The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

arXiv was the first major preprint server, a practical Internet solution for a community seeking to exchange findings in areas like high-energy physics, particle physics, and astrophysics, all of which were growing at a rapid rate at the time due to machine-readable outputs and new sensor abilities.

First housed at Los Alamos, it moved to Cornell for a time before spinning out as an independent non-profit earlier this year. It has always been a bit of a financial albatross, so going it alone may mean more financial austerity is in the cards.

But now that it’s taken its future into its own hands and making changes, maybe it’s time to leave arXiv alone?

For its rather arcane origins and purposes, it has punched above its weight in how it has influenced thinking and been used as an example, inspiring utopian visions around the unfettered sharing of scientific findings that have proven misleading in the end.

Suffice to say, platforming preprints didn’t scale as an idea. Commercial forces of various kinds have done their best to abuse, corrupt, and extract value from them, and they have led to a litany of problems as readers here know.

But arXiv retains a talismanic power in some minds, so when extra review steps, limits on article types, and caps on article submissions were proposed, a clamor of alarm and disdain predictably followed — from the kinds of tourists and peanut gallery postulators who have taken roost in the open science era.

So today we’ll discuss a basic question about freedom, community boundaries, and grace:

We discuss why treating care and trust as antediluvian is ridiculous, why others keep wanting to exploit our infrastructure, why gatekeeping has become a more blunt, quantitative instrument, and how techno-fascism is monoculture-adjacent and why this matters.

We also share our Discoveries of the Week.

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

The history of science and tech is at some level a history of fabulists — people who imbued new technologies with magical powers of one sort or another, and others who dethroned the magicians and seers with empirical evidence. Now, physicists are actively asking if freewill is an illusion, and if the laws of physics are so deterministic that our consciousnesses are themselves an illusion.

Now, we’re using technology to make new forms of what looks like consciousness to reassert some magic into our world.

Information technology and religion merged early on, with “book religions” expanded by the printing press, which itself spread rapidly largely because the Catholic church printed and sold indulgences to absolve believers of sin — for a price.

With money on the table, there was a good reason to build or buy a printing press.

But the fabulism of indulgences didn’t last. Fortunately, the technology was general use.

We may be living through a similar period when it comes to digital technologies, with fabulists making money and adoption while the larger world seeks general use to solve problems or expand human capabilities.

As we wrestle LLMs to the ground, we seem to be turning a corner as three related trends emerge:

That doesn’t mean we aren’t in danger of allowing fabulists to wreck things. Their ability to shift agency away, to spin fantasies, and to hide behind ideologies creates a lot of risk.

It all hurts science and scholarship, because the fabulists also hide the specifics of their technologies inside a black box of beliefs and make claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And the flood of information they are producing is shutting down legitimate scientific data, discourse, and distribution as fabulism seeks dominance.

We discuss all of this, and more.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week,” including the egopantis.

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

Various ideologies have captured the handful of leaders atop the major AI firms currently calling for a slowdown in development — effective altruism, long-termism, Singularitarianism. The way these firms are whipsawing society is notable, and the superficiality of the leadership at these firms alarming.

The utopian/dystopian fantasy world their ideologies has created — high hopes, disassociation from reality, groupthink, and more — may be fun for bros in their 20s to discuss over their THC infusers and ketamine drips, but it may also be more familiar to scientific and scholarly publishers than many think. After all, it was scientific publisher who underwent an ideological conversion decades ago with the high hopes and utopian beliefs of open access (OA) publishing foisted on us by a few strong and relentless voices.

AI and OA have some key similarities — the belief that technology can and will solve problems simply through scaled deployment, the blindness to obvious problems created by the pursuit of the ideological goals because stopping is not an option, and the cult-like status of the ideas where dissent or critique is not allowed.

For a profession that at its root has the idea of taking a breath, evaluating claims, and making careful judgments of those, scientific publishing’s headlong rush into OA is now being matched by a headlong rush into AI — one that seems even more likely to end in tears given how things are unfolding overall and the lack of a culture of caution and considered choices. Scientific publishing at least still has that going for it . . .

In this episode, we discuss these topics, leaderboardism, and the latent backlash for both OA and AI.

We end by discussing why it’s time for us to go out and make new observations at the following upcoming events:

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

A recent press release from Springer Nature — gussied up to pretend it was a “white paper” representing “findings” and pushed right out through Research Information, where press releases go for release — provided a litany of incentives being pursued by the author-pays Gold OA publishers these days:

However, these are not reliable incentives. Some work against OA publisher finances. Each one has been hacked to death. All three are meaningless to whether the scientific claims being made are important or reliable.

Worse, they reveal a rejection of the duty of care the scientific enterprise has in relationship with the public.

Today, we talk about the lack of consumer protection in scientific publishing and its negative effects, why editorial and peer review done right protect both fellow scientists and the public by engaging communities of experts, and why something unbiased and unhackable might make sense as a priority for those who care.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

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:

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.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

Today, we want to talk about Anthony Fauci, and our role in making life difficult for him — and, beyond his current travails, for society at large.

In 2021, healthcare expert Paul Keckley noted five flaws in the response to Covid-19, three of which ended up at our doorstep:

The scientific publishing system was at the heart of what some called an “infodemic,” with hundreds of papers posted or published per day, most from inexpert research teams and nearly all from inexpert authors, part of the “more information will solve this faster” mentality.

When speed was prioritized over quality or relevance or even sound public health messaging, misinformation purveyors had a field day. Preprints dominated the news and were seen at the White House. The My Pillow guy started a Covid-19 grift with a preprint. The myocarditis myth was started with a bad preprint. Steve Bannon catalyzed the lab leak conspiracy with two preprints he funded. Fake information from anti-vaxxers and others went mainstream. And, worse, the seeds of MAHA were planted, created a beanstalk that RFK, Jr., and Jay Bhattacharya among others would climb to positions of power.

All of this — and more — undermined what could have been a good pandemic response if messaging had been consistent, uniform, and science-based and delivered mainly by trained public health leaders.

Instead, our eagerness to chase attention undermined these efforts while helping to make MAHA and empowering the very people who attacked Anthony Fauci recently.

It’s time to have this uncomfortable conversation — our Fauci reckoning.

We can’t make things better if we don’t accept that scientific publishing played a role in public health’s struggles to do right by us during a pandemic, in Fauci’s woes during that time and subsequently, and in society’s science-addressable problems ever since.

We end on a more cheerful note with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

Colette Delawalla is the Founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science (SUFS), an organization that has been at the heart of our national — and now international — defense of independent science as an independent truth-seeking pursuit.

With the organization recently notching a win by getting the proposed OMB funding rules — which would have given political appointees discretion over spending decisions, among other affronts — potentially delayed, Colette and her team are now working to ensure these proposals are shut down entirely while activating a larger coalition to reinvent science in ways that will auger well for the future.

But we get to let her explain . . .

We are extremely grateful that Colette took the time to speak with us. Along with Beth Jacobs, who we interviewed last December, and many others, science is being defended by some great people and well-aligned teams.

Please do your part whenever you can!

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

OA publishing and social media gave pseudoscience information a business model, but how do those people actually sell and fulfill products?

The media keep missing this story, focusing on the products and not the businesses, as we found with a recent WIRED story about “natural” alternatives to Adderall. It’s not that they’re pushing these as much as how easily they’re able to push them in the first place.

Shopify is a central operator, with templates, stock photos, profitability calculators, e-commerce, and fulfillment services. Just pick your poison, so to speak, and watch the money start to flow.

The family behind Shopify, based in Canada, is also trying to build a media empire called True North. And, since their politics tilt to the right, it’s no surprise their stock price also responds to the political winds of their most lucrative market, the US.

From “slopfluencer” grandmas to AI monks, it seems no taboo is off-limits when it comes to scamming people.

There are retail competitors, including Amazon and TikTok, but one in particular seems focused on undercutting Shopify — another platform that feels even griftier called Swell.

We’ll walk you through what we’ve found. It’s not definitive, and we can only speculate about some things, but it’s worth knowing about.

Of course, we share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

We’re back from our first signings, and we have a few stories to share.

The signings occurred prior to the book’s official publication date, creating some extra interest but also some challenges the bookstores helped us navigate. Overall, it was a great experience, getting better and better as we settled in and got used to the format. The people we met were all fantastic and interesting.

The stores we visited (and our helpful hosts):

In addition to some highlights from the signings, we also discuss recent and upcoming podcast interviews, and why we’re excited for people to finally read our book.

Finally, we share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

In 2025, Anita Say Chan’s book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, was published by the University of California Press. This led to a review here, and we became immediate fans of her insights and research trajectory. We also conducted an email interview with Chan back in June 2025, before we were any good at podcasting. That interview is absolutely riveting, with dozens of insights that will give you pause.

Then, in September 2025, we had the chance to do a podcast interview with Chan, where we discussed:

It’s a great interview. Given renewed attention on both “soft eugenics” and eugenics in scientific publications — preprints and otherwise — we thought it would be a good idea to revisit this.

We’d also like to mention a recent paper by Helen Burn about Galton and the history of eugenics in statistics and at University College London (UCL). Chan references the history, as well.

Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/