Our Information Networks
Information networks are too centralized, and that privileges manipulation
“Gatekeeping” can be disparaged by cyberlibertarians as something antiquated, print-centric, immoral, or greedy. But one aspect of it is underappreciated — good gatekeepers serve communities, and communities provide a defense against profligate information, a buffer.
In the networked information economy, communities can sniff out bad actors and repulse them through coordinated action.
As we head into a politically and socially fraught time, the extremists seem to have gained new technology allies — Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are all posturing as either active bad actors (Bezos and Musk) or unapologetic bad actors. These individuals control some of the most powerful centralized information networks in the world.
This matters to scholarly and scientific publishers because bad actors have learned how to exploit our lowered defenses — pay-to-play journals, barely screened preprint platforms, bastardized policies, government and funder mandates.
The lack of defenses in the design of modern information networks comes up in Yuval Noah Harari’s recent book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, where Harari makes a distinction between “the naive view of information” and more measured, skeptical views.