We need peer review for lettuce and for letters.
It’s been a bad summer.
Today I read that jalapeños have been recalled. I checked FDA dot gov and saw it's the thirteenth recall in a week. During the same period in 2022, only two products were recalled, both of them pharmaceutical products. What's the average number of food recalls a year? Is this normal? I don't know. I have never needed to know.
An article on Salon reports that RFK Jr.'s program as Secretary of Health and Human Services has, in effect, made us all amateur food safety inspectors now. This is what happens when government turns on itself, fires and defunds agencies to fecklessness and hollows out it own functions. It is the Republican playbook: rescind all of the support needed for a government to function, wait for the disaster to unfold, and then point to it as evidence of governmental failure. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I also read a few days ago that a (supposedly) peer reviewed journal is awash in AI-generated articles. Authors attest that they are submitting their own, original research to this same journal, but frankly who among us now can discern the real from the slop? Who has time for this audit? Do we really need to play out Sokal on hyperfuckingdrive? Surely this is what editors and peer reviewers are meant to do, but when you're under a mountain of shit it's hard not to just give up and live with the cyclospora. Do we just read articles authored by scholars whose names we know and who know we can trust now? Seems bad.
I've been publishing for years now (and I hasten to add, I always hasten to add, before the advent of ChatGPT because the writing has been on the wall long before we were panicking about the so-called death of the college essay and pervert glasses and all the other nonsense that is just today's hell), but I've been writing for a while on how the purpose of the tech industry is unanimous with the purpose of our authoritarian regime: namely, to force citizens to abandon trust in expertise so that we can buy a subscription to platforms that will make decisions for us. This is the thesis of Shosana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism, most prominently, but it is intimated in so many others, a number of which I list here.
Food recalls and an inability to know whether AI is forging the news, scholarship, and literature are not unrelated phenomena. I do not know how we can emerge from this. But this fall I'll be teaching a course called, "Extracting the Past: Democratic Futures without AI," hopefully working with young folks who want to learn and want to converse with me and with each other while I try to get the book done. That is what I'm hanging on to right now.
Tonight we’re having jalapeños in dinner. We got them from a farm we trust down the road. I hope they’re safe.
