----- Forwarded message from Yosem Companys <companys@stanford.edu> ----- Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:52:06 -0700 From: Yosem Companys <companys@stanford.edu> To: Liberation Technologies <liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu> Subject: [liberationtech] Henry Farrell for Democracy Journal: The Tech Intellectuals Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu> http://www.democracyjournal.org/30/the-tech-intellectuals.php?page=all The Tech Intellectuals The good, bad, and ugly among our new breed of cyber-critics, and the economic imperatives that drive them. Henry Farrell A quarter of a century ago, Russell Jacoby lamented the demise of the public intellectual. The cause of death was an improvement in material conditions. Public intellectuals—Dwight Macdonald, I.F. Stone, and their like—once had little choice but to be independent. They had difficulty getting permanent well-paying jobs. However, as universities began to expand, they offered new opportunities to erstwhile unemployables. The academy demanded a high price. Intellectuals had to turn away from the public and toward the practiced obscurities of academic research and prose. In Jacoby’s description, these intellectuals “no longer need[ed] or want[ed] a larger public…. Campuses [were] their homes; colleagues their audience; monographs and specialized journals their media.” Over the last decade, conditions have changed again. New possibilities are opening up for public intellectuals. Internet-fueled media such as blogs have made it much easier for aspiring intellectuals to publish their opinions. They have fostered the creation of new intellectual outlets (Jacobin, The New Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books), and helped revitalize some old ones too (The Baffler, Dissent). Finally, and not least, they have provided the meat for a new set of arguments about how communications technology is reshaping society. These debates have created opportunities for an emergent breed of professional argument-crafters: technology intellectuals. Like their predecessors of the 1950s and ’60s, they often make a living without having to work for a university. Indeed, the professoriate is being left behind. Traditional academic disciplines (except for law, which has a magpie-like fascination with new and shiny things) have had a hard time keeping up. New technologies, to traditionalists, are suspect: They are difficult to pin down within traditional academic boundaries, and they look a little too fashionable to senior academics, who are often nervous that their fields might somehow become publicly relevant. Many of these new public intellectuals are more or less self-made. Others are scholars (often with uncomfortable relationships with the academy, such as Clay Shirky, an unorthodox professor who is skeptical that the traditional university model can survive). Others still are entrepreneurs, like technology and media writer and podcaster Jeff Jarvis, working the angles between public argument and emerging business models. These various new-model public intellectuals jostle together in a very different world from the old. They aren’t trying to get review-essays published in Dissent or Commentary. Instead, they want to give TED talks that go viral. They argue with one another on a circuit of business conferences, academic meetings, ideas festivals, and public entertainment. They write books, some excellent, others incoherent. In some ways, the technology intellectuals are more genuinely public than their predecessors. The little magazines were just that, little. They were written for an elite and well-educated readership that could be measured in the tens of thousands. By contrast, TED talks are viewed 7.5 million times every month by a global audience of people who are mostly well-educated but are not self-conscious members of a cultural elite in the way that the modal reader of Partisan Review might have been. In other ways, they are less public. They are more ideologically constrained than either their predecessors or the general population. There are few radical left-wingers, and fewer conservatives. Very many of them sit somewhere on the spectrum between hard libertarianism and moderate liberalism. These new intellectuals disagree on issues such as privacy and security, but agree on more, including basic values of toleration and willingness to let people live their lives as they will. At their best, they offer an open and friendly pragmatism; at their worst, a vision of the future that glosses over real politics, and dissolves the spikiness, argumentativeness, and contrariness of actual human beings into a flavorless celebration of superficial diversity. This world of conversation and debate doesn’t float unsupported in the air. It has an underlying political economy, which is intuitively understood by many of its participants. As Jacoby emphasizes, all debates about ideas are shaped by their material conditions. The intellectual possibilities of the purported golden age of the 1950s were in part the product of bad pay, cheap rent, and a small but intensely engaged audience of readers. Those of the 1960s and ’70s were influenced by a burgeoning university system, which rewarded intellectuals for writing impenetrably for an audience of their peers. The possibilities today reflect a different set of material conditions again, which don’t determine individual choices so much as they pull on them, gently but insistently. They influence what is discussed and what isn’t, who wins and who loses. And much goes undiscussed. The working consensus among technology intellectuals depicts a world of possibilities that seems starkly at odds with the American reality of skyrocketing political and economic inequality. It glosses over the deep conflicts and divisions that exist in society and are plausibly growing worse. And the critics of this consensus fare no better. They work within the same system as their targets, in ways that compromise their rejoinders, and stunt the development of more useful lines of argument. [snip] -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. 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