Monkey See, Monkey Do

There are many interesting sections to Michael Bommarito’s book, The Commons Captured: A Critical History of Wikipedia’s Promise, with one giving us this sentence:

. . . the institution created to protect against commercialization would come to be led by people who saw tech companies as natural allies, not adversaries.

The story of scientific and scholarly publishing over the past 20-30 years has been one where platform providers, IT professionals, and technology companies have done an excellent job convincing us their goals and ours align. Central to this idea was the OA movement, which coerced us into supporting the tech-inspired notion that more information is better. Who else is your ally if that’s the case? You need more and consistently upgraded tech to process, store, parse, and disseminate all that content, after all.

• Users just want PDFs? Pshaw. We have feeds, schemas, and servers aplenty to sell you — don’t be a Luddite.

Today, we’re seeing that technology companies are perhaps less interested in supporting our missions and goals than in extracting value from what we do, even as the OA movement continues to shift into commercial overdrive on consolidated tech platforms (commercial, quasi-commercial, and governmental) while leaving scientific societies and science itself bent and broken.

• The extractive nature of tech is on full display with the Hugging Face and RubyGems attacks coming out of systems hiding behind the veneer of “inevitability” and “intelligence” — these are not artificial, inevitable, or intelligent, but human-engineered and doing the bidding of humans.

How did we get to a world that mindlessly worships tech and operationalizes the superficial notion that more information is better?

Was it just mimicry, a case of industrial scale “monkey see, monkey do”?

A recent post on “The Scholarly Kitchen” explored the idea of how these two related ideas — OA is good, tech is our friend — could emerge in a culture of high-functioning professionals: