Eira TanseyDecided that effective immediately upon a request for a review of an academic manuscript, I will no longer be a manuscript reviewer for a fully paywalled journal unless I already have access to it through a professional association. I no longer work in academia, and so the gift economy of peer review already is difficult for me to justify in my current role, but the fact that I can no longer access journals due to institutional paywalls is all the more reason to withhold my labor.
Also: I fucking hate the tenor, style, language, and pseudo-authority of most academic writing. But the largest crime of most academic writing is that it's BORING. I'd rather offer to be a second pair of eyes for a friend writing an explosive blog post than something that might get a handful of citations on Google Scholar over ten years.
Anyway, once again as someone who is now outside of academia, I maintain that _THE_ most interesting intellectual discourse is happening outside of academia, often in newsletters and podcasts. A lot of people with the most interesting or thoughtful or well researched intellectual projects are ex-academics or failed PhDs. They are adjacent to the world of academia but not in it. I feel like a perfect example of what I'm talking about is the Know Your Enemy podcast.