Wednesday at Stoke
Full Member
I came across this article and felt it was worth sharing here as this is a vital yet under discussed aspect when we generally lament the spread of fake news and false information.
He doesn't necessarily offer a solution as much as wistfully thinking about a utopia where knowledge is democratically distributed but it is indeed quite thought provoking.
He also goes in on the academic publishing industry keeping knowledge, generated by research funded by tax dollars behind closed doors.But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/Possibly even worse is the fact that so much academic writing is kept behind vastly more costly paywalls. A white supremacist on YouTube will tell you all about race and IQ but if you want to read a careful scholarly refutation, obtaining a legal PDF from the journal publisher would cost you $14.95, a price nobody in their right mind would pay for one article if they can’t get institutional access.
He doesn't necessarily offer a solution as much as wistfully thinking about a utopia where knowledge is democratically distributed but it is indeed quite thought provoking.