Conversation

the truly excluded political perspective in academia is the anticapitalist.

There is an ongoing interest in the question of "why is science becoming less productive." I'm dubious about that as a trend at all, given the overriding quantification and control over daily life delivered by industry-as-alt-ac. The scientification of the world as a project is arguably more successful than ever, even if it is no longer recognizable to traditional academic scientists who don't see the continual A/B testing of their lives along commercial axes as science. The progress of rendering us subjects of data, subjects to data, our actions irrevocably shaped by optimizing algorithms visible and invisible is an always more vertical hockey stick.

Science is stagnating? Why do you need to publish in Nature? To write a viral Twitter thread? Science isn't stagnating, you just became the experiment.

If we take the classicalist/neoliberal view of "scientific progress" as cumulative shared understanding of some True reflection of nature, its stagnation is of course overwhelmingly caused by the entrenching ownership of scientific process by the ring of extractive industries that structure it.

The inability to structure the results of our work in the same form as we do it - I am an "auditory neuroscientist," why is it impossible for me to a) publish my work to other auditory neuroscientists as a whole, and b) find the work of other auditory neuroscientists - should be a hint. The people who publish a Nature paper and write a Twitter thread about the death of science demonstrate our participation its demise. It's about informational organization as the dominant mode of extraction and the staggering profitability of exploiting informational deficits.

Every feed is filling an informational gap: the product is your dependence on it, which can be spun off for profit. Social media can be profitable because it can inject ads in that feed. Elsevier can be profitable because scientists will pay out the nose to be featured and have access to that feed - ie. pay astronomical subscriptions or APCs to read and publish in it.

Every feed generates perverse incentives. Algorithmic social media didn't start out intending to weaponize belief, but it is absurdly profitable to do. The prerequisite backdrop to contemporary academic prestige culture is information disorganization: if you could find all the information you wanted, person to person, without the mediating force of venue, there would be no need to publish in Nature, the signal would cease to be relevant. If the ability to coordinate the informational organizational process of peer review was trivially done in public by virtue of public discussion of papers (eg. here, idk), the function of peer review as a service would cease to be relevant.

The structure of scientific communication as isolated papers that reconstruct reality as an island of self-selected references in an "introduction" that poses the isolated interpretation is not an accident. The very possibility of selling a unit of scientific prestige is predicated on that isolation. What props up disgraced scholars? What props up hype cycles that drain hundreds of millions in funding in dead end research projects? If you profit from every instance of endless academic debate through impenetrable chains of disconnected research, what incentive do you have towards "cumulative understanding?"

This is why the "open science" movement ran aground: it limited itself to window dressing against the fundamental backdrop of profit taking in science. All our most fundamental problems are those of informational capital, and it is the only fight common to all academic disciplines.

So when we find ourselves with endlessly diminishing public funding and the transformation of academic science into an outsourced cheap labor and training program for industry, it is anti-capitalists that are the most necessary for academia's survival - and, since informational capitalism is the water we swim in, the most excluded perspective in academia.