Accounting for large language masses: a time capsule

We present the time capsule of an e-mail conversation between the editors and co-editors of this journal that we have painstakingly reconstructed from the data-dust bowl of the late 2020s. Contributions to this conversation illustrate the struggles among journal editors who were dealing with the high number of journal submissions accompanying the arrival of generative AI around that time. They also highlight some of the human eccentricities in figuring out editorial and occupational strategies in a battle for intellectual hegemony, which people of that time will have thought they were losing. Whilst some of their despair is shrouded by the articulation of archaic concerns with efficiency or critical scholarship, the undeniable lostness of the human position we now experience will be particularly obvious to the reader in the more confident-sounding contributions to this historic debate.