This wasn’t an email I wanted to write because this belongs in a 120 page physical book that people need to re-read over and over again.
(I’m still writing it)
But I’m gonna give you the TL;DR version.
So grab a drink and prepare your eyeballs, cause this might be the most important email you read if you don’t want to lose your sanity while the world gargles on the robo-balls of big tech and all that.
I’ll preface this and say that again, I’m not strictly against technology or even AI, but the generative side which is mainly being schilled…
That’s the bit I’m against.
The industry that has happily engaged in the largest scale IP theft in recorded human history seem to be getting away with intellectual murder and that shit is not good on my watch…
Thing is, It is incredibly easy to look at the current landscape and the online space as a whole.
If you look social at social media. It’s flooded with prompt engineers and people treating chatgpt like it’s a whole personality trait.
And when you look at that. It’s like deep and rigorous thought is dead.
Like it was dragged behind the shed and we just two tapped it right into the skull…
I wrote an email about the decline of the literary bloke and honestly, that’s the real part that I’m mourning.
If you look at Hemingway, Bukowski, Lewis etc. They were the classic public intellectual who engaged with society through sweeping prose, cultural critique, and nuance.
And I still believe it’s a valid loss.
But it is important to separate the AI grifter…
(who is just chasing the latest gold rush and collectively they all don’t have two brain cells to rub together.)
From the actual neo-intellectual though…
It pisses me off because it feels like nobody cares about real world problems because the loudest voices in the room are currently selling tech optimism snake oil.
But if you look past the bullshit grift, the rise of the modern, multidisciplinary thinker, “neo-intellectual” is actually a massive upgrade for how we solve complex problems going forward.
And well, is this going to be perfect? I don’t know. I’ve not sat down long enough to think about it in detail but I have observed it in a lot of the spaces where the Guru’s are just peddling bullshit and neatly packaged platitudes… (Yesterday’s email)
The shift starts to happen when we look at rhetoric to reality.
The classic literary intellectual was a master of persuasion. They could win a debate or shape public opinion purely through the beauty of their prose and the sharpness of their wit, even if their underlying grasp of economics, science, or policy was flawed.
The neo-intellectual operates differently.
They are the data journalists, the deep-dive video essayists, the specialised Substack writers, and the open-source researchers.
(I do love Substack and frankly I’m pissed that I killed my own Substack when I was nearing around 8k readers)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still gonna be a sucker for prose. I’m always reading the old classics and trying to get into the mind of those writers and thinkers.
But if we’re going to take on the neo-intellectual identity and make that shift. We’ll be demanding receipts and not just the fancy prose…
Today’s thinkers are forced to be interdisciplinary. You cannot write a widely respected essay on the housing crisis today just by philosophising about the “soul of the city” or you will be immediately fact checked by urban planners and economists online.
The neo-intellectual has to back up their rhetoric with rigorous data, making the conversation much more anchored in reality and the thing is.
I’m tired of having to make sure some random Karen doesn’t try and dump on the content because she missed her spinning class.
Fuck that noise.
There’s also the decline of the gatekeeper.
For a long time, engaging in “high-level” thought required access to elite institutions or specific, expensive print subscriptions.
Today, a 22-year-old with a Wi-Fi connection can watch a rigorously researched, three hour video essay on macroeconomics or geopolitical history for free.
Yes, the format has changed, but the depth is actually far more accessible to the average person than it was in 1990.
(Yes I prefer the olden days of multiple library visits and waiting for Friday so we could jump online on the “old internet” to do research)
But come on. Nowadays there’s literally no excuse to not go deep on actual content that makes people think.
Then there’s the next step which means we need to become hyper focused on the mechanics…
Yes I did say that nobody thinks about real-world problems anymore, but the opposite is true of the actual neo-intellectuals.
Because they are less concerned with abstract cultural theory and more concerned with systems, they are obsessively focused on tangible issues.
The modern intellectual sphere is dominated by debates on YIMBYism (housing policy), energy infrastructure, effective altruism, and climate technology.
They are looking at the nuts and bolts of how society runs, rather than just writing poetry about its decline.
The “literary bloke” was brilliant at telling us how to feel about the world.
But the neo-intellectual is much better equipped to actually figure out how the world works.
The challenge isn’t that deep thinking has vanished.
We just have to actively curate your feeds to filter out the AI hustlers and find the real conversations happening online.
So will this apply to you artistically and creatively?
Yes. 200000%
Whatever it is you share. You need to go deep. You need to argue and be passionate and tear into people if you know they are wrong.
The current influx of people are so happy to be loud AND wrong because they have an LLM as their personality, that if you know more about something, have the receipts and also the balls to be loud about it,
Maybe just maybe you’ll grab a few people by the eyeballs and get them to truly think about it things.
Anyways. This email is getting long enough and I’ll end up going deep into this in the book I’m writing.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. The decline of the literary bloke, if you want to read the original post…