Science & Tech Quote by Michael Shermer

Shermer’s line is an evangelist pitch for science as a social technology, not just a lab method. The real “power” isn’t microscopes or equations; it’s the publicness of results, the way findings can be inspected, replicated, attacked, and improved. By framing open publication as science’s engine, he’s implicitly demoting prestige, gatekeeping, and proprietary secrecy to obstacles rather than features. The punch is that the Internet changes the material economics that once justified those obstacles: when dissemination is no longer limited by paper, printing presses, and mailing lists, the old scarcity story collapses.

The subtext is a critique of the legacy publishing regime that charges rent on access to knowledge largely produced by publicly funded researchers. Shermer’s wording treats “price of paper” as a polite stand-in for a broader toll system: subscription paywalls, slow editorial pipelines, and the career incentives that lock scientists into closed journals even when the marginal cost of sharing is effectively zero. He’s also gesturing at a democratizing ideal - anyone, anywhere, can read and respond - while leaving unspoken the messy trade-offs that arrived with digital abundance: information overload, predatory journals, and the fact that “open” can shift costs onto authors through fees.

Contextually, it’s a statement from the post-1990s open-access era, when the Internet turned publication from a physical constraint into a political one. Shermer isn’t just describing a technological shift; he’s arguing that science’s legitimacy depends on aligning its norms with the medium’s possibilities. If knowledge can travel at near-zero cost, then making it scarce starts to look less like tradition and more like betrayal.