The 2010s was an intellectual era, but not an era of intellectuals: rationalists, SSC, LW, NRx, etc produced popular teaching, but no great, lasting texts. Lots of (Thomas) Huxleys, no Darwins. That said... https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1354776708310687745

I think the 2020s may be very different. The most obedient member of the class of 2024 realizes that there’s much more to be learned outside the traditional academy, and that creates demand for truly new thinking.

Eh. The early 2010s Moldbug, where he self-educated with out of print slave-owner narratives from ABEbooks was an interesting moment in the sociology of the elites. The new material is an edgy version of SSC. https://twitter.com/oneayeking/status/1354783678673670146

The 2010s “history of ideas” is much more interesting than the 2000s; but it’s hard to point to really new, reorienting texts. Nothing, e.g., even at the level of Dawkins in the 70s/80s—and nobody would organize an intellectual history around _The Selfish Gene_.

In 2010, patiently and clearly explaining 1970s information theory, was enough to create an entire intellectual ecosystem. A lot of this groundwork was laid by to the cypherpunks e-mail list (and related offshoots, whose names I don’t remember).

The Black Swan created a genre (IMO)—a new kind of essay whose template gets that repeated in many places online. E.g., the tic of having your fiducial example person taking on a fictional life of his own. https://twitter.com/newsouthnc/status/1354786969952415746

A lot of the most interesting material was either gonzo popularizations, or bizarre syntheses of past eras. Remix culture. In contrast to the “(consumer) culture is stuck” thesis, I don’t think intellectual life is stuck. Quite the contrary.

The current turmoil reminds me of Paul Hazard’s book, on the pure insanity of intellectuals in the just-pre-enlightenment era. Thousands of magpies accumulating USB drives of bizarre PDF from libgen and Wordpress. https://amzn.to/3pEaXI0