The fall of the intellectual
resisting the rule of the algorithm takes energy and creativity and courage, and the risk for our culture is that our technological skill and our cultural exhaustion are working together, defending decadence and closing off escape.
Ross • Can We Resist the Age of the Algorithm?
Keely Adler and added
“More and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist cult... See more
Zach Lamb • The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands
It’s common nowadays to talk about the “culture wars.” The notion is that we’re profoundly divided about the kinds of people we want to be, and that we express these divisions in everyday, sometimes petty ways. But, in Roy’s view, this framing is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that there’s a war on culture; what we call the culture wars ar... See more
Is Culture Dying?
the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been character- ized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of... See more
Peter Thiel • The Straussian Moment
Juan Orbea added
Generations of intellectuals have turned away from the future, dispirited at best, cynical at worst.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Keely Adler added
Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
The traditional line for why essentially all intellectuals used to be aristocrats is that they were the only people with the leisure time to pursue the life of the mind. But what if it was never solely about leisure, but also a style of education that has fallen out of favor?