Up Is the New Down

Two thinkers recently coalesced in their conclusions about the outcome of the latest US elections, and what it might portend.

In the first case, Ted Gioia writes that while the media has focused on a customary political right vs. left narrative, what really seems to have been going on is an up vs. down narrative.

• Framing the election as left-right and in other typical ways that are not as informative recently forced the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s Scientific American, who found herself enraged within an elite paradigm of what the outcome meant. It may have been an overall misinterpretation by her given some of the shifts in the electorate which didn’t match the prevailing narrative . . .

Gioia points to a 1929 book by José Ortega y Gasset entitled The Revolt of the Masses which detailed class conflict as the engine of political change and cultural stress. In Ortega’s formulation, it isn’t even about rich vs. poor, as these class conflicts are not between “hierarchically superior and inferior classes. . . . upper classes or lower classes.” For instance, a billionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega’s schema, while a pauper might represent the elite.

• Think of a billionaire courting a populist image — Mark Zuckerberg taking a tour of America, or Elon Musk wearing a t-shirt and a MAGA hat — on the one hand vs. a college professor on the other.

Pollsters saw Kamala Harris’ support begin to wane after she began attacking Trump, rather than ignoring him or even tolerating him. At the same time, Harris began producing endorsements by celebrities and pop stars, signaling her ties to the cultural elites, even as two of the most iconic images of Trump gained traction in non-traditional media — one of him in a McDonald’s apron and another of him in a reflective vest in a garbage truck.

Elites scoffed, but Ortega’s framework seemed to hold. By appearing as a member of the masses while being attacked by the elite, Trump solidified emotional support. He was down, they felt down, so he felt like their candidate.

David Brooks also published an essay in the Atlantic about how higher education as an aspiration has lost its mojo, alienating people with its exorbitant costs, strange priorities, and lackluster career opportunities. He also discusses how “intelligence” became a marker of future success, leading to a commercialization of testing, college marketing, and ultimately over generations the emergence of familial success as parents who did well in school were able to perpetuate the same success for their children at the expense of others.

Brooks’ essay is nothing groundbreaking — I was talking with a friend about much the same thing the day before it came across my desk, as students we deal with are expected to live for tests and college admissions, but we see many other markers of potential success in them. For those still enthralled with college above all else, Brooks is acting as a translator — many parents, children, and institutions are obviously ignorant of what he has to say about success and a life well-lived.

What Brooks fails to mention, but what anyone with friends or acquaintances with feeds that deviate from the up/liberal/left-wing bubble has seen, is that Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts alienated a lot of non-college, non-elite individuals, most of whom have loans of their own to pay down without assistance (mortgages, small business loans, credit card debt). They saw student loan forgiveness as nothing less than the up/elite looking out for their own.

• As Gioia notes, viewership of awards shows is down 70-80% for much the same reason — people have tired of the elites giving themselves awards.

What does this all have to do with scholarly publishing?

To some extent, the OA movement has been predicated on the up/down paradigm, with the powerful publishers setting prices libraries weren’t prepared to handle, editorial elites gatekeeping quality, and the Impact Factor generating numerical judgments all becoming targets for those feeling that those in power needed a comeuppance.

• Now that OA has proven itself worse than what it sought to upset — more corruptible, less reliable, and broadly ineffectual — the movement is in a quandary.

In another manifestation of the up/down paradigm, the OA movement has been perpetuating the false pseudo-populist belief that everyone is capable of or interested in being like academics — reading papers, studying topics, being learned. Set in the larger cultural up/down context, such assertions prove laughably false. As Brooks writes, “working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class.”

• If there’s anything more elitist than elites thinking everyone wants to be like them, let me know.

So it’s no surprise that elite media sources are being eschewed like never before — their qualities are viewed as elitist, and people see them as part of the problem. As Gioia writes, traditional media forms are being supplanted:

The media platforms associated with Down agendas are messy, and often seem amateurish. But these are the focal points of cultural energy right now, and if you aren’t aligned with their worldviews you probably should fear them. They include TikTok, YouTube channels, social media, live feeds, grassroots podcasting, Web3 communities, gaming platforms, Bandcamp, Substack, etc. Even when these platforms are owned by huge global corporations, they convey the ambiance of a bottoms-up insurgency. And the simple truth is that the corporations behind the platforms may be incapable of controlling them—and if they somehow do manage to impose order, they will see their platforms lose energy and impact.

This doesn’t mean that things like preprint servers are the future — the papers they promulgate are as elitist as anything in their form and function. It may mean that the “paper” itself needs to be changed, and not in the thoughtless manner so many “paper of the future” projects have attempted. Claims-making may need to be rethought in the context of up/down rather than prior attempts of simply ladling technological tricks on elite papers.

This election may be an inflection point for media on a broader scale, for social priorities, and for how we frame cultural conflict.

It seems premature to say much else, but I wanted you to have some food for thought. Both essays are worth a full read.

Something our normal frameworks aren’t prepared to handle is happening.