The Peer Review Experiment: The Root Failure of the Modern Knowledge System

Title: The Peer Review Experiment: The Root Failure of the Modern Knowledge System Description:This essay reframes peer review not as a timeless safeguard of scientific rigor but as a mid‑20th‑century institutional experiment whose underlying assumptions—expert neutrality, disciplinary coherence, and methodological stability—no longer hold under contemporary conditions. Drawing on evidence from mass retractions, compromised review processes, reviewer overload, and the structural rigidity of disciplinary boundaries, the paper demonstrates that peer review produces institutional legitimacy rather than epistemic reliability. By analyzing epistemic drift, category lock‑in, institutional narrowing, and the economic dependencies embedded in academic publishing, the essay shows how the weaknesses of peer review cascade upward into the entire knowledge system: publishing, indexing, citation economies, evidence‑based policy, and institutional authority. The emergence of agentic AI, which retrieves coherence and cross‑domain integration, makes the fragility of peer review newly visible by contrast. The essay argues that exposing the root experiment reveals the need for new epistemic infrastructures capable of integrating knowledge across domains. SignalRupture provides one such architecture. Keywords: peer review; epistemic drift; institutional narrowing; retractions; academic publishing; governance of knowledge; category collapse; post‑web epistemology; SignalRupture.