How the Internet Disrupted Scence
By Kent Anderson & Joy Moore (Prometheus)
This book is an extended motte-and-bailey argument on behalf of the publishing industry. It opens as more of a conventional polemic on science and the reception of science in contemporary life. It focuses on the capture of the scientific publishing industry by moneyed interests and the general sort of negative changes that have taken place in science journals over the last 40 years or so. These are real – science publishing is one of those things where if you are not an academic, you will be 2/3rds bewildered and 1/3rd irate about the lookingglass world of academic journal – but these are also better detailed elsewhere.
After that opening, which would be a three-star sort of polemic, the rhetorical move here is to weld those problems tech industry and to a lesser extent populist anti-science thinking. This is thorny, so I am going to be direct: there are valid issues the author’s raise, but they raise them in bad faith. There are ways to talk about the problems with Big Tech than to rely upon moral panic. I am disinterested in doing the work that the authors ought to have done in extracting the good faith ones if they cannot be bothered to either.
The argument is for regressive tactics. Publishers were better gatekeepers, and so they should be reinstated in control.
The book comes out swinging against Aaron Schwartz and in vibrant defense of SOPA/PIPA, two things I did not expect to see again, but when, late in the text, it starts in on Section 230, it is clear that the authors are totally out of their depth. Less charitably, they are looking for whatever contemporary causes they can graft their defense of their own industry onto.
I feel like there is some sort of test or rubric that I need to name for books on a topic, where if you could effortlessly swap out the author’s bugbear for Capitalism, it is a do-over.
My thanks to the authors, Kent Anderson & Joy Moore, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Prometheus, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 