This is a substack draft where I just thread all of the tweets that I’ve written with the word “public intellectual”. I might do a few of these dumps
… my thinking on this is influenced by Cory Robin’s 2016 argument that public intellectuals in a sense *create* publics and in that sense, taking someone else’s idea to “the” public… it’s never the same public, so…
like take that gore vidal quote, about wanting to change 200,000,000 people’s minds. suppose the idea for that change came up in a conversation between some friends, so the originality/authorship is suspect. it still takes a lot of work to present that idea tirelessly over & over.
I think culturally there’s still this romantic idea of a creative person – scientists included – as someone who has like some profound flash of insight because of their personal genius, and then poof, you come up with e=mc^2, or an iphone, and then everything else Just Happens.
the reality is closer to: almost everything is a tremendous team effort of lots of people who are never seen, known, thanked, appreciated. everything is an assemblage, everything is a remix, and it takes grit and persistence to drag any great idea in front of people 1000x times.
it’s weird. the way we talk about things is all wrong. we don’t even have the right words to talk about things correctly.
interesting and compelling claim that a magazine that reached about ~15,000 people had a significant, outsized influence the notable contributions are indeed notable – baldwin, orwell, sontag
some important riffs from Randall Collins’ Sociology of Philosophy big claim: 15 circles being the dominant influences in 11 generations from 1600-1965 Europe. Will have to read the book to dig into the argument
…but for many folks in the ii, and adjacent to it, I think it’s directly relevant to how we think about our own “careers” and trajectories. I would love to particularly encourage anybody who’s “building in public”, who’s trying to grow a scene, etc to attend and discuss tactics
as I piece together the readings for this I find there’s a cluster of content around the phrase “Public Intellectual” that’s very academia-adjacent I find myself wondering if there are other phrases that other scenes cluster around. how do podcasters, vloggers talk about this?
when we examine the trajectories of well-known names in almost any field, we can often identify several “breakout moments” that were disproportionately responsible for their success. are there patterns to be discerned across different breakout moments? let’s reverse-engineer
the first major pushback that arises – within me as well – is, how do you measure success? is it just in terms of reach? having a large audience might seem impressive but it doesn’t necessarily translate into impact. so you have to ask yourself what exactly you want to achieve
I think you can be a *very* successful public intellectual or creative with a relatively small audience, if the people you have a direct influence on go on to do great work, and/or interesting things. see: the partisan review’s impact on NYC intellectuals
“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” – Brian Eno This is one way you can succeed. There are many kinds of success, you get to define what you want.
some recurring things I’m noticing about people that I think are admirable: 1. they have a large body of good work 2. they have relationships with interesting people, talk to lots of people 3. there’s often some “breakout event” that catapults them into public attention.
thing is, having a breakout event alone isn’t enough if you have nothing good or useful to followup with. that’s how you get “15 mins of fame” type folks. once you get people’s interest, you have to *continue* to captivate it, and these are two very different problems to solve
I’ve noticed that sometimes people write off other people who seem to be courting publicity, with the assumption that courting publicity is something only attention-seeking simpletons do in pursuit of cheap status. ironically this is itself an overly simplistic and narrow POV
if you know what kind of attention you want, why you want it, what you intend to do with it – if you have clarity of vision – then seeking to build an audience can be very positive sum. there are things you can do with others that you can’t do by yourself. (Bobby McFerrin)
a mistake that beginners in this game recurringly make is, they hope that the audience will validate them and tell them what to do. if they’re not careful, they end up allowing their behavior to be dictated by the noisiest elements in the audience.
there are parallels here with making a product &listening to customer feedback. you want to have as thorough an understanding of your customers’ problems as possible. but you shouldn’t just mindlessly do everything your customers ask, bc they’ll flood you with noise and ruin it.
you can & should allow audience/user/customer feedback into the artist’s workshop, at least some of the time, maybe even most of the time, bc some of it will be profoundly useful in ways you don’t expect. BUT. you cannot outsource your taste. you cannot outsource your judgement.
(if you’re curious, this is part of why I put a crown on my profile pic. it’s not to elevate myself “above” others, but to remind myself of the inescapability of my own authority, authorship, to remind me to take responsibility for my actions and choices. the most heinous shit is done by people who are convinced that they are the victims in the story, they are the oppressed, even after they’ve accumulated power. and that therefore they are justified in lashing out, in. every egotistical dictator is an insecure baby. i digress lol.)
anyway, circling back: so there are two parts to the challenge, the “product” and “distribution”. different people will have different tastes and preferences about how to allocate your attention and resources towards each part of the problem.
the “product” is your work itself – your tweets, your blogposts, your essays, your youtube videos, your book. I generally advise against making overly large/complex/ornate products w/o doing any audience-building work, without (at least partially) solving for distribution
there are many reasons for this. how heartbreaking it must be to spend years writing a fantastic novel but nobody knows who you are and nobody is interested in what you have to say. how demoralizing and frustrating. you *have* to be in coffeeshops talking to other authors etc
I’d go further than that: it’s v hard to make any kind of great work without riffing and parlaying with other creatives. the completely isolated genius. it’s maybe possible in fields like math, or maybe music… but even einstein hung out with other nerds. einstein btw is himself an interesting figure who was likely very good at playing the public/media game, which is part of why we talk about him so much. why don’t we talk as much about Faraday, or Maxwell? I think it’s partially because Einstein was better at PR
> Time magazine’s Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was “a cartoonist’s dream come true.” here we get to iconography! the power of symbolism and imagery. you can deliberately play and experiment with this. there is a whole understudied art to this
the thing I’m trying to say with all of this is that this stuff can be *studied* and it can be *understood* and it can be *deliberately influenced*. I can’t guarantee that anybody will become The Next Big Thing but you can really improve your odds dramatically
if you do 100,000 tweets in isolation there’s a possibility nobody will ever care but if you do lots of replies to other people, there’s a good chance you can build relationships, then you can build a network/graph of friends, then you can build an audience, then a scene
you don’t necessarily need to be the smartest, the most competent, the most skilled and so on you just need to be decent enough, and you can be the one that introduces everyone to everyone else, and there is great value in that
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the demons are things like public outrage, appeals to disgust, vengeance, defining and attacking enemy in the name of some righteous moral crusade, etc. it seems like pure upside at the start, your audience is growing so fast, you’re so relevant and important and beloved…
you can’t control a demon once you’ve summoned it. it will demand more and more blood through any means necessary there have been so many stories throughout millennia trying to warn people about this, but summoners always think they’re the exception
cruelty leaks. dehumanization leaks. it stains the hand that wields it. all of human history has been trying to teach us this lesson. we must be better
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that’s important enough to me that if I ever grow large enough that I can’t do it by myself, I would consider hiring and training someone to help me with it. I absolutely reject the premise that comments sections must be bad
if you carefully curate a space where people feel comfortable & confident that their effort will be appreciated, they will put in the effort. I’ve seen this happen a lot over the years, but then things go to shit i think bc ppl don’t know how to manage it
once I have ~300 people who really understand the game I am playing here and they collectively upvote the quality comments, at about 10,000 subs my youtube channel will be one of the best places on the internet to hang out. I can already see it happening, it just takes time. you can’t rush this.
it takes time for people to get familiar with each other, recognize each other, establish the norms and culture. and if you’re slow and patient you allow the more maniacal hothead types to whiz past you so they don’t hijack what you’re doing.
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it’s not a mystery. make 1000 videos, write 1000 blogposts, talk to 10000 people, practice good reply game, build media assets, refine, review, improve, keep at it 50 years. maybe not everyone has the capacity for it, but if you know in your heart that it’s what you want, go for it. If you don’t know what you want in your heart, read Introspect then get back to me
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caricatures