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The DDoS attack of academic bullshit
Not long ago, during a discussion with a Zoomer colleague about how to find research material, I realized that he had never experienced internet search back when it was good. I tried to explain how it used to be easier to find information from good-faith experts, but I don’t think I really got the point across. Let me try again.
When you looked for information about how to tell if your bread is rising correctly, or about South Korean cement manufacturing, or the musical influences on Igor Stravinsky, or whatever weird thing, Google would pull up high-quality reference material, or blogs and BBS arguments among disagreeable weirdos who specialized in the subject and usually knew what they were talking about. The tricky part wasn’t sifting through a mound of spam and paywalls and halfassed summaries to find something legitimate; the challenge was making sense of a high-context insider discussion on a topic you were trying to wrap your head around. Because the internet commentariat’s intellectual elite is more attentive to an argument’s substance than whether it observes the bureaucratic forms, these circles are much less vulnerable to getting DDoSed by floods of well-formatted bullshit, and are slowly picking up more and more of the jobs that academia is abdicating.
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