Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’

Matt Roth for The Chronicle Review

Conventional wisdom says that if a staff writer for The New York Times wants to feature you in a story about brave intellectuals, you reply, “Yes, please!” This is especially true if the Times sends a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer to create a noble portrait of you for an accompanying visual pantheon.

But every time that Times writer, Bari Weiss, called to talk with me about the “Intellectual Dark Web” and my supposed membership in it, I just started laughing. In case you missed it — though, really, how could you, considering that it seems to be everywhere at the moment? — the Times recently published a piece about a bunch of renegade intellectuals who “dare venture into this ‘There Be Dragons’ territory on the intellectual map.”

Why was I laughing? The idea that I was part of a cool group made me think there was at least some kind of major attribution error going on. The confused feeling was exacerbated by the dramatic photo setup: Damon Winter, the Pulitzer winner, had me standing in a marsh full of tall, dry reeds, waiting for a particular moment just past sunset. “Why am I in this scene?” I wondered as we waited, and not just because my favorite dress boots were getting muddy and I worried about ticks.

I also had no idea who half the people in this special network were. The few Intellectual Dark Web folks I had met I didn’t know very well. How could I be part of a powerful intellectual alliance when I didn’t even know these people?

When I asked what this group supposedly had in common, the answer seemed to be “they’ve climbed the ladder of fame by pissing people off, saying stuff you’re not supposed to say.” They regularly made progressives angry with “politically incorrect” statements about gender, race, genetics, and so on. This troubled me the most — that one might think of pissing people off as an inherent good, a worthy end.

While I am very experienced at being annoying, including to members of my own progressive tribes, I don’t think this is a technique that should on its own be valorized. Pissing people off is something to be done accidentally, as a side effect, while you’re trying to fix a significant problem. Yet the operating assumption behind the Intellectual Dark Web seems to be that angering progressives represents a mark of honor in itself. Indeed, the group’s signature hack is leveraging these alleged badges of honor into greater fame and fortune. (Witness the singular genius of Jordan Peterson.)

I knew that some of the people named as part of the IDW are, like me, legitimate scholars — they care about research, data, and changing their own minds through honest inquiry. But that just made me wonder why these enlightened souls would want to be glorified as part of a “dark web.” Perhaps they were in universities just long enough to get the pernicious message from their central administrations that all publicity is good scholarship (until it is cause for firing)?

The Times article confirmed my initial fears — and made me glad that I asked to be left out (which I was). The article begins by breathlessly reporting that the IDW is rife with “beauty” and “danger.” So, what even is it? Here’s the vague rundown: “Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now.”

Meh. How is this really about intellectualism, darkness, or a special web? If these people are having conversations that are so rare “in the culture,” how is it that they have millions of followers and pack auditoriums? (Is “the culture” The New York Times?)

The whole thing — especially the excitement over these people having found a “profitable market” — made me identify anew with that person standing in the ESPN-televised crowd at some SEC football game holding the sign that said, “You people are blocking the library.” I don’t see it as a sign of intellectual progress when a bunch of smart people find a way to make money off of niche political audiences by spewing opinions without doing much new research.

Opinion is not scholarship, it is not journalism, and we are dying for lack of honest, fact-based, slow inquiry. Twenty years since my first scholarship-based op-ed ran in The New York Times, here’s what I see: a postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die. The Intellectual Dark Web isn’t a solution, it might just be a sign of end times.

I’m all for bringing intellectualism to the masses, but like a lot of academics, I value ambivalence itself, along with intellectual humility. Yet these values seem in direct opposition to the kind of cocksure strutting that is the favored dance move of the IDW.

What I’m left with after this experience is a sense, for myself, of how much academe matters. How we need to fight back against university administrators’ equation of “entrepreneurship,” funding, and publicity with scholarship. How, since resigning my position at Northwestern University over my dean’s censorship of my work, I miss the Intellectual Light Web, the crisscross of walking paths that bisect the campus green. How we need job security to keep people from going to the dark side.

Professors, listen to me: You don’t want to be in this dark-web thing, even if it comes with an awesome trading-card photo. You are in the right place. Carry on.

Alice Dreger is a historian of medicine and science and the author of Galileo’s Middle Finger (Penguin, 2015).