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What is a “public”? It has to be one of the most ubiquitously vague notions after “freedom” - most of the time a rhetorical tool, rather than a concept with a real referent.
But its complementary opposite, the “private”, doesn't suffer the same fate. The private is still an abstract notion, but it feels closer, more intimate. We have private thoughts of our own, things we only do in the privacy of our homes, or things that only make sense in private groups, close friend groups, or communities that develop their own communication substrate (mostly composed of extremely situation-specific inside jokes). When we speak of privacy and the private, we know very well what this means.
But what of publicity? If my private friend group is the recipient of my joke, then what is the recipient of one that goes out in public?
This question is hard to answer in a moment where the notion of a "public" has entered the domain of ghosts, sharing the same fate as "the world," "justice," and "value." It is the invention and ossification of a medium that elevated the notion of the “public” to the ethereal realm. We have Twitter to blame.
Well, not quite, but close enough. The medium is the infrastructure; web 2.0 and the injection of Javascript into static websites opened up Pandora's box of interaction, giving birth to the "end-user."
The end-user is a teleological notion. The end-user is an end in itself and becomes the center focus of the interface. Meanwhile, the interface itself, rather than a mere portal to an underlying store of data, has ascended to a platform, a generator (and appropriator) of data. On top of the platform is a stage, and on the stage, a play is played where anybody can enter into a social theatrical which we see being played through the feed. The feed is the most extreme form of postmodern participatory theater, a death of the author, but also the play and also the audience. Baby and bathwater both down the drain.
Just for a moment, imagine a theater where the stage is gradually consuming the audience and then the walls until it covers the surface of Earth. This is public social media.
No wonder the notion of the public is collapsed through this medium, no matter how targeted a certain discourse or language may be. But how does the role of the intellectual get transformed through the transmutation of the public, and what does it mean to be a public intellectual?
Public intellectuals used to refer to certain moments in history and certain cultural contexts. The French intellectual would go on public French TV, but that would not make him relevant to the sociocultural climate of Yugoslavia, or India, or Brazil. But things have shifted dramatically with the power of new media to broadcast globally and borderlessly. And there we have phenomena like New Atheism and the counter-response of Jordan Peterson and the whole Red Pill shabang.
Especially in the case of Jordan Peterson, and especially for an Anglophone audience (especially North American), there is a social reality that is totally outside the purview: the social reality of the uptake of such influencer-type intellectuals in the non-English speaking, non-Cold War embedded, and non-Western world. The Petersonian Red-Pill discourse has infiltrated regions such as Eastern Europe, which has some form of semblance, but the problems and the realities are extremely different. Politics is not the same. Social issues are not the same. And to be honest, we are talking about a much less liberal, more corrupt, and more economically unstable world.
The main problems in Greece are not "social justice warriors"; it's trains having a head-on collision because, for more than 30 years, nobody bothered to look if there is a monitoring system for signaling that two trains are on the same freaking tracks. But now the youth of Greece are just Red-Pilled and thinking that what is wrong about the world is the same as what happens at a prestigious Canadian university and its administration.
We shouldn’t forget that both those who are vocal about what is wrong, and those who are scapegoated for these issues, speak from experience and struggle. If Peterson didn't become an intellectual celebrity by night, he would still be beating the dead horse in a more closeted and resentful manner at the university or clinic. But the whole world is neither a university nor a clinic, so why are these problems relevant at all to people in Greece, or Algeria, or Argentina?
I don't have any hard feelings with Peterson; his Maps of Meaning book is actually a good one. The problem is that he didn't realize he became part of the world theater and started to play a role. There is a bigger problem than an opinionated clinical psychologist and his conspiratorial fantasies against a fictional enemy he devised. It is people whose lives are completely different who embrace Peterson’s worldview because they wanted to listen to an intellectual and this is what they got.
My best friend was a big fan, until he confessed to me that he has real problems now, not imaginary ones that in the end are not even his. I also met a fan close to his 50s, something unlikely considering his usual demographic, and a quite sharp agricultural microbiologist. He was old and wise enough to not fall into the cult of personality and was open to exploring other worlds of intellect, but he confessed to me that he wouldn't know where to look, or who else exists. But after giving an impromptu lecture in front of an audience of two intellectually curious microbiologists on the crisis of modernity and the new intellectual underground internet scene, his eyes lit up, and I saw that the guy just needed a little guidance, not intellectual evangelism.
These are just a few anecdotes of a broader pattern I have observed as a renegade cultural cyber-anthropologist that point to the fact that the Peterson phenomenon in the non-Anglo world is, in fact, a problem of no alternative, of a lack of intellectual infrastructure through the web and the problems of being a public intellectual in an age of unlimited worldwide broadcast.
The aspirational role of a public intellectual is to come and give sense to the situation people are living in right now, and to motivate, to open up curiosity to the audience for further exploring the world of intellect, whether they are themselves an intellectual or the wider "public." But the spectacle of intellectuals who accrue a worldwide audience through non-institutional, online methods reveals that they lack the situatedness and relevance required to serve that public role.
And this is not the end of the story. The combination of the non-relevance of public broadcasting along with the "death of public social media" and the move towards private groups and intentional communities necessitates a different function and practice for intellectuals.
There are some that suspect that the public, neutral infrastructures of the internet and even of world culture and politics are breaking away from the asymmetric monopoly of American technocultural hegemony. Instead, they argue we are heading towards a neomedieval world of decentralization, away from panopticon-type state surveillance and towards a more pluralistic glocal world that retains some of the nomadic aspects of internet infrastructures to move around and assemble according to cultural and psychological affinity rather than geographic proximity. Maybe it will be a world where a hundred flowers bloom, of a plurality of voluntary-association network states or confederated coordi-nations. It could also be a darker patchwork world of shadowy forests and tribalist multipolar atomization.
Whatever the not-so-distant future holds, the present already calls for the need for an alternative form of intellectualism. Lo and behold, the private intellectual.
There are already a few hints as to what this looks like from already existent examples in various cyber-niches. I had such an experience with the so-called "cryptowanderer" of KERNEL, an educational pluralist intentional community part of the Ethereum ecosystem. It is a move away from the Twitter-mediated incessant craziness and degeneracy of DeFi culture and is more like a boarding school for tech-savvy blockchain-focused people from developers to poets.
KERNEL has a very well-curated educational curriculum spanning the fields of traditional economics, cryptoeconomics, monetary systems, design, computer science, literature, Eastern philosophy, regenerative agriculture, organizational science, and whatever else might fit into this ever-expanding non-institutional education experiment. When you enter one of the blocks, as the cohorts are called (with block 8 having just started as we speak), you will be welcomed at one point by cryptowanderer, the intellectual and spiritual steward of KERNEL.
Cryptowanderer provides a service to a community of people with common ground, intentions, and problem statements and guides them towards different directions to explore, bringing philosophical and spiritual depth to things that are not commonly thought of as deep, such as money and data querying infrastructures. Alongside cryptowanderer, there is also a broader culture of other similar intellectuals in the community who have been through the drill of self-discovery and world exploration and come to share their wisdom, such as Daniel from Active Inference Institute, who co-organizes De-School, a series of alternative education for KERNELites.
These people enact a form of intellectual practice that closely borders on shamanism. They are, in the idiosyncratic language of Alexander Bard, "shamanoid" personalities, mental nomads who are able to traverse through different epistemic cultures and lifeworlds, explore unconventional experiences, and provide value back to the community.
They are also closely related to but distinct from Ancient Greek sophists, public orators who touched on intellectual subjects relevant to the Athenian "demos," the public, but also offered private tutoring and mentoring to the aristocratic youth. Socrates and Plato used to be quite critical of this form of intellectualism because it "corrupted" youth and broke from small affinity groups centered around a teacher, such as Socrates, or private educational groups such as the Platonic academy.
In retrospect, these philosophers might have been a bit too harsh on the sophists, and there is nuance to their pragmatically-oriented form of intellectual pedagogy, but we can see the parallels in terms of how this form of intellectualism can reflect the ways network age public intellectuals can go horribly wrong.
Sophists preached, and they mostly preached virtue rather than motivating personal intellectual exploration. They were professional moralists rather than shamans, stewards, or sensemakers, and this fits closely to a Petersonian mode of intellectualism, a priestly-like performance of delivering sermons around… you guessed it… virtue! Be it personal responsibility or direct action, be it a critique of postmodern nihilism or a critique of reproducing power structures, the sophist's mode of intellectualism is also shared by other similar influencers (politically) left or right while psychosocial development and wisdom fly out the window.
There are, of course, public intellectuals who, in my humble view, are more serious, more diligent, and nuanced, such as the intellectual influencers of the liminal web, and they are doing a great job at it. But there is still plenty of surface tension to pierce to even get to the Schmachtenbergers, the McGilchrists, and the Freinachts, and the right funnels do not exist. Even if they did, though, the fundamental problem of broadcasting irrelevance is still there and is incredibly hard to acknowledge and account for.
A good example is Hanzi Freinacht, an intellectual chimera 1000x more preferable and more insightful to the issues of the contemporary world and what to do about them than Peterson (and in my opinion way cooler and more culturally-savvy than him). Their (meta)metanarrative of a move away from modernity but through postmodernity to reach a new height of metamodernity in a dialectic fashion is a much more sensible alternative to the nostalgic and regressive tendencies of Petersonianism to go back to "better times" and "better values." The choice to truly engage with postmodern literature, art, and culture to truly understand it and see its necessity in history is more intellectually brave than Trad Cath anti-woke neoreaction. Hanzi Freinacht is exactly the reaction that was needed in a post-Peterson public intellectual arena, and I hope it gets the spotlight it deserves.
But still, the aforementioned problem exists. The Metamoderna framework is based on some cultural assumptions to work, which makes it mostly relevant to situations of material and economic abundance, liberal social democracies with ecological tendencies, and the WEIRD demographic (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). In the same way that the WEIRD has been used as a critique of academic cognitive psychology, hinting at a scientifically tractable and epistemically important rather than ideologically-driven difference, this also applies to the Metamoderna and Metamoderna-like frameworks. The world is not Sweden or Denmark, and the Nordic countries are outliers, weird in every sense of the word! What if I am fully on board with the framework, but in Greece, trains still crash with each other, and the street police have automatic rifles and armor?
As a Greek, I am an expert at complaining (even more so than the Brits), but what then is my suggestion?
My suggestion is that, rather than needing more intellectual frameworks that might work 100 years from now, we need more private intellectuals, shamanic intellectuals, and community intellectual stewards. We need to legitimize intellectual guidance as a service, in companies, in schools, in neighborhoods, hell… even in universities. We need shamanoid nomadic personalities who are able to ingest global culture and divergent perspectives but integrate it on local levels, meeting people where they are at and showing them what's more. We need Hermetics who can go between the world of enclosed intellectualism in academia, and pop intellectualism in the marketplace of ideas. A civic intellectual who can find the means and resources to disentangle both from the coziness of ready-made state and university infrastructure, but also from the algorithmic and economic incentives of social media and markets. Both present dead-ends of perverse incentives. We need a third-way intellectualism.
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I enjoyed your piece. Especially the information on KERNAL. Do you have personal experience with the program?