academic journal decision timelines. I'm uploading my data. You can too!

Stories like this are why my lab started the Coauthor Project. If this was a manuscript central submission, can you upload it to the dashboard?

coauthor.fly.dev

My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, I remember hearing that today, independent voters are more likely to vote for the same party in consecutive elections than those who identified with a party 40-ish years ago.

The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context...

🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online !

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is an important “long view” contribution to the gig economy/platform work scholarship. Congrats @maffie.bsky.social!

I recognize many of the decay/degradation mechanisms you describe. They’re why so many seasoned gig workers have left these platforms, when possible.

The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context...

🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online !

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

How Uber Became A Cash-Generating Machine Uber has achieved one of the most impressive turnarounds in recent corporate history — a $12 billion swing in free cash flow over the past…

Len Sherman and team from Columbia business school have just released this excellent report on Uber's pricing and pay which reflects many of the same trends we observed: len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-bec...

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

Opinion | A new era of government censorship has dawned Donald Trump fancies himself a champion of free speech. Oh, really?

A new era of government censorship has begun.
It started with the silencing of scientific speech, when the admin blocked release of research on bird flu. But MAGA has also cracked down on other wrongthink—on race, geography (!), and of course Trump himself
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Someone on Twitter posted a color chart for how to combine different shirts and pants.

You should never follow any of these color charts. They are all stupid.

I'll show you why. 🧵

NEW PAPER

Oil, shipping, tariffs: We are back in a world of cost shocks.

Our AI/LLM analysis of 138,962 corporate earnings calls shows how economy-wide cost shocks let large firms raise prices & increase profits—triggering sellers' inflation. 🧵

Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

Dodge? No way. Gommage.

I’m curious how the trend changes in unionized universities in which there are clear standards for tenure and promotion. Seems that is likely to reduce the spike before a tenure vote but could reduce burnout immediately after.

Editing an article about the enshittification of online services in Wiley's online proofing system is strangely validating.

Tell me you’ve never attended a faculty meeting without telling me you’ve never attended a faculty meeting.

Inside JFK's Key Decisions During the Cuban Missile Crisis No other event offers as relevant lessons about presidential leadership in the nuclear age as those thirteen days in October.

“These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” President Kennedy sardonically remarked to his aide Dave Powers: “If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

time.com/5899754/jfk-...

Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing Ride-sharing platforms like Uber market themselves as enabling `flexibility' for their workforce, meaning that drivers are expected to anticipate when and where the algorithm will allocate them jobs, ...

New paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278

Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/

🚨 Paper acceptance! Keep your eyes out for, "The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labor Conditions in the Gig Economy". Out soon in the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

Waylon Smithers from the Simpsons opening a crate labeled “Robot workers: 100% loyal” while Mr. Burns looks on.

Current tech industry status:

Thanks so much. There will be a big update next week (mostly UI, but some UX). If you upload data now, it will all carryover. Any help in spreading the word is highly appreciated.

Also, if you have any feature requests, either DM me or shoot an email to the lab email address.

No data on ASR yet, but we built this tool to help crowd source answers to these questions: coauthor.fly.dev

We also provide the conditional acceptance percentage of a first RR so folks can better understand the “value” of a first RR at different outlets.