Science was supposed to be the one institution immune to the attention economy. It succumbed anyway. Kent Anderson and Joy Moore join Mookie for the 79th episode of Bald Ambition to talk about the already dire implications, and what we should do.

Kent and Joy have spent decades inside scientific publishing: the editorial and distribution machinery that turns research into the "studies show" headlines you scroll past every day. Their new book, How the Internet Disrupted Science (out August 4), traces exactly how that machinery broke, and why the breakdown is feeding the same institutional distrust poisoning politics, media, and public health.

They decribe how when publishing flipped from subscriber-funded to pay-to-publish, journals stopped getting paid to reject bad papers and started getting paid to accept them. Peer review got deprioritized. Preprint servers — built for physicists sharing telescope data — got repurposed for biomedical claims with minimal to zero vetting. The result: 25,000+ journals, a paper mill economy, and a scientific record that can't be corrected once it's indexed, cited, and fed into an LLM.

That's the tension at the center of this conversation. The public's distrust of institutions is real and often earned, exacerbated when COVID exposed genuine communication failures, flip-flopping, and arrogance from public health authorities. But the "democratization" that was supposed to fix institutional gatekeeping instead built a parallel attention economy where Silicon Valley moguls reign supreme, volume beats rigor, sensationalism beats replication, and a wellness grifter with 80 pay-to-play citations looks as credible as a legitimate researcher. The public started distrusting science when the attention economy manufactured a version of science optimized to be distrusted.

Mookie pushes back on what got us into this mess in the first place. He questions whether LLM limitations are really the crisis Anderson and Moore claim, and whether "the internet ruined it" lets decades of cloistered, pre-internet gatekeeping off the hook. Then he goes further: if Wall Street can separate Elon Musk the troll from the trillionaire whose rockets actually launch, can the public learn to make that same split between bullshit, bravado, and evidence-based brawn? Why write off science wholesale when it can and perhaps should be reinvented?

Anderson and Moore argue the real fight isn't over who's loudest, it's over who gets to rebuild the system once it's broken, and they lay out what scientific publishing could look like if it's built from scratch instead of patched: less gatekeeping for gatekeeping's sake, more resistance to the attention economy, a shot at the kind of paradigm shift that only happens when the old model finally breaks. Give them a listen, it could be the most important conversation you hear since the pandemic.

The Guests

Kent Anderson has worked in scholarly and scientific publishing for nearly thirty years, serving as Director of Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics when the initial vaccine-autism link was forged in mass media; working as Publishing Director at the New England Journal of Medicine; serving as CEO of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery; and working as Publisher at AAAS/Science. He also founded two of the most influential blogs in scholarly publishing, the Webby-nominated Scholarly Kitchen and his current paid e-newsletter, the Geyser. Through these, he has kept a near-daily pulse on activities in the space since 2007. He lives and works as a consultant outside of Boston.

Joy Moore landed her first job out of college in a scientific journal editorial office in Chapel Hill, NC in 1995, in the days of fax, on the cusp of the internet. She quickly became a key player in the discovery and adoption of technology into the workflow to produce, disseminate, and monetize scholarly and medical products. She has worked for or with nearly every major global commercial publisher, scientific society, platform vendor, technology partner, and funding body in the space. Blackwell (later Wiley), Nature, Wolters Kluwer, McGraw-Hill, The American Medical Association, Silverchair, and EBSCO, to name a few. Her current home base is Williamsburg, Virginia.

Their Book & Podcast

https://www.disruptedscience.com/

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