Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ing has been going through some socio-​​philosopho-​​technical rough spots in the last few weeks: techno-​​philosophical prob­lems cop­ing with hacked-​​together kludgy legacy code­bases and grow­ing fea­tu­ri­tis, sociotech­ni­cal chal­lenges involv­ing cen­tral­ized vs. col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­nity man­age­ment and moti­vat­ing vol­un­teer par­tic­i­pants to help bal­ance the sev­eral stages of pro­duc­tion, and… well some philo­soph­i­cal issues I’ve brought up in the com­mu­nity forums that haven’t gone over very well. Stuff not quite involv­ing the words “stu­pid” and “dan­ger­ous”, but close.

Over­all, a stage of unrest and aus­ter­ity mea­sures, clas­sic insti­tu­tional infight­ing between oli­garchy and new blood, revis­it­ing old con­ver­sa­tions in an attempt to pro­mote con­flict­ing agen­das. And a huge struc­tural cat­a­stro­phe poised to hap­pen when all the work has backed up in the queues wait­ing for the more advanced, low-​​production qualified-​​volunteers-​​only “later rounds” of the workflow.

And today we’re in the New York Times.

Inso­far as any­body reads the NYT who cares, peo­ple will prob­a­bly poke their heads in to see what’s what. I sus­pect “unpre­pared for the com­ing inun­da­tion” would sum up the state of DP. Just what we need is a bunch of smart, intel­lec­tual, cos­mopoli­tan, lit­er­ate read­ers to come along and under­mine our factory-​​inspired ad hoc tis­sue of ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive social norms with their——

Hold on.… Maybe it is just what we need. [Cf. “philo­soph­i­cal’, above.}

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