The Tech Fantasy Is Ending

I’ve spent the past few years documenting the end of an era of irrational tech-centric idealism — the collapse of cOAlition S and Plan S, the renewed calls for handouts at PLOS, the commercial capture of bioRxiv and medRxiv by CZI LLC, India’s “One Nation, One Subscription” repudiation of OA, Gates dropping support for APCs, China pulling back from APCs, and arXiv being forced to fend for itself after years of support from government and academic hosts.

SPARC’s decline has been especially ugly, and that’s not from as high a perch as some assumed, given how corrupt it always seemed. Things got even uglier with the last Presidential election — SPARC chose to “obey in advance” when the DEI-hating Trumpeters took over in 2024-25. Revealing a nihilistic heart, SPARC also hired MAGA lobbyists. Around this time, SPARC was apparently sent packing by its liberal-leaning fiscal sponsor the New Venture Fund (NVF), and was forced to sleep on another sponsor’s couch until it was able to get things in order to become a small non-profit of its own, only to find that its run-rate was excessive, requiring it to go hat-in-hand to the charity Heather Joseph has infiltrated to get another $6 million to keep the lights on until 2030. The incestuousness — Ross Mounce is Arcadia’s OA manager and works alongside Joseph at ORFG, while Joseph is on the board of Arcadia where Mounce works — only underscores how the ambit of the OA movement has contracted. It’s now just kissing cousins working for a few sloppy oligarchs.

This all comes on the heels of two major cases (here and here) going against social media giants. While the fines are too small, the remediation requirements could utterly change these and other platforms, outline overdue regulations, and cause Section 230 to be more narrowly defined. Meanwhile, big thinkers are writing major essays describing fissures and fractures and choices in the “technocracy.”

And there’s this book coming out in the summer, too . . . oh, yeah.

These all feel like a harbingers of change. And thank heavens because the rise of Silicon Valley and the OA movement have been an unmitigated disaster — extracting value across society, destroying small businesses, decimating privacy, driving oligarchic power lapping from springs of inanity, and so forth. In our world, OA has spent its decades of ascendance harming society publishers, consolidating commercial power, undermining peer review, corrupting incentives, spawning predatory publishers, enabling pseudoscience, and giving oligarchs sway.

The contrast from the early, hell-raising days of the OA movement, when free access was portrayed by bullies as inevitable, disruptive, and transformational, to these days where science is under massive assault in the US and elsewhere, where scientific publishing has become a playground for nonsense claims of nearly every imaginable variety, and where the automated box of confusion is feeding epistemic hoodwinking at scale, often based on OA content — well, it’s enough to give you whiplash.

Meanwhile, AI platforms are facing their own barrage of lawsuits, with public sentiment and simple logic suggesting these companies had better prepare for a comeuppance.

This post is just a marker to signify what I think is essentially good news — the de facto end of the idealistic, unrealistic phase of the OA movement and the fantasy era of extractive techno-utopianism more broadly.

In our world, disembodied OA voices are now coming the haunts of Epstein-adjacent tech billionaires or irrelevant sugar daddies of some kind. They don’t matter. They need to go away.

The large commercial and non-profit publishers and the efficient exploitative publishers (MDPI, Frontiers) should be the focus now. Competition is becoming increasingly cutthroat and merciless as APC dollars leave the market for various reasons. Preprints have become part of a sales funnel or an AI fantasy, just commercial plays of some kind or another. For a few haggard survivors from the early days, there is only scrappy survival as the large-scale winners carefully manage revenues and volumes in what is a mature and declining producer-focused marketplace.

Assuming this is an accurate marker on the twisty historical path of irrational exuberance fed by silly tech fantasies, careerism, neoliberalism, and academic hubris, we have to hope there is more than token movement away from our decimated publishing landscape — a rebuilding of more carefully tended gardens for communities that need good information they can trust, not the dodgy foods and brackish waters that have emerged from the OA flood.

The techno-utopian OA movement is done, as is the overall fantasy of free content, tech-first solutions, and benign tech firms. Rapaciousness, weirdness, and corruption have become their hallmarks. It’s all being swept aside to make room for something else.

Whether the next phase will be better or worse is unclear, but unless we take a more definite role and make clear investments in that future for each community and ignore the calls for scale, opaque and badly realized LLMs, online attention and personalization, and the producer-pays monetization that led us down this path, we are going to struggle to find a better way forward. As one observer writes:

The real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable. A people habituated to passivity and optimized for consumption may eventually forget the work of building a world together. What once belonged to politics — the imaginative labor of collective destiny — has been quietly surrendered to the corporate logic of the algorithm. The result is not enlightenment but enclosure: a society awake to everything except itself.