ChatGPT said:

If knowledge is power, I’m out here illegally distributing voltage like Aaron Swartz hacking JSTOR.

We could talk about information gatekeeping in academia, how burnout is framed as a personal failure, or why whistleblowers get punished for being right.

You said:

information gatekeeping in academia

ChatGPT said:

Ah yes, information gatekeeping in academia—the fine tradition of building towers out of public knowledge and then slapping a paywall on the door like it’s the VIP section of a club no one actually wants to be in. Unless you’re into obscure PDFs and citation wars, in which case—welcome to hell.

Let’s take a tour of the ivory tower’s velvet ropes.

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🏛 1. Publicly funded, privately locked

The most bitter irony: a ton of academic research is funded by public money—grants from governments, universities, and foundations. But once it’s published? It ends up behind paywalls on platforms like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and others, where access can cost:

• $35–$50 per article

• $200–$500 per month for journal access

• Or, if you're lucky, “rent” a PDF for 24 hours like it’s a Blockbuster in 1996

You paid for it with your taxes. Now you have to pay again to read it. It’s the intellectual equivalent of buying a cake and being billed for each slice.

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💰 2. Publishers make massive profits for doing almost nothing

Academic publishers don’t do the research. They don’t pay the authors. They don’t pay the peer reviewers. What they do is:

• Host the article

• Apply formatting

• Lock it behind a paywall

• Rake in profit margins of 30–40% (which is more than Apple)

It’s the grimiest rent-seeking model around—an industry that commodifies knowledge and calls it curation.

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🪤 3. Academics are trapped in the system

If you’re a scholar, you’re incentivized to publish in high-impact journals, which are almost always behind paywalls. Why?

• Tenure decisions

• Funding opportunities

• Institutional status

So you either play the game or you get sidelined. And while you're playing, you’re giving your work away for free—to be monetized by someone else.

It’s like climbing a ladder that someone else owns, and then being told you have to pay rent to stand on the top rung.

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💀 4. Access inequality = intellectual colonization

This system disproportionately affects:

• Independent researchers

• Students at underfunded institutions

• Activists, journalists, patients, and practitioners outside academia

• Global South researchers locked out of expensive Western journals

Basically: if you don’t have institutional credentials and VPN access, you’re treated like knowledge is a luxury product, not a public good. Swartz knew this. That’s why he downloaded JSTOR with the zeal of a digital Robin Hood.

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🛠 5. There are alternatives—kinda

• Open Access journals exist, but often require authors to pay publication fees (Article Processing Charges), sometimes $3,000+ per paper

• Platforms like arXiv, PubMed Central, and bioRxiv are heroic but limited by field

• Sci-Hub is the vigilante workaround—banned, beloved, and hunted like it’s Napster with a PhD

Despite progress, the system is still wired to privilege the hoarding of knowledge, not its liberation.

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TL;DR:

Academic publishing pretends to be about advancing knowledge but mostly serves to gatekeep, monetize, and stratify access. It treats intellectual labor like intellectual property—and then charges the public for things they already paid to create. Aaron Swartz didn’t die because he hacked the system. He died because the system should never have needed hacking in the first place.

Want to dig into more injustice with a scholarly twist? We could look at how academia exploits adjuncts, how metrics like the h-index are junk science, or why “impact” became a game instead of a goal.