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You know who is to blame for trans madness by name (off the top of my head Rachel Levine had a pivotal impact on WPATH's removal of age guidelines). You could easily find out who to blame when the American Anthropology Association says something batshit.
What you mean, I think, is that you can't hold them accountable. But that's not just because they're obscure.
It cuts both ways: Elon Musk isn't accountable to you either. The AAA at least has to pretend to hold to some code of conduct because that is what allegedly justifies the outsized power bequeathed to them.
An organization with set of norms, traditions and procedures meant to direct people towards a goal over extended periods of time?
I know what you're getting at. I don't think an accretion of Twitter reposters make a good institution.
Who is to blame for the trans madness took years to get 'unearthed' in a publicly accessible way. Prior to 2016 you could not find any tangible info on what was happening and why beyond /pol/ schizos talking about John Money and what books the Germans had been burning in the 1930's. By the same token you can not easily find out who is to blame for the AAA spiral into insanity. The ousting of Carleton Coon is just the tip of the iceberg and 99.9% of people don't even know who that is.
To the extent the AAA needs to pretend to hold to some sort of code of conduct, so does Elon. People make fun of him online if he doesn't. The H1B/Vivek debacle is a great example. Or when he pretended to be good at video games. Even if that amounts to nothing, it's at least transparent. Elon can be yelled at personally. The AAA presents no such target for the public. It only has to pretend to maintain the disguise of sensibility to the public and to please their 'masters', who are more or less completely hidden. If it is ever attacked by the public it can hide behind the mass of media and academia that are all running the same playbook to please the same 'masters'.
Neither do I. But when the alternative is mind bending insanity from people who have made it a career to look sensible to fool the gullible I choose to pick my own poison and sort my own substack subscriptions based on a more primitive but holistic human approach, rather than pretend that there exists some 'system' of science do gooders that receive grants from heaven and are therefore definitely not in the tank for whatever is funding their existence.
To put it differently: Lift the veil on the 'systems' and it's just the left wing version of cringe permanently online right wingers. But instead of scientific racism, misogyny with anime profile pics you get feel good humanism, misandry and a LinkedIn profile.
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