Sustainable Musicology

(© Sustainable Musicology)

The Unsustainable Fossil Model of Knowledge

The current academic system resembles a fossil-based model.

It relies on internal consumption. It produces a growing mass of residues. And it gradually exhausts the very resource on which it depends: credibility.

For a long time, this model has appeared not only viable, but even necessary. The expansion of publications, the refinement of evaluation mechanisms, the increasing specialization of disciplines have been interpreted as signs of vitality. In reality, they may indicate something else.

A system is sustainable not because it produces more, but because it can sustain what it produces.

In this sense, much of contemporary academic output behaves like fossil energy. It is extracted, processed, and consumed within a closed circuit. Articles are written, reviewed, published, cited, and quickly replaced by new ones. The process is continuous, but the accumulation is largely inert. What remains is not knowledge that circulates, but a sediment of materials that are rarely reactivated.

The analogy is not merely descriptive. Fossil systems are efficient in the short term, but structurally limited. They depend on finite resources, they generate waste, and they tend to reinforce their own logic of extraction. Academic production follows a similar pattern. The incentive structures that sustain it — evaluation metrics, publication requirements, institutional rankings — do not simply measure activity. They orient it.

The result is a form of productivity that is internally coherent but externally fragile.

Peer review, in this context, does not function as an independent mechanism of validation. It operates within the same system that it is supposed to regulate. The criteria of evaluation tend to reproduce existing paradigms, to favor conformity over risk, and to reward alignment with established agendas. What is produced is therefore not only knowledge, but legitimacy.

At the same time, the durability of knowledge is increasingly uncertain. Digital infrastructures create the impression of permanence, but in practice much of what is published is rarely revisited, reused, or even read. The system ensures visibility at the moment of publication, not persistence over time.

This is the paradox: an ever-growing production of knowledge accompanied by a progressive weakening of its long-term impact.

If the fossil model is unsustainable in the environmental domain, it is for similar reasons that it becomes unsustainable in the epistemological one. It consumes resources — intellectual, institutional, and symbolic — at a rate that exceeds its capacity to regenerate meaningful knowledge.

What would a renewable model of knowledge look like?

Not a system that produces less, but one that produces differently. A system in which knowledge is not only generated, but also transmitted, reinterpreted, and reused. A system that values durability over immediacy, and responsibility over output.

This implies a shift from accumulation to selection, from internal validation to open confrontation, from procedural legitimacy to intellectual accountability.

It also implies accepting that not everything needs to be published, and that not everything that is published contributes equally to knowledge.

The transition from a fossil to a renewable model is not a matter of reforming individual practices. It concerns the structure of the system itself.

A system that feeds on its own outputs cannot sustain itself indefinitely.

At some point, it stops producing knowledge.

It produces only its own continuation.