Invasion of the Institution Snatchers
Progressing from journals to organizations to institutions, the takeover continues
We’ve written about “the invasion of the journal snatchers” a few times recently (here and here). This is when an established and indexed journal is purchased and surreptitiously repurposed into a high-volume, predatory OA publication, its legacy status disguising new goals and incentives as its new owners extract price premiums based on pre-existing indexing and impact advantages.
As part of snatching a journal, the organization owning that journal or set of journals is also often snatched.
Now, AI may make it possible for the entire institution of scholarly and scientific publishing to be snatched without all that messy “snatch a journal” pretense. And we’re playing right into the trap.
In fact, the process may be farther along than we think.
This insight was provided by a draft paper from two law professors at Boston University about “How AI Destroys Institutions,” which begins with a bang:
If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence.
What Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey are talking about when they refer to “institutions” is a profession or pursuit based on shared norms and expectations, either intrinsic or extrinsic, probably both.
These aren’t the only authors to flag the threat, with the late David Golumbia writing in 2024 (highlights mine):
In the 2020s, we have learned just how vital to democracy it is for societies to have some mechanisms by which we develop some shared sense of what real history and real science and real knowledge look like, and how democracy relies on them for its very existence. Digital media tells us it is vital to that project, too, yet evidence continually shows us the opposite: that the institutions and methods we relied on for democracies to function are specifically what digital media destroys.
But while Golumbia attributed the threat to digital media — correctly, I’d argue — the step-function in digital media manifest in AI systems has only made the threat more palpable with extraction that can’t be interrogated and possibly not undone.