Why Academic Journals Can’t Be Blast First Records
Suppose, for a moment, that academic journals solved the problem diagnosed in Part One. Suppose editors could admit—openly, unapologetically—that they curate. Suppose they could move fast, reject misfit work without ritual, and act on taste rather than pretending to be neutral clearinghouses for “scholarship in general.”
Even then, the system would still fail.
Because the deeper problem isn’t just selection. It’s tolerance for friction. And academic journals are structurally incapable of surviving the kind of friction that important work reliably produces.
To see this, it helps to move from Homestead to Blast First.
Blast First Records didn’t just sign bands that fit a sensibility. It signed bands that caused trouble. Sonic Youth, Big Black, the Butthole Surfers—these weren’t merely unconventional acts. They were abrasive, polarizing, frequently misunderstood, and often hostile to the expectations of audiences, venues, and critics alike. Their value was inseparable from the discomfort they generated.
That discomfort wasn’t an unfortunate side effect. It was the signal.
Blast First could operate that way because its mandate was clear and narrow: release records we believe in and let the consequences unfold. If a release alienated listeners, confused critics, or failed commercially, the label absorbed the cost. There were no appeals. No investigations. No obligation to demonstrate balance or anticipate every objection in advance. The catalog’s coherence emerged over time, across releases, rather than being justified exhaustively within each one.
Academic journals cannot operate like this—not because editors lack nerve, but because the institutional mandate forbids it.
Journals are designed to minimize antagonism, not absorb it. Their legitimacy depends on procedural defensibility: fairness, balance, contextualization, and preemptive justification. A Blast First record could be wrong, abrasive, or unreadable for years and still be defensible as a curatorial bet. A journal article that produces sustained controversy is treated as a failure of process, regardless of its eventual importance.
This difference in mandate matters more than taste ever could.
Where Blast First treated friction as evidence that something was happening, academic publishing treats friction as a liability to be mitigated. Complaints trigger reviews. Strong reactions invite scrutiny. Editors are asked not “does this matter?” but “did we follow procedure?” The safest publication is not the one that opens new terrain, but the one that offends no one in particular.
This is why even honest curation wouldn’t be enough.
Important work almost always creates problems—not technical problems like incorrect citations or flawed methods, but structural ones. It challenges foundational assumptions. It unsettles settled debates. It threatens professional identities and institutional investments. Often, it cannot fully explain itself in the language the field currently recognizes. Its contribution becomes legible only later, once the conversation shifts.
Academic journals are structurally hostile to this kind of latency.
The modern academic economy demands rapid legibility. Citations must accrue within a few years. “Impact” must be demonstrable on short timelines. Tenure clocks do not allow for “this will matter in 2035.” Grant applications require significance to be articulated in advance, not discovered in retrospect. Even journals themselves are evaluated on metrics that privilege immediate uptake over slow-burning influence.
Blast First could release something that wouldn’t make sense for a decade because its legitimacy did not depend on immediate comprehension. Academic journals do not have that luxury. They must justify their decisions in real time, to multiple stakeholders, under conditions of constant audit.
The result is what might be called the teeth-removal process.
Peer review, as currently practiced, does not merely filter for quality; it systematically defangs work that might otherwise matter. Reviewers ask authors to anticipate and address all major objections, contextualize claims within existing literature, soften strong assertions, balance arguments with counterarguments, and demonstrate comprehensive engagement with the field. These demands are reasonable for incremental work. For genuinely disruptive work, they are corrosive.
By the time a paper has anticipated every objection and hedged every claim, whatever risk it once carried has usually been neutralized. What remains is documentation rather than provocation. Conversation rather than intervention. Cold oatmeal, carefully prepared.
This is not reviewer malice. It is mandate compliance.
Blast First would never have told Sonic Youth to make their work more accessible, more balanced, or more deferential to existing noise-rock orthodoxy. Academic journals make exactly those demands, because they are obligated to demonstrate that no reasonable reader could accuse them of partiality or irresponsibility. Controversy is not evidence of value; it is evidence of exposure.
This produces the everything-to-everyone trap.
Academic journals insist on universality. They claim to serve “the field” as a whole, even when the field is internally fragmented and contested. They deny having a sensibility, even while enforcing one implicitly. Because they cannot admit identity, they cannot optimize for coherence. Because they cannot optimize for coherence, they must process everything. Because they must process everything, they reward the work that offends least.
Blast First never pretended to be for everyone. That clarity made selection fast and meaningful. Academic journals pretend neutrality, which means selection happens anyway—but slowly, opaquely, and without accountability.
This is also why AI-generated text overwhelmingly manifests as blandness rather than provocation.
Even if a scholar used AI to develop a genuinely challenging argument—one that refused to soften its claims or anticipate every objection—where would it go? The venues that carry career weight are precisely the venues least capable of absorbing that kind of friction. So rational actors produce work that fits the venues that exist: careful, contextualized, defensible, incremental.
The venues that matter professionally are hostile to the work that matters intellectually.
Small heterodox journals, working paper series, blogs, and books sometimes fill the gap—but they rarely count in hiring, tenure, or funding decisions. The system thus teaches its participants a brutal lesson: if you want to survive, don’t make trouble. Make oatmeal.
This is the final irony. Academic publishing is panicking about slop overwhelming its filters, but those filters were designed to eliminate exactly the kind of work that would stand out against slop. Spicy jook gets rejected for being insufficiently balanced, inadequately contextualized, or too strong in its claims. Bland oatmeal passes because it satisfies every procedural demand.
AI makes both cheaper to produce. Only one survives.
Which brings us back to the deeper contradiction.
Academic journals cannot be Gerard Cosloy because they cannot admit they are choosing. And they cannot be Blast First because even if they admitted it, they could not survive the friction that important work creates. The system cannot choose honestly, and it cannot survive honest choice.
This is not a call for braver editors or better filters. It is a diagnosis of institutional incapacity. The architecture of academic publishing was built to defend legitimacy under scarcity. Under abundance, that architecture selects for defensibility over discovery, procedure over provocation, and immediate legibility over lasting importance.
AI did not cause this. It merely made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
The kitchen was never serving jook. It was serving oatmeal—carefully prepared, nutritionally adequate, and safe for everyone. AI just made it abundant enough that the diners finally noticed, and started asking why no one remembers what food is supposed to taste like.