Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) 

The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how one weird guy in an office somewhere figured out a thing that nobody else noticed. And you might find yourself thinking: these are the same books. Spiritually, structurally, thematically identical to the books these same men were writing in 2008. In 2003. In some cases, in 1997.

The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this: take a subject that seems simple, complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense, then resolve the tension with a tidy insight that flatters the reader's intelligence while confirming something they sort of already believed. The ten thousand hours rule. The tipping point. The power of snap judgments, except actually you should think more carefully, except actually your gut is right. It's intellectual comfort food, and there's nothing inherently wrong with comfort food, but we've been eating the same meal for two decades now and the chef keeps insisting he's serving something new.

This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character. 

It’s a broader problem.

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since. 

These are the arena rock bands of ideas: acts who had one or two genuine hits, who now tour the same material endlessly, who perform to audiences of business travelers and conference attendees who want to hear the classics one more time. And we seem to have no punk rock waiting in the wings to tear them down. No new movement of rough, vital, angry thinkers ready to call bullshit on the whole enterprise. Our intellectual underground, such as it is, consists of Substack, a platform funded by some of the most establishment venture capital imaginable, and podcasts that run for three hours and manage to say less than a single well-constructed paragraph.

I'm not claiming these people have never had good ideas, or that their early work wasn't valuable. Gladwell's "Outliers" was genuinely interesting when it came out. Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" was excellent journalism. David Brooks wrote some thoughtful columns in his day.

The problem is that success in the modern “ideas industry,” such as it is, creates a set of incentives that almost guarantee calcification. Once you've written your airport bestseller, once you've established your brand, once you've secured your sinecure at the New York Times or the speaking circuit or whatever institutional perch you've landed on, the pressure is almost entirely toward repetition. Your audience expects the thing they know you for. Your publisher wants more of what sold last time. The conference organizers who pay $50,000 for a keynote want the hits, not the deep cuts.

What you absolutely do not want to do, if you're in this position, is challenge the people who pay those speaking fees. The specific genius of the Gladwell-Brooks-Lewis school of thought is that it manages to seem iconoclastic while posing no threat whatsoever to established power. Take a David Brooks column about character and humility and ask yourself: who is threatened by this? 

The answer: no one. 

The column flatters its readers (and its sponsors) by implying they're the sort of sophisticated people who care about character and humility, while asking nothing of them and certainly not questioning any of the structural arrangements that determine their lives. 

And now of course we have the David Brooks “situation” - the columnist has appeared in a dump of jovial, elbow-rubbing photos with Jeffrey Epstein and his prat pack, just weeks after publishing a full-throated dismissal of the Epstein files without ever disclosing his own position in the pedophilic financier’s orbit. 

I want to be careful here because appearing in someone's photos doesn't make you guilty of anything, and the guilt-by-association game can get out of hand quickly. But it's worth noting: David Brooks, the man who writes about moral philosophy and community and the importance of character, moves in circles that included Epstein. Presumably Brooks wasn't doing anything nefarious, but that's where prominent people in certain worlds end up. The Aspen Ideas Festival. The TED conference green room. The Davos cocktail parties. These are the spaces where the thinking class mingles with the ruling class, and the relationship is fundamentally symbiotic.

This is what bothers me about the whole enterprise, more than the staleness of the ideas or the repetitiveness of the arguments. It's the social function these folks serve. They exist to translate the prerogatives of power into the language of thoughtfulness. When a tech billionaire wants to feel like their fortune is part of some larger intellectual project, they hire a David Brooks type to write about it. When a corporation wants to seem like it's grappling with deep questions, they bring in a Malcolm Gladwell to tell them that actually their instincts were right all along. When the establishment wants to feel like it's engaging with ideas, it invites these thinkers to its conferences and dinners and puts them on its stages. And the thinkers, in turn, produce work that never genuinely threatens the hand that feeds them.

And so we have a class of professional idea-havers, who've been entirely had by their own ideas, who exist in almost perfect symbiosis with the institutions they're theoretically critiquing. They provide intellectual cover; they receive status, endless column-inches, money, and access. It's a nice arrangement for everyone involved except possibly the reading public, who keep getting fed the same warmed-over insights in ever more ornate Greatest Hits Special Edition Bundles. 

From roughly the mid-twentieth century through the early 2000s, the American intellectual ecosystem (and so the broader western intellectual ecosystem) was shaped heavily by a few key institutions: the prestige press (the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker), the major publishing houses, and the university system. These institutions had their own problems and biases, but they at least maintained a function of selection for a certain level of rigor. Getting a book published by a major house was difficult. Getting a column in the Times was difficult. These barriers created bottlenecks that, whatever their flaws, at least ensured that the people who passed through them had demonstrated some ability to construct an argument.

The internet was supposed to democratize all this, and in some ways it did. But the way it happened created its own pathologies. The first wave of internet intellectualism, roughly 2005-2015, produced some genuinely interesting work. Blogs allowed for a more conversational, exploratory mode of thinking that broke with the constraints of formal publishing. You could follow an idea wherever it led, revise your thinking in public, engage with critics in real time. Some of the best intellectual work of that period happened on blogs, often by people who would never have been published by traditional venues.

But the blog ecosystem didn't evolve into something more robust. It collapsed, got eaten by social media, and was eventually replaced by a combination of podcasts, newsletters, and the social platforms themselves. And each of these replacement formats has significant limitations as a vehicle for serious thinking.

Take podcasts, the most prominent of which is unarguably Joe Rogan's marathon interview show. Rogan is an interesting case: some of his interviews with scientists and thinkers have been genuinely valuable. But the format itself works against depth. A three-hour conversation sounds like it would allow for careful exploration of ideas, but in practice it often does the opposite. The length encourages rambling, the conversational mode encourages agreement and rapport over challenge and critique, and the audio format makes it difficult to engage with complex arguments that might benefit from being written down and studied. You can't fact-check something as easily when it's buried in hour two of a podcast. You can't easily quote and critique a verbal statement the way you can with written text.

And of course, Rogan's audience is enormous, which creates pressure toward accessibility and entertainment. There's nothing wrong with accessibility in principle, but accessibility that maximizes podcast audience numbers tends to favor the provocative over the precise, and the emotionally resonant over the rigorously correct. The result is pseudo-intellectual culture that has all the signifiers of serious thinking (long conversations, complicated topics, citations of research, Jordan Peterson) without the actual rigor.

I find myself wondering if this is just the inevitable consequence of scale. Serious thinking is inherently a minority pursuit. Most people, understandably, and God above I wish I were among them, don't want to spend their leisure time wrestling with difficult arguments about difficult subjects. They want to be entertained, or at most to have their existing beliefs confirmed in ways that make them feel smart. The mass market for ideas has always favored simplification and flattery over genuine challenge. Maybe what we're seeing now is simply what happens when the technological infrastructure allows that mass market to scale without limit.

But I don't think that's the whole story. There have been moments in American history when genuine intellectual ferment reached a broader public. The 1960s, whatever else you think of them, produced real debates about real ideas that engaged significant portions of the population. The early internet era managed to sustain communities of genuine inquiry that, while not mass phenomena, were accessible to anyone interested. Something specific seems to have gone wrong in the last decade that goes beyond the eternal tension between populism and rigor.

Part of it, I think, is the economics of attention. The old business model for intellectuals involved some combination of university salaries, book advances, and journalism wages. None of these were lucrative, but they at least provided a stable base from which to develop ideas over time. The new economy of ideas is much more directly dependent on attention, which means much more directly incentivized toward whatever captures attention. A provocative tweet performs better than a nuanced argument. A confident hot take generates more engagement than a careful analysis that acknowledges uncertainty. The old system rewarded people who could produce a good book every few years; the new system rewards people who can produce a constant stream of content that keeps audiences engaged.

This helps explain the Rogan phenomenon, but it also explains Substack. Substack is supposed to be the intellectual underground, the alternative to mainstream media, and the place where independent thinkers can build audiences without depending on traditional gatekeepers. And in some ways it works. There are excellent writers on Substack producing work that probably wouldn't find a home in legacy publications. The model of direct subscription support at least theoretically aligns incentives better than advertising.

But I am uncomfortable with Substack as the default standard-bearer for independent thought.

The platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful and connected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. A16z's partners are as establishment as establishment gets: they sit on the boards of major tech companies, they socialize with senators and moguls and Donald Trump and his clan, they're regularly cited as visionary thinkers in the same airports bookstores where you find the Gladwell and Brooks titles. The idea that a platform funded by these people represents some kind of intellectual insurgency is, at minimum, in tension with the actual power dynamics at play.

I'm not suggesting there's some conspiracy here, that a16z is using Substack to promote certain viewpoints or suppress others. I don't think that's how it works, or at least it’s not how it works yet. The influence is more structural and subtle. Substack's investors want the platform to succeed, and success in the current media environment means attracting the kind of writers who can build large audiences. Large audiences, in the current environment, tend to come from a certain kind of content: culture war commentary, contrarianism that flatters particular demographics, lifestyle content for the professional class, and yes, the occasional genuinely original thinker who happens to be accessible enough to go viral.

The result is that Substack's version of independent thought looks suspiciously like the establishment thought it's supposed to be replacing, just with different political valences. Where the old establishment was center-left liberal, the Substack counter-establishment leans toward heterodox centrism that's critical of progressive excesses while being very careful not to threaten the tech industry or the investor class. Bari Weiss, one of Substack's highest-profile writers, is a perfect example. She positions herself as a brave truth-teller taking on the illiberal left, but her actual analysis rarely if ever questions the structural arrangements that benefit people in her social position. She's David Brooks in different packaging: iconoclasm that poses no threat to power, courage that risks nothing.

The point isn't that everyone on Substack is a sellout or that the platform is irredeemably compromised. The point is that the thing that was supposed to be our scrappy underground alternative to the dinosaurs, turns out to be funded by the same class of people who fund everything else and tends to reproduce similar dynamics. We don't have a genuine intellectual counterculture. We have a pseudo-counterculture that performs the aesthetics of independence while remaining thoroughly embedded in establishment networks.

Why doesn't something come along to tear all this down? That's what I keep asking myself. Historically, intellectual establishments get overthrown by new movements that point out the emperor has no clothes. The Enlightenment displaced scholasticism. Romanticism rebelled against Enlightenment rationalism. Modernism rejected Victorian conventions. There's usually some group of young thinkers somewhere who see through the pretensions of their elders and build something new. Where are those people now?

One possibility: they exist but I'm just not seeing them. Maybe there's a vital intellectual underground happening on Discord servers or in zines or in scenes I know nothing about. 

Another possibility: the current media environment makes it genuinely harder for new intellectual movements to emerge and gain traction. The attention economy advantages established brands. The economics of content creation push toward rapid production rather than patient development. The social media platforms that could (theoretically) serve as distribution channels for new ideas are optimized for outrage and engagement rather than careful thought. And the venture capital model that funds new media platforms has its own biases about what kind of content is worth supporting.

For a new intellectual movement to emerge now, you'd need a group of thinkers developing original ideas, which takes time and needs some degree economic support. You'd need venues for them to publish and reach an audience. You'd need the audience to have enough patience and attention span to engage with complex new arguments. And you'd need the new movement to somehow compete with the enormous content production of established brands while having none of their resources or reach.

The old model, imperfect as it was, provided some infrastructure for this. Universities, even with all their problems, gave young thinkers time to develop their ideas before having to monetize them. Small magazines provided venues for experimental work. The economics of publishing meant that one successful book could fund years of subsequent thinking. The new model provides almost none of this. If you want to be a public intellectual now, you need to be constantly producing content from day one. There's no development league, no minor system where you can hone your ideas out of the spotlight. You're either generating engagement or you're invisible.

This might be part of why the pseudo-counterculture looks so much like the establishment it claims to oppose. The people who succeed in the new media environment are the people who figure out how to work its mechanics, which selects for skills that are only loosely correlated with genuine intellectual originality. You need to be good at social media, good at building a personal brand, good at identifying topics that will generate engagement. These are real skills, but they're not the same skills that lead to developing genuinely new ideas. And so we end up with a "counterculture" that looks like the culture it's supposedly countering because the same selection pressures apply to both.

I keep thinking about punk rock as a comparison. Arena rock in the 1970s had become bloated, complacent, and disconnected from audiences. The bands were playing stadiums, their albums were overproduced epics, the flute was reaching its pop-cultural peak, and the music had lost whatever urgency it once had. Then punk came along, stripped everything back to basics, and revitalized the whole form. Three chords and the truth, as someone put it.

But punk didn't emerge from nothing. It developed in specific scenes (New York, London, DC, Brisbane) with specific economics (cheap venues, independent labels, zines) that allowed a new sound to develop outside the mainstream industry. The majors didn't sign punk bands at first because punk didn't fit their model. This independence was crucial to punk's development as a distinct movement with its own aesthetic and values.

What's the equivalent now for intellectual culture? Where is the scene where new ideas can develop outside the attention economy? Where are the cheap venues, the independent labels, the zines? The internet was supposed to provide all this, and for a while it sort of did, but the consolidation of platforms and the winner-take-all dynamics of attention have recreated something like the arena rock era without creating the conditions for punk to emerge.

Possibility number three: the intellectual work of our age is happening in academic corners that don't show up on Twitter or Substack. Perhaps it's happening in non-English languages and traditions that I can't access. Perhaps it's happening in applied fields (biology, AI, economics) rather than in public intellectual discourse per se. IE: there are brilliant people doing genuinely original work, just not in the media spaces I've been describing.

But that's a dispiriting thought in its own way, because it suggests a permanent disconnection between serious thinking and public discourse. The arena rock dinosaurs would keep touring the same tired material for audiences of conference attendees and airport book buyers, while the work of having thoughts and poking them happens in specialized venues that never reach the broader public. We'd have a public sphere filled with Gladwells and Brookses and Rogans, trafficking in ideas that were stale a decade ago, while the people doing genuinely interesting work remain invisible.

Is this worse than what came before? I honestly don't know. The old public intellectual culture had its own pathologies. It was too narrow, too focused on a particular set of prestige institutions. Maybe the current situation, with all its problems, at least offers more points of entry and more diversity of voices. A lot of people who never would have been published by the Atlantic or the New Yorker now have audiences on Substack and YouTube. That's worth something, even if the overall quality of discourse hasn't improved.

Still: the economics of attention favor constant production over depth. The platform dynamics favor engagement over accuracy. The venture capital model favors scale over sustainability. None of this can continue indefinitely. Something will change, either because the economic models collapse or because someone figures out how to build something better or because audiences simply get tired of consuming the same intellectual comfort food year after year. I love Burger King. I can’t keep eating Burger King. Christ, will someone give me something other than Burger King. 

The thing that keeps bothering me, and I'll end on this, is the flattery. What all these figures have in common, despite any differing politics and subjects, is that they never really challenge their audiences. They might seem to challenge them, might present ideas as counterintuitive or uncomfortable, but the actual experience of reading them is always reassuring. You finish a Gladwell book feeling clever. You finish a Brooks column feeling virtuous. You finish a Peterson lecture feeling understood. You finish a Rogan podcast feeling entertained and maybe a little smarter. What you never feel is genuinely confronted with something that makes you question your assumptions or change your behavior.

Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see. The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this. They afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted, as the old journalism saying goes. Our current crop // slop does the opposite. They comfort the comfortable and flatter the unflattering, and they've been doing it for so long that we've forgotten to expect anything else.

I don't have a solution to offer. If I did, I'd probably be on some speaking circuit myself, collecting fees for explaining my three-step program to revitalize intellectual culture. 

(I know me, and I know the cost of my rent.) 

The best I can do is name what I see and hope that naming it contributes to the conditions that might eventually produce something better.