I suspect this is probably doubly true for women and all people of color more than it is for white menā¦
Iām happy to see billionairehood abolished, but there are plenty of billionaires spending plenty of money on at least pro-science causes. Would certainly be a better use of Bill Gates educational investments, and still in line with his goals.
Well, thereās the question: why hasnāt anyone?
Maybe, but we should be entirely skeptical of their motives. Does the Gates Foundation support education just to improve it, or because it gives MS an opening for selling software to schools? And can we disentangle the two organizations? Much like the robber barons of old used chartiable giving to whitewash their wealth and to ensure the state did not step into various kinds of regulation on labor issues, can we really trust the people whose wealth is being used in a particular way to be entirely altrustic here? Gates (or whoever) might have the best of intentions, but heās still going to be bringing his interests to the table that we canāt control or account for.
When public funds are being spent on something, we have a much more robust ability as voters to vet how that money is being spent, because itās directly in our interests. We canāt do that with Gates or the like. We have literally no say in how that money is spent.
We collect taxes for a reason, and one of those reasons is about redistributing funding for projects for all of us to access.
Likely because the people who could do it, academics, are already overwhelmed with work to do our own work and that of the university where we are employed - so time is a major factor here. Gaining a TT job and then getting tenure is an exhausting and often demoralizing process that takes the steam out of many people. There are also deeply entrenched interests in academic publishing that many academics materially benefit from, which makes building an alternative less attractive (the system works for enough academics that they donāt feel the need to rock the boat and are loathed to give up their hard won privileges to do so).
I certainly donāt know the answer but I suspect itās that in the current society that exists in the USā¦ you need money whether you should or shouldnāt, and co-ops, especially those advocating against capitalism, suck at making enough money bc poor ppl can only empty their wallets so many times before one of them dies of something. At the same time money making ventures also tend to suck at doing things that will always cost and never return value.
Well, unless theyāre ādisruptingā an industry that has decades of worker protections built into laws and regulations. In that case they can set as much venture capital money on fire as they want (see: Uber, Airbnb, Grubhub, etc.).
You know, it occurs to me someone has. They decided to build their alternative in a completely different way, though, and ended up with wikipedia. Which is, you know, pretty useful in a lot of ways, though with its own alternative limitations.
Iād add that many academics who could champion this kind of thing would not, because it would go against the class interests.
I disagree to an extentā¦ yes, itās considered an alternative means of collating knowledge, but some of the problems include people who arenāt experts in their field shaping the text based on grounds of ideology, not where the actual knowledge leads you. Wikipedia has some great value, but it just would not work as any kind of a textbook, honestly.
For specifically textbooks, if I get a choice for my classes, I will always go for this option:
It is a textbook, itās open source, freely available, has a relatively low-cost print version ($25 per vol, which even if you buy both is still cheaper than most textbooks from Stanford Uni press), and it was written by actual historians working collaboratively (yes, that does matter, IMHO).
Oh dear, a literary allusion
From the WP article I think this means āburn it all downā?
That link doesnāt even mention one of the most troubling long-term COVID effects, the widely-reported ābrain fogā. Not being able to think clearly must be terrifying, but itās also probably the symptom most likely to be dismissed or disbelieved.
No, I am a much more sinister person than that.
Sort of what I meant: the people who made an alternative did things so differently, it is something else entirely. 
Hm, who to trust? The doctor whoās been in charge of preventing pandemics through several administrations, or the Neuroradiologist who was on Fox. Tough call.
I think I have to go with Dr. Bananas. I mean, just look at him!
He is the standard by which all things are measured.
I hadnāt heard thatā¦
