Starting Your Journal’s Digital Detox

We have a chapter in our book (“Trapped in the Tech Shrine”) about how scientific publishers became habituated to taking publishing and business advice from technology vendors.

It became so entrenched that some might wonder who’s in charge.

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a palpable tech backlash against:

• Big Tech oligarchs
• Data centers
• Techno-authoritarians

Lawsuits are everywhere as extraction and exploitation are challenged, as the energy and economic disruptions of data centers are sparking increasingly organized protests to thwart them, and AI and tech valuations and futures are in flux.

Through their embrace of digital tech, publishers became accustomed to platforms and templates, which were developed in large extent to spread the higher costs of digital publishing. As a result, today we have code bases full of business risks, incentives to set it and forget it for as long as possible, and distractions built in a decade ago that too often go unquestioned.

It seems time to say that tech often distracts from substance, is too quickly elevated for no good reason, and can easily mislead us about what matters to our audiences.

Is it time to question assumptions? To begin a digital detox? Is it all vaporware, selling us on a future that will never come?

As automakers replace massive touchscreens with knobs and dials, do we need to do our own program of digital detox?

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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