Bourbaki? Sure, blame the man. But the writings of Weil, Eilenberg,
Grothendieck, Tate, and Godement remain a proper treasure trove of
intelligible thought. All else equal, I get your point. I remember the
excitement I felt when I found the complete works of Bourbaki in the RLM
library, sat down under the fluorescent light, and discovered, yes, a
maximally compressed message.

I’d actually recommend a journal where reviewers meet with the author. The
author is given a polygraph and asked to describe the thought or finding.
The work is accepted on the grounds that the author believes their own
work; the reviewers exist as a repository, a sort of RAID system for the
idea. Of course, I have never been an academic, only hazed by them, so I’m
not sure what I can offer. I suppose I fall into the camp that wouldn’t
mind nearly all of them pushed into a volcano somewhere.

To my mind, the problem is an old one, only exacerbated to nose-bleed
levels in the present time: too many serfs chasing too few jobs, and the
problem of search. The playbook was forged during the search-engine wars of
the 2000s, when it was to the benefit of Google, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and the
like to flood the web with informational cyclic-AMP in the form of junk
pages. Only the most resourced, with the best algorithms, would survive.
Now all search is mediated by one of these institutions. Similarly for
LinkedIn, Indeed, and the modern world of adversarial hiring: employers
receive endless floods of non-applicants; job hunters are alienated, via
ATS, from finding a face with whom to plead their case. I’m not sure who
will win the employment search wars; my current bet is on Workday, SAP, or
Oracle. All these years later, and search still isn’t solved.

To paraphrase Nolan’s Odysseus: “We have broke Zeus’ law and now are
plunged into a world without trust.”
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