The elitist-populist debate is the topic of the moment, following Trump’s second win. The conversation usually polarises into two positions: In favour of, or against, the current elites. If you are against the current elites, you are taken, by default, to be a Trumpian populist. But there is a third position, which is that we need elites, but that the current “elites” are shit; that, due to the increasing senility of the institutions which produce and employ them, they lack the core competencies and characteristics which would make them qualified for such a role. That, along with the claim that it is the failure of these pseudoelites that has led to the rise of incoherent, irrational populism, is the position taken in this essay.
“No bricklayer builds a wall perfectly perpendicular, mathematically this is not possible; a certain degree of perpendicularity suffices him; and he, like a good bricklayer, who must have done with his job, leaves it so. And yet if he sway too much from the perpendicular; above all, if he throw plummet and level quite away from him, and pile brick on brick heedless, just as it comes to hand—! Such bricklayer, I think, is in a bad way. He has forgotten himself: but the Law of Gravitation does not forget to act on him; he and his wall rush down into confused welter of ruin—!
This is the history of all rebellions, French Revolutions, social explosions in ancient or modern times. You have put the too Unable Man at the head of affairs! The too ignoble, unvaliant, fatuous man. You have forgotten that there is any rule, or natural necessity whatever, of putting the Able Man there. Brick must lie on brick as it may and can. Unable Simulacrum of Ability, quack, in a word, must adjust himself with quack, in all manner of administration of human things;—which accordingly lie unadministered, fermenting into unmeasured masses of failure, of indigent misery: in the outward, and in the inward or spiritual, miserable millions stretch out the hand for their due supply, and it is not there. The “law of gravitation” acts; Nature’s laws do none of them forget to act. The miserable millions burst forth into Sansculottism, or some other sort of madness: bricks and bricklayer lie as a fatal chaos—!”
– Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Lecture 6 “The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism”
When designing a microchip, or an engine, or software, or any complex system there are (at least) two levels of iteration, the version, and the generation. A highly simplified version of it works like this:
This is a sensible way of doing business. Eventually every building reaches a point where it is more efficient to knock it down and rebuild it than it is to try and renovate.
But when we try to rebuild human systems – for example, the media, politics or education, there are added difficulties. Those with the most decision making power, by definition, have an interest in the status quo. So when piecemeal reforms stop delivering, instead of a timely re-ordering, is a torturous, grinding, shuddering series of crises and conflicts. This is where we find ourselves today across and beyond the developed world.
It’s not just a matter of our leadership personnel. It’s a matter of our leadership systems. Institutional senility has passed a point of no return. The universities, political parties, and newspapers, which should produce and employ our intellectual, political, and communication elites, are failing to do so, and the problem is unfixable.
This is because the institutions themselves, not just some selection of them, but all of them, are rapidly becoming obsolete.
I often criticise postmodernism. But I still find great value in the work of many post-modernists. At the foundation of this essay, for example, is an idea from perhaps the most famous post-modernists of all time, Michel Foucalt.
A core concept in Foucault’s work is institutionality. Often when we say “institution” we just mean the organisations which operate in a given society. So the family might be called an “institution”. We might talk about the “institutions” of the ancient Greek city state, or the medieval period, or whatever.
But when Foucault is talking about institutionality, he means something relatively new, something modern. Institutionality in Foucault’s work is the characteristic shared by a modern school, prison or hospital. It is what defines an institution in general – a set of systems (key among them, a surveillance system) to do with the “management of bodies”. This development was required by the scale of an industrialised, centralised, mass participation society. This wasn’t just an economic development, but a social, political and psychological one, too. I could go on at length, but there are plenty of great explainers out there already.
But this approach raises a question; if these institutions are novel, modern inventions? What did we have before them?
Here I will provide my own answer: we had households.
So the regularly sitting, professionalised parliament replaced, in phases, the royal family and their court. The prison replaced the dungeon in the royal family’s basement. The school replaced the household tutor. The factory replaced the cobbler’s, or craftsman’s house as a locus of production. Clothes, bread and other items that had been produced in the home were increasingly mass produced, by large, impersonal, capital intensive companies. Something fundamentally shifted in the way societies work. The state corporate complex, with institutionality deep in its DNA, pushed everything else out of its way. The elites of those institutions became the elites of society in general.
This state corporate complex is now approaching the end of its peak era. As such it stands united, with a seemingly exhaustible supply of guns, money, and lawyers – not to mention centuries of accumulated ideology from both the left and right wing traditions. It appears more formidable than ever. If anybody fucks with it, it is ready to fuck right back.
But nobody fucks harder than time. And another shift, of a similar scale to the arrival of modernity and the institution is taking place. The institution is being replaced by the interface.
Ride sharing platforms are displacing the taxi company, with its shed and fleet and radio operators. Software platforms and boutique websites are displacing the newspaper and the TV channel. Short term leasing platforms are taking market share from hotels, etc.
Taxi companies and hotel chains still exist, for now. And so does the British royal family, just in a more marginal role, cosplaying their former glory. And so some vestigial versions of the university, the newspaper, the political party, and so on, may survive for some time beyond their prime era, even as new systems emerge and displace them.
Of these, the university, which existed, in a very different form, before the modern period Foucault describes, probably has the best chance at a degree of continuity. As Steven Pinker points out, they have hardware – telescopes and MRI machines, and so on – which will remain important for science education.
Legacy media brands are already in freefall, shedding readers and staff. But, so far, the interfaces which are replacing the institutions in this space have failed to produce an elite capable of really challenging the hated “mainstream” in terms of setting the agenda, and the terms of the discussion.
Not much has happened yet in terms of politics. But, in place of our current government structures, we can imagine online parliaments. Rather than being all together in one place – a purpose built institutional building, to which lobbyists have free access but voters don’t – these representatives would be spread throughout the population, embedded in the communities they serve and represent. I wrote a whole thing about it, a lifetime ago at the peak of the Arab Spring/Occupy moment, the peak of optimism about the progressive political implications of digital technology.
Note here I am not suggesting an anarchic, purely horizontal, zero-hierarchy, form of digitally moderated direct democracy. I’m just applying the elitist principle of democratic representation, which concentrates political power in the hands of a selected few in earnest, in the context of the world we actually live in.
This is just one example of the kind of interface-based systems that could replace the current institutional systems. But the latter aren’t going down without a fight. That fight, for survival, now pits them against reason itself.
Back to the office, they bleat, as if they want to waste money on real estate. Robbed of a coherent vision, of the capacity to produce a coherent vision, these institutions, including the ones which run our countries, follow a path of least resistance to nowhere.
It wasn’t always this way.
When these modernity-defining institutions were ascendant, growing in strength and power, rationality was their secret weapon, and their rallying cry, their lifeblood. They needed more of it to expand their power, which was new, provisional and dependent on functionality. They had to be better and more powerful than the old systems with which they were in competition.
But now, at the end of their lifecycle, as their remnant power depends on incumbency, an irrational and inherited sense of just-so unchangeability, so it is anti-rational, hyper-subjective, perspectival ideologies that are promoted by institutions.
Whereas previously they might have insisted on competence, they now insist on incompetence. This is how a country like America, with millions of brilliant, competent people in the prime of their lives, ends up electing Donald Trump as president, then Joe Biden, then Donald Trump again. On all three occasions, they set a new record for the oldest president ever elected.
For decades now, any new germ of leadership, anyone with a coherent vision, or even just the self confidence to think in a straight line, to not apologise and undercut themselves constantly, has been filtered out at the lowest layers of legacy institutions. This has left a Boomer Gerontocracy surrounded by generational-traitor-lackeys – the Gen X’rs and Millennials who got their jobs in universities, the media or politics by crawling up some boomer’s arse and intellectually dying there. Together they form a community of serene and undisturbed intellectual vacuity. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Trump and JD Vance. That’s not to say Harris and Vance are stupid, as such, just that they are smart enough to know when to play dumb. They have fully internalised the lesson.
It’s like these institutions have an auto-immune system. The little-fucking-Eichman’s who keep our institutions running, to the extent they run at all, serve like white blood cells, detecting and attacking threats to the institution – in this case anybody with sincerity, integrity, or, especially, the inclination towards rationalisation and efficiency. Because if you started, in earnest, to rationalise our institutions, you would rationalise them completely out of existence. A deep instinct whispers: don’t pull the thread.
The hard part, of course, is not being smart enough to realise that systems are outdated, but being stupid enough to try and change it.
It is unrealistic, of course, to expect people to rationalise themselves out of a job. And people need to be realistic, so, the cynical logic goes, we should all accept that nothing can ever change.
People who talk too much, or even think too hard, about significant overhauls, new accountability systems, or root and branch reforms, are therefore being unrealistic, and a bit stupid. The only sensible thing, then, is to continue on with the way things are currently done, no matter how Kafkaesque it has become, because we’re all too sensible to try and change it.
This is how it can be that, as Friedrich Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil; “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
But there are moments when societies have flashes of terrifying, often violent, lucidity. These are called revolutions. What occurs during a revolution is an inversion of the normal social hierarchy.
Consider this account given by Will Durant, in Volume VI, the Story of Civilisation; The Reformation
“Late afternoon on December 11th [1520], Luther proclaimed that no one could be saved unless he renounced rule by the papacy. The monk had excommunicated the Pope.”
I think a moment like this, of global significance, is coming, when the current institutions become so despised that it flips, and the status that people have fought so hard to get becomes, on net, a cause of suspicion, derision, and hatred.
Like how police, caught out during the revolution in Egypt who had to beg people to hide them in their homes, to give them civilian clothes, so they could ditch the uniforms that had been a status symbol, but suddenly marked them as targets for the mob.
Things can get ugly.
It’s the responsibility of serious thinkers to diligently, consistently, and in concert with each other, on replacement systems, to have a new class of leaders, with a new kind of thinking, and new systems of leadership and elite production, waiting in the wings to seize the moment.
The multitude includes the clergy and the aristocrats and kings, actually, everybody’s the multitude, except the ones who understand the reality of things. But the people who understand the reality of things can come from any class. – Jonathan Israel, Stroum Lectures, 2017
In the above quote, Israel is explaining Spinoza’s use of the word “multitude.”
Jonathan Israel’s vision of Spinoza as the central figure in the Enlightenment is part of a broader division of the enlightenment into moderate and radical thinkers. So Descartes, often considered the father of the enlightenment, is positioned as a moderate, because, for example, his dualism allowed for an immortal soul, separate from the body, which survived death. This made him less of a threat to the church than Spinoza, whose monism unified mind and body, God and nature. Spinoza refused to accept incumbent authority, intellectual, political or religious, on the basis of incumbency, and put these inherited systems on trial, assessing them by a new standard, that of reason.
Israel sees Spinoza as the central figure in a network of “radical enlightenment” thinkers (such as Johan de la Court, Marquis de Condorcet and Franciscus van den Enden) who were the originators of “Democratic republicanism” – and therefore much of what is good about the modern world. “Spinoza is the first democratic philosopher in the history of philosophy” – Israel states.
What stands out about Israel’s work is how seriously he seems to take the causal role of this small group of thinkers in the scheme of world history. This is refreshing in a world where the power of ideas is often cynically dismissed, even by intellectuals themselves, in a foolish attempt to seem hard-nosed, serious, relevant and grown up.
French revolutionary consciousness doesn’t mean after 1789 I’m talking about revolutionary consciousness before 1789 otherwise there wouldn’t have been any 1789… It’s absolutely absurd to talk about ‘oh well there was a financial crisis in the French monarchy, and things got out of hand… that’s a very silly way of explaining what the revolution was in terms of a transformation of consciousness and ideas.
He explicitly contrasts this approach to the “social history” approach taken by other historians, which he portrays as dominant “since Robert Darnton started this process in the 1970s”.
But without a sufficiently clear view of the differences between philosophical camps, Israel argues, we cannot make sense of the history.
In the context of the French revolution, Israel distinguishes the Radical Enlightenment thinkers, like Mirabeau, from the “authoritarian populists” such as Robespierre. According to his interpretation, Robespierre and his faction were opposed to freedom of speech and popular enfranchisement from the beginning. Israel argues the Radical Enlightenment Philosophes started the revolution, and the authoritarian populists “wrecked” it. “That was an entirely different group of people, who were expounding an entirely different ideology.”
The point is rammed home by the fact that the people he counts as participants in the radical enlightenment, always outnumbered by less enlightened groups despite their leading role in intellectual circles, were among the first to be killed once the authoritarian populists got the guillotines working.
In Israel’s telling the members of this league of the radical enlightenment are not too cold, nor too hot, but like the porridge in the story, just right. Elsewhere in this intellectual genealogy, the family tree with Spinoza on the trunk, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Woolstonecraft and Thomas Paine get name checked, along with the leading women of the French Revolution.
They argued for the extension of equal rights to European Jews and women, as well as to black people, and for an end to slavery and colonialism, and universal secular education for all boys and girls.
What shines in his description of this community is their intellectual self confidence – their willingness to ignore consensus and convention, to be right, rather than be popular or officially validated.
The old regimes of government and thought were so obviously bankrupt, morally and intellectually, that they could be confidently – and ultimately successfully – talked over. These thinkers did not bother to look either to the rulers, or the ignorant masses which they ruled, for validation. They looked, and this is the crucial thing, to each other. They recognised, in each other, the future, even when nobody else could see it.
It all sounds too good to be true. Surely, under close enough inspection, everyone ends up being shitbags, right?
Or is it a trick of definitions – First we define the “radical enlightenment” in accordance with our own current values, and retrospectively impose a continuity on disparate thinkers from the past who happen to align with it?
If so, what’s wrong with that?
Why shouldn’t we look back at our best and noblest thinkers, and trace that line, that vein of diamond, sandwiched between the layers of dull sediment?
This is exactly what the current caste of failed pseudo-elites do not want. They would much prefer that we follow in the footsteps of Darnton (the social historian who Israel defines himself against) and help bring the “lofty” ideas of the enlightenment “down to earth”.
Be realistic. Think small. Aim low.
This cultivated post-modern cynicism, with its scepticism of the metanarratives might have seemed genuinely edgy and radical in the mid 20th century, but by now it should be pretty clear that all it leads to is the rise of cottage-core folk politics, and, ultimately anti-vaxxers like RFK Junior running the US Department of Health and Human Services. We’re so down to earth that the worms are eating our brains.
We can accept Israel’s logic, as I do, that this elite community of enlightenment philosophes was a necessary precursor to the enlightenment politics, while maintaining, also, that this elite community itself was causally downstream of the invention of the printing press. And so our new intellectual elite shall operate downstream from the introduction of digital technologies.
This is stated often enough, but the consequences have not really been thought through. Consider universities, still stuck on how they can get students not to use AI when writing essays, rather than to use it effectively and ethically.
The scale of the changes afoot have not, despite all the talking, been grasped. Partially this is because, as Upton Sinclair wrote, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But it’s also hard because we are talking about a future which doesn’t exist yet, and which is inherently hard to imagine or predict. So let us again return to the example of the past. Here, unfortunately, I must rely heavily on my own imagination, tracing a line of causality which I do not, at present, have significant direct evidence to support. Digging up that evidence would, ideally, be something I could do as a post graduate research project. But whenever I have contact with the institutions of higher education, I want to die because they are so depressingly awful. Nobody is ever the right person to talk to, it’s always someone else, who is then CC’d but doesn’t respond. Everyone is always so busy. Nothing ever happens.
My speculation is about the origin of the bibliographical standards which are now associated with scholarly work. In the era before the printing press, it seems impossible that these would have existed. Books were copied by hand, one at a time, not printed in batches of hundreds or thousands of identical copies, all produced within the space of a single month. Only once the printing press came into existence did it make sense to list, along with the author’s name and the title of the book, the publisher’s name, and the date of publication. And that’s also when it became most needed.
The printing press allowed a greater number of books to come into existence and be copied widely. These included an unprecedented number of pseudonymously authored, forged manuscripts. And others with falsely attributed quotations. It was in this context that good faith scholars began including, along with any quotations, the page number, year of publication, and publisher of the book in which they found that quotation. This made it easier for the skeptical reader to check up on them. I like to call the underlying principle here strength through vulnerability. It was a way for good faith scholars to signal their intentions, their integrity, to each other.
When it is used now, however, there is a degree of ritualism to it. Putting links in footnotes or end notes, rather than simply linking from the relevant passage itself. But anyhow, using a link is insufficient since the link can break or crucially the content at that address can change. I experienced this first hand with the explosion at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, which the Associated Press originally called an Israeli Airstrike, before changing the language to reflect the ambiguity about its cause. Some people have responded by archiving links on the Wayback Machines as they cite them, which introduces the problem of directing traffic away from the people whose work you depend upon – and adds a layer of double handling.
And none of these (neither did print-only bibliographies) addresses the problem of superficial or false readings of the text. So I can just link to the whole Chilcot Report, all 2.6 million words, claim that it supports my position on the Iraq war, and suggest that anyone who disagrees with me needs to read the whole thing before responding.
References and links are often used like this. A corporate lawyer I know once talked about “throwing paper”, also termed “document dumping” or “discovery abuse”. It’s the practice of flooding the opponent with bad faith communications, unwanted information, spurious requests for information, and so on. The idea is to exhaust the enemy, make it as hard as possible for them to proceed with the dispute, and to wear them down. Links and references are often used in this way, as a defensive manoeuvre.
One first step then, in building this digital first intellectual elite would be the creation of a new intellectual-provenance system, one which uses current technology as efficiently as possible. This is what I have dedicated my life to. This is what it looks like in practice:
What you see above is called a research portal. It contains the highlights from my research project, which is a comprehensive record of the sources I consulted when working on this article. It shows, for example, that I consulted the work of thinkers including Slavoj Žižek, Peter Sloterdijk, Yuval Harari, Alvin Gouldner, Joseph Tainter, Peter Turchin, Gabriel Rockhill, and many others, without (until now) mentioning their work.
What that means is that I have engaged with their ideas, and done my earnest best to see where others might have articulated something, so I don’t need to. I have no desire to fool myself or anyone else into thinking I have an original idea when I don’t. It shows I mostly just watched youtube lectures, rather than reading the thinkers mentioned. It shows that from day 1, Foucault’s ideas were my primary inspiration.
It shows that I’ve spent over 24 hours, starting December last year, working on this essay – from which an intelligent person can infer that I’ve spent even more time than this thinking about the ideas. I should note here that it would not take 24 hours to review. In the periods when I don’t have my webcam on to record a highlight, the parts of the research shown only in the project, not the portal, the system captures one screen shot pers second, creating a 24-1 timelapse, so reviewing the whole 24 hours of work, from soup to nuts, including the commentaries I added along the way, could be done in just under an hour and a half.
It shows that I used Microsoft Copilot extensively while working on this essay, bouncing ideas off it, asking questions about various thinkers, and sometimes even having it draft sections of prose for me. But it also shows that the ideas are fundamentally mine, and that I have used the LLM to compliment, not replace human intelligence.
It shows that I have jumped back and forth between composition and research – rather than just researching first, then writing up my findings, or writing up my opinion in full, then searching for references to back that up.
Of course, nobody cares, and probably nobody will bother to look. But if this essay should beat the odds, cut through the noise, and become a significant intellectual landmark, they might.
And it matters that they could. It matters that I am willing to make my process and my inputs transparent to anyone who is interested. It matters that many, if not most, of those who populate the internet with low quality, low effort non-fiction content, would not be willing to do the same.
That’s a good thing. We don’t need them. A necessary step towards creating a new intellectual elite is having a set fair and meritocratic and methodological principles regarding who to exclude.
Stone Transparency, as the platform is called, is the beginning of that process. Not the end.
Including a video bibliography, then, becomes a way someone can mark themselves out from the pack, as neither concerned with ritualistically aping outdated practices, nor of looking for the rage-bait hot take that will propel them to the top of everyone’s feed, but primarily motivated by the desire to produce quality, reliable work – the kind that can be built upon by others, and form part of a whole new intellectual edifice.
If you’re concerned about the deterioration of intellectual standards, of institutional capture by ideological groups (or the production of extreme ideologies by dying institutions), if you’re concerned about fake news, authoritarianism, and the post truth era. This is a community you can help found. If we can recognise the future in each other, like the Cercle de Spinoza, then, like that community, we would be the most important thing happening on the planet.
Follow Austin on Bluesky at @austingmackell.bsky.social and on UpScrolled as @DayM0on
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