We’re Now Tone Deaf, Too
Executives play robot ping pong as the hoofbeats of a reckoning grow louder
“There are only engineers. ‘Researcher’ is a relic term from academia.” — Elon Musk, July 29, 2025
The tone deafness of Silicon Valley, embodied above in an Elon Musk quote, was most recently and painfully reinforced by the Palantir manifesto — which joins other, similarly awful manifestos in asserting a racist, eugenics-based, techno-authoritarian world view. Palantir employees are wondering if they’re the bad guys.
This same tone deafness is now beginning to dominate the upper echelons of scientific publishing. We’ve seen the tech-obsessed posturing again and again:
- Wiley boosting AI as science burns
- JAMA and NEJM throwing their epistemic souls into the OpenEvidence volcano
- Researchers creating a preprint server for bots
The latest evidence of tech-obsessed tone deafness was provided by the head of Springer Nature, Frank Vrancken Peeters, who posted this video of himself in Japan playing ping pong against a robot, complete with flexes and cartoon captions:
Even as retractions mount, garbage floods the zone, faith in Gold OA tanks, science funding is cut, and pseudoscience surges, this proto-bro is glamorizing tech and his own privilege while ignoring science and the approaching rot in his glorious Gold OA business model, which he has pushed to nearly absurd limits.
Peeters, like many of the consultant class now running large commercial publishers, is fixated on “number go up” volume growth to increase shareholder value and their own compensation. It’s all done within a euphemism of “science.”
- UPDATE: After this post went live, Research Information emailed this pair of headlines. You can’t make this stuff up:
The entire industry is now so drunk on quantity that it no longer measures anything else, as this recent assessment confirms: