Found the recent reference. Iirc she lives in St. Louis, MO. St. Charles is a suburb of St. Louis & 94 is likely state route 94. I’m completely unfamiliar with Missouri but likely she works at a hotel or gas station. She’s also claimed to be a freelance journalist, film editor / producer & activist, although I doubt those endeavors are very lucrative.
They're the kind of careers that *can* be lucrative if you're successful at them. I've had some experience in those fields myself, and they paid pretty well twenty five years ago. But getting the occasional article published in left wing magazines that don't pay and giving your pals a hand with their college film project that has a single screening that you fund yourself -- those things don't make you a journalist/producer.
It's the sort of thing that middle class losers tell people because they're embarrassed to admit that they pump gas or clean hotel rooms for a living.
While the internet has made it easier for freelancers to live outside of the media hubs these days, I'm not seeing that there'd be an awful lot of opportunities in those areas in St. Louis. Unless you were focused on crime. I bet that guy who wrote 'White Girl Bleed a Lot' would find a lot of freelance opportunities in St. Louis. It seems like a cesspool.
But Carimachet seems like the rest of the locals crowd. Barely fucking literate.
So, I've just had a look at the long-assed paper she uploaded to SSRN. I'm pretty sure my initial take of her being a perpetual student was correct, but she was clearly a perpetual student who couldn't cut the mustard. It's about the length of a Masters Dissertation -- too short for a PhD dissertation. But it's utterly incoherent. She ticks a lot of the academic darling boxes in her citations, Baudrillard, Deluze and Guattari, etc. but her initial attempts at rigourously modelling the academic form start to slip away from her as the paper goes on.
If I had to guess why, I'd assume it was because she was getting feedback from her supervisor that displeased her. He must have pointed out that her arguments are incoherent, she lacks a clear hypothesis and it's veering into the kind of lane that you see in psychotic people. As the paper goes on, so what little rigour she tries for early in the paper completely falls away and it's just an incoherent collection of factoids plucked from random publications. I'm also guessing that she would have submitted it to this SSRN 'publish anything' server, because she realized she was never going to complete that PhD thesis/book/whatever it was, and so she felt that she should have SOMETHING to show for the enormous amount of money her studies had cost her.
I feel a bit sorry for her now. I've had friends like Carimachet -- who overestimated their academic capabilities. Back in my youth, the only way to get into university was to be smarter than 95% of the population. They took you in and they paid for your ride because you were worth the investment.
Then at some point, somebody decided everyone could benefit from a university education. But we couldn't pay for everybody's ride, so if you're willing to take out the loans, you can sign up and LARP as a scholar -- regardless of how dimwitted you are. And most degrees became so dumbed down that any old halfwit who could bluff and cheat their way through would come out with a degree at the other end.
And that's all mostly true of Post-Grad education as well. But this girl had the aspirations, she just didn't have the competence. It's not a very high bar any more, but it's too high for poor Cari. There's something really poignant about watching somebody's dreams of excellence crumble into mundane mediocrity.
I feel sad for her.
Truly.
Edit: I wrote this before I saw
@Strix454's account of her background -- all of which makes absolute sense to me.