The last note shared a manuscript I made available through SocArXiv.org, an open archive for the social sciences:
Christopher Hobson, ‘Memes and monsters of the interregnum: Gramsci between the times’, Manuscript, 2025. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gzhrq_v1
I decided to try making it freely available online and see how well it works (or does not). The paper would surely benefit from a proper peer review process, but I am doubtful as to how much it would be improved by really existing peer review. With that in mind, I put it out into the world as is, with the hope that it will be of interest and help to some.
The manuscript offers a genealogical sketch of Gramsci’s prison notebook entry on ‘interregnum’, tracing it from obscurity, to being largely bypassed when his work was rediscovered in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with it only emerging post-GFC as a common frame for understanding conditions. In the last 15 years, Gramsci’s line of ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’ has rapidly become an analytical meme, one that generally tends to stand in lieu of more serious thought.
In a way, the problems related to presenting and sharing research in academia echo another theme the paper considers: how to think and act in the in-between space of something like an interregnum. In a prior note, I shared this judgement:
Contemporary academia, ceaselessly warped and worsened by the collision of petty politics and neoliberal nastiness, constantly demands more and more. As researchers, we are expected to produce research™: commodified, packaged, ready to be sold back to universities. The type of scholarship and thinking encouraged by such conditions is not only increasingly incremental and irrelevant, it tends to be narrow and banal.
Over the years, as the profession continues to involute at an increasingly faster rate, I have become more convinced about what is not working, rather than having a clear sense of what ways forward might offer the most promise. My sense is that AI is the wrecking ball that will knock down this crumbling edifice, for good and bad. The difficulty becomes identifying viable forms of agency within these entropic conditions. Nonetheless, we must try in an open and earnest manner. With that problem in mind, this note reflects on these issues alongside the work of Adam Mastroianni and C. Thi Nguyen.
Mastroianni published a piece in late 2022 on ‘The Rise and Fall of Peer Review’ that nicely captured some of the distortions with the current system of peer review. In it, he points to the recent vintage of the practice:
From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.
(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)
That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.
Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.
The results are in. It failed.
Whatever merits peer-review has / had, it is difficult to advocate that the current version of the system is working. Moreover, Mastroianni hits on an important point, it is a terrible allocation of resources:
Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.
Huge interventions should have huge effects….
All we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal. In this biz, we call this a total flop.
This is the case at the micro as well as the macro level. A serious and sustained investment of time is required for seeing a standard academic article through from origination - drafting - submission - revision (possible rejection along the way too) - proofing - and finally publication on an online platform that normally places the article behind a paywall. Not only is the author not compensated, they (or their institution) generally need to pay to have it made open access. The result is that the vast majority of articles are destined for irrelevance, with most barely read, banished behind paywalls or lost amidst an ever-expanding information glut. As PC judges, this system, ‘“produces” something that is of little interest to most, viewable by a tiny minority of people, most of whom, like Melville’s scrivener, Bartelby, would prefer not to.’
From a simple cost-benefit analysis, the logic of participating in this is increasingly hard to justify. At one point in time, perhaps the trade-off made more sense, less so as it presently and really exists. Peer review can be incredibly worthwhile if done well and in good faith, with ‘if’ being the key word. Very often the review process is undertaken in a half-hearted and rushed fashion by an academic with limited time, competing pressures, and little incentive to do it well. And, of course, LLMs are making this process much worse. Gary Marcus presents this as, ‘the exponential enshittification of science’, and while he might be justified in worrying about the impact of AI-slop on knowledge generation, implicit in the framing is an under-appreciation of how enshittified the process has already become. For all the over-egged complaints about ‘woke’ professors and so on, a far bigger problem is paywalled professors who spend too much time producing articles that generally achieve little besides padding CVs.
In contrast, Mastroianni presents his experience with sharing a paper directly and how much more widely it was subsequently read compared to his last peer-reviewed article. There is likely some survivorship bias at play, most open-access papers - presumably including mine - will soon disappear into the online void. The sad reality is most of what is posted online is destined to be training material for LLMs and probably not much more. Nonetheless, the basic insight that Mastroianni presents with clarity and verve holds: the reality of peer review is much more tawdry, uninspiring and unsuccessful than the ideal, and that the logic for unreflectively persisting with such a poorly performing system is increasingly difficult to rationalise.
And yet, this is what academics overwhelmingly continue to do. Why? This sorry state of affairs is largely overlooked and accepted, however, as the value of publishing for the author tends to be simply in being published. At this point, we turn to C. Thi Nguyen’s rich description of a process he terms ‘value capture’, by which our behaviour and choices become shaped by external values we have accepted and adopted with little thought or consideration. He explains:
Value capture happens when your environment presents you with simplified versions of your values, and those simple versions come to dominate your practical reasoning.
From this perspective, really existing academia becomes less about the pursuit of knowledge, and more about achieving metrics that count towards jobs, tenure, promotion and prestige. Nguyen develops the example:
I want to focus on one particularly clear, and quite common, form of value capture: when an institution presents you with some metric, and then you internalize that metric.
Say that I, an academic, care about the pursuit of truth, wisdom, and understanding. Across my career, if asked, I would describe my core values using those same terms. But suppose that in the course of my professionalization, the way I apply those terms changes. Now, whenever I try to evaluate the success of my articles, I turn to certain metrics, like the citation rate or the status of the publication venue on some ranked list. And when I evaluate my overall success as an academic, I turn to metrics like my total citation rate or the status of my institution on some ranked list. In that case, it is those institutional metrics, and not the vaguer values I report upon reflection, that effectively dominate my actual actions and self-evaluation. Here, the metric gains dominance by capturing, not the general terms in which I articulate my values, but the more specific application criteria I use when the values hit the ground. The metric fills out the process by which I determine whether I have fulfilled my core values. And suppose that I guide my actions based on those evaluations: I start writing papers that are more like the ones that have succeeded, in these terms, and start taking actions that might advance my general success, in these terms. Then those external criteria have come to effectively dominate my practical decisions.
Nguyen is a wonderful speaker, it is well worth listening to his presentation of these arguments. What he powerfully captures is the drift and distortion that takes place through metrics coming to dominate. Forest from the trees, it all blurs together on the neoliberal treadmill.
Much more can be said on these themes, suffice to say that the current model has not been working well. To which can now be added the pivotal development of the rapid advance of LLMs. From my book manuscript:
That AI can increasingly replicate and simulate human thought is undoubtedly impressive, but also reflects the predictability and conventionality – if not banality – of so much of our thinking and writing. The steady dulling, homogenising flood of articles and online miscellanea can only increase as the cost for producing text with AI goes to zero. Nonetheless, it raises the stakes, increases the challenge for us: to think in open, creative ways that move beyond the obvious reference points. Thinking must become more human and more humane.
My sense is that one of the only credible ways of adapting to the rapid and unchecked encroachment of LLMs is a conscious emphasis on the aspects of writing that are more distinctive and less easily predictable. A response in the form of a rearguard action that celebrates the human present in thought and word. And yet, this kind of more adventurous and idiosyncratic thinking is precisely what the deadening hand of peer-review tends to prevent. Indeed, the way peer-review presently operates - demanding displays of ‘rigour’, requiring a standardised structure, addressing the most obvious authors and reference points - is more likely to push writing towards a format that is easier for LLMs to imitate and replicate.
The current mode of producing research appears to be fast reaching a practical and intellectual dead end. The direction of travel has been increasingly evident for some time, but LLMs are a laser-guided missile aimed at the soft-underbelly of involuted neoliberal academia.
What can and will replace this system is less clear. This is precisely the predicament of being in conditions described as an interregnum: it is evident the old ways of doing things no longer fit, but it is difficult to have a sense of what new approaches can work. Mastroianni’s solution is a simple and obvious one: ‘experiment’. Nguyen points to one of the major impediments in doing so, however, with this not aligning with the incentives and values of participants. Institutions ‘see’ metrics, this is what is rewarded, and so the churn of academic articles expands exponentially.
When I commenced Imperfect Notes back in February 2021, I explained:
Too often academics tend to passively accept that this is how things have to be, and don’t explore or take advantage of some of the other possibilities available. That has been the case for me. With that in mind, I am starting this platform to explore different ways of developing and presenting my work.
In the intervening years, Substack has been a great opportunity to push my thinking and writing in new directions. Already, however, one can feel the logic of enshittification washing over the platform. The shift towards a Twitter-like dynamic with the notes function, combined with a business model that encourages maximum pump, ends up reinforcing trends towards the debasement of language as a currency of meaning, as everyone produces more and more content that fewer and fewer peopler read. How to stay ahead of these involuting dynamics is a real challenge.
In another paper, Nguyen advocates for ‘intellectual playfulness’, which allows for perspective shifting and exploring different frames with a light and playful touch. This accords with one path I am taking through a book-length series of interconnected essays. As Nicholas Carr explains in an article entitled ‘The Tyranny of Now’: ‘Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time‐biased media tend to be heavy and durable.’ Long-form also offers a way of recovering, preserving and presenting ideas, placing them in a format that is less ephemeral than the immediacy of writing online. In this instance, the ‘new’ looks rather like an old ‘old’. Perhaps so. One does not need to go full Taleb to acknowledge there are reasons that long-standing practices and forms continue to persist. This rationale also informs my belief in the importance and value of in-person teaching, which involves putting in the work of showing up, engaging, and learning together.
There are plenty of signs that the neoliberal globalised and platformed model of academia is in severe crisis, with much less evidence of capacities for course correction. In the current moment, the great temptation is to turn to AI as an answer or solution to such problems. It is most likely neither a miracle technology nor snake oil, landing somewhere in-between. I do not pretend to know. What I am more confident in proposing is that the general direction of travel is towards modes of being and interacting that are more brutal, less civilised and more inhumane. AI as it is currently being rolled out seems likely to greatly exacerbate these dynamics. And it is coming hard and fast, whether we want it or not.
Jean Baudrillard spoke to this in a note written in 1984:
The computer will take over everywhere from the operation of thinking, leaving the brain to lie fallow, as the mechanistic technologies of the nineteenth century have already done with the body.
What role for the university when thought is no longer valued? This is a question that increasingly needs to be reckoned with. The world we are rushing towards appears heavy on data and information, but light on knowledge and wisdom.
Faced with such conditions, there is a need to reject both the ‘old’ of involuted neoliberal academia and the ‘new’ generated in an uncritical acceptance of Silicon Valley doctrine. Knowing what to reject is easier than what to build, but that is the challenge. Surely one response must involve recovering and building practices that actively develop and foster knowledge and thought, which is something I will be continuing to work towards here and elsewhere.