Satirising papers
I have no talent for writing satire. It’s not the kind of thing that much of the academy indulges in, at least not publicly. But I have been moderately impressed by an AI chatbot’s capacity to take formal writing and satirise it. My fondness for the work of Douglas Adams offered a lazy way to dabble.
I came across a paper concerning STS (Science & Technology Studies) that has a touch of fun while it poses interesting questions about STS.
I prompted:
Write a satirical version of this paper in the style of Douglas Adams
and uploaded the paper: Gül, Z., Harb, J. I., Shaik Ali, M., & Pandian, S. (2024, 2025/01/01). Doing STS Now: Of Hackers and Angels in Technoscience. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 50(1), 3-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241298009
The combination of GenAI to summarise coupled with the fun of Adams generated, at least for me, a different sense of engagement. The key points were not lost but were embellished, Adams-style to points of absurdity as you would expect. I wonder if serious written work might be complemented with an accompanying reworked version in the style of one’s favourite satirist.
Title: Doing STS Badly: Of Hackers, Angels, and Poorly Designed Conference Wi-Fi
Chapter 1: The Discipline That Isn’t a Discipline
The story of STS (Science and Technology Studies) begins not with a bang, but with a faintly apologetic cough in the corner of a borrowed lecture hall. Imagine a field that calls itself a field but, when asked to define its boundaries, promptly dissolves into a puddle of interdisciplinarity. “STS doesn’t exist,” one speaker at the 2024 STS School in Singapore declared, sparking an argument so vigorous it nearly consumed the coffee break. “Exactly!” cried another, mistaking this existential crisis for validation. Meanwhile, the catering staff wondered why the attendees kept referring to themselves as hackers when the only thing being hacked was the Wi-Fi password.
STS, you see, is less a discipline and more a vague collection of ideas that loiter suspiciously near the academic buffet table, stealing sandwiches from sociology and anthropology while loudly proclaiming, “We’re different, you know.” It is an intellectual squat—a pop-up field that appropriates the methodologies of other disciplines and rebrands them with enough jargon to sound cutting-edge. This makes STS both thrillingly boundary-breaking and deeply confusing to anyone who thought they’d signed up for a straightforward career in academia.
Chapter 2: Hacking as a Metaphor (and as a Way to Crash PowerPoint)
The term "hacking" in STS was originally meant to convey something noble, like subverting the systems of technoscience for the greater good. In practice, it mostly means taking apart ideas in a way that leaves them in pieces on the floor, much like how a toddler might “hack” a set of Lego instructions. At the STS School, participants were encouraged to think of hacking as a way to “deconstruct and repurpose”—which is academic-speak for breaking things you don’t understand and pretending it’s innovative.
One group, for example, attempted to “hack” the concept of disciplinary expertise by holding a roundtable discussion on whether knowledge is truly knowable. This discussion ended in a 47-minute debate over what “knowable” actually means, which was then summarized in a paper that no one will ever read because it was published in a journal whose title alone requires three breaths to pronounce.
Chapter 3: The Angel Trick, or How to Sound Ethical While Doing the Opposite
One of STS’s favorite party tricks is something called the “angel trick,” a term that sounds vaguely benevolent until you realize it’s just a fancy way of saying “dodging accountability.” The angel trick is what happens when technocrats create a disaster—say, a self-driving car that mistakes pedestrians for shrubbery—and then shrug it off with phrases like “unintended consequences” or “a learning opportunity.”
In academia, the angel trick takes on new and delightful forms. For example, universities often frame exploitative practices like adjunct labor and endless publication demands as “opportunities for growth.” “You’re not underpaid,” they insist. “You’re gaining valuable experience!” It’s the sort of logic that might be found in the diary of an especially cynical angel, perhaps one recently demoted from harp duty.
Chapter 4: Inverting the Angel Trick (With Limited Success)
The solution, STS argues, is to “invert the angel trick,” which essentially means pointing out that the emperor not only has no clothes but is charging others for the privilege of washing them. This is easier said than done, particularly when the emperor controls your research funding. Attempts to invert the angel trick often result in a kind of academic slapstick, where the critique is so laden with footnotes that no one notices the punchline.
For instance, a brave group at the STS School decided to critique the technocratic structures of academic publishing by submitting an intentionally unreadable paper filled with random buzzwords. It was promptly accepted by three journals, one of which awarded it a special mention for “pioneering thought.” The group’s next project—hacking the concept of tenure—was less successful, mostly because no one could agree on whether tenure is a social construct or just a bureaucratic prank.
Chapter 5: Doing STS Badly, But with Style
In the end, the charm of STS lies in its glorious messiness. It is a field that thrives on contradictions, a community of misfits united by their shared love of arguing over the definition of “community.” At its best, it challenges the very foundations of technoscience. At its worst, it produces conference panels so esoteric that even the panelists aren’t entirely sure what they’re discussing.
And yet, for all its flaws, STS persists—perhaps because, in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and angel tricks, there is something oddly comforting about a group of people dedicated to asking questions like “What if we hacked the concept of hacking?” It may not change the world, but it certainly makes for a memorable coffee break.
