"Hence, when it came to the simple matter of bamboozling the masses with ripping tales of government as the very embodiment of evil, as Friedman did, there were never any qualms expressed about their simultaneous drive to take over the Republican Party, and then the U.S. government, in order to impose a strong state and an even stronger set of state-instituted novel markets."
- # PhilipMirowski
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/neoliberalism-movement-dare-not-speak-name/
He starts out so well. Then about 2/3 of the way into the article, he devolves into the 'all digital tech = counterculture = neoliberal' absurdities of Adam Curtis '... Machines of Loving Grace' doco series. Here he is slamming "open science".
"The most important aspect of this brave new world is the reason why its champions would believe that such a sloppy, unintegrated, bottom-up system, beset by waves of ignorant kibitzers would produce anything but white noise."
Um ... Wikipedia?
Turns out the online encyclopedia, which #PhilipMirowski would no doubt claim is also "a sloppy, unintegrated, bottom-up system, beset by waves of ignorant kibitzers", is on average as accurate Britannica, a totalitarian, top-down system edited by anointed experts.
https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/
Why would reimagining science as more of a participatory project not achieve the same thing? More importantly, how is this reclaiming of science from corporatized universities and journals "neoliberal"?
"The paladins of Science 2.0 love to quote the injunction, 'With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,' but that presumes that all science is merely an instrumental task, similar to the building of software."
This guy knows *nothing* about developing software. Which means he isn't qualified to comment with any substance on the pros and cons of open science proposals.
After this bit, he goes on a fantastic rant about all the problems caused by neoliberal interventions in academia, totally missing that the best open science proposals offer anti-neoliberal solutions to all of them.
"It was neoliberals who provided the justification for the strengthening of intellectual property ..."
So rejecting "IP" and wanting to make scientific data and publishing a public commons is neoliberalism? I can't think of anything more self-contradictory.
"Rather than simply foster 'participation,' modern science is chockablock with proprietary websites that aim to reengineer the research process from the ground up."
Like Curtis, Mirowski seems unable to separate actual open source practice from openwashing, the opportunistic but incoherent attempt to trade off of its goodwill. This is sad, because like the proponents of "source available" licenses, he seems to have genuinely good intentions, but fails to understand the context he's working in.
To be clear, I agree with Mirowski that there are neoliberal strategies in place to bend digital technology to their ideology. A recent example is the opportunistic use of the pandemic response lockdowns to roll out new layers of surveillance capitalism, and corporatized government, in what #NaomiKlein calls a "Screen New Deal":
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
But the user freedom and platform cooperatives movements are organizing in opposition to this, not in support of it.
@strypey I think your analysis is spot on. Mirowski sure is always thought-provoking to hear though. He gave a recent interview about how COVID-19 crisis was more of an opportunity than a threat for the neoliberal project. You might find it interesting if you haven't seen it: https://soundcloud.com/poltheoryother/85-never-let-a-serious-crisis-go-to-waste-w-philip-mirowski
