This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than seems reasonably possible.

Yeah and like…who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market (which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing: seizure of publication by big actors.

As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change. But I think we’ll see something weird, soon.