As the digital landscape undergoes a series of tectonic shifts—Twitter deflating, the rise of Substack, the collapse of Vice and Gawker—I have started to think about what has been missing in our previous round of online media and intellectual culture, and what I’d like to see instead. To put it simply, I think online conversation has been able to produce a great deal of discussion around ideas—some of which has been productive—but that it has also blocked a key trait that is absolutely essential for insight: ambition.
There is an aspect of the Twitter/Facebook/Youtube ancien régime that has looked like an intellectual culture. Twitter has been full of debates on liberalism or democratic theory. Fights unfold in magazines and elsewhere on detailed questions of history. Some of the long-form writing of this era has been brilliant.
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