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 that what is relevant now is found and valued while also allowing those papers in niche ﬁelds or in areas that have yet to gain any prominence to be found, if and only if the seeker desires. In this mode of post-publication review, everything would be assessed, but it would be done after the fact and the exclusion of material would not be a permanent pre-silencing, but rather a process of continuous community consensus. There are a couple of assumptions that underpin this mode. Such a system would rely upon the correct translation of the community will by software and also upon the continued participation of academics; voting systems for article/book prominence must be hardened against gaming and academics would need to be engaged enough to signal value. Of course, there is no guarantee that the peer-review criterion of ‘technical soundness’, however translated, would be free of abuse in itself, but this could be a step in the direction of militating against some of the perceived failings of blind review. Hurdles, nonetheless, remain, especially because there are also no current incentive systems within the academy that adequately value peer review, especially in the sense of an open, post-publication mode.

To close this section, however, it is worth once more referring to Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the most lucid thinker of these problems for the humanities to date. In her seminal book on the subject, Planned Obsolescence, Fitzpatrick systematically interrogates humanities’ peer-review practices in the age of the digital and concludes that what is required is a mode that is less certain of the merits of ‘the stability that we’ve long assumed in the print universe’ and one that is more adaptive to generative possibilities.12 What Fitzpatrick addresses, in essence, is the problem of the fundamentally anti-collaborative nature of humanities research in most cases. At present, review is not usually a community endeavour but rather an activity that expects to see a ﬁnal artefact in which no traces of the construction remain visible, in much the same way as I have traced some of the problems of anonymity here. Experiments such as McKenzie Wark’s collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book on his 2007 Gamer Theory suggest, however, that while an online collaborative model currently solicits sub-optimal levels of participation, there can be merit in the process.13 Indeed, a draft of Fitzpatrick’s own book was ﬁrst published through the CommentPress system,