This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free.
UPDATE: I’ve posted a very long set of replies.
UPDATE 2: I’ve decided to reply below as well–very belatedly…
I’m a little confused, I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering. Am I a geek or an intellectual?
Probably both. You don’t get a Ph.D. without getting the kind of depth that would usually qualify you as an intellectual. “Geek” is hard to define precisely, though.
It’s not a that geeks are unhappy with knowledge. It’s that they are unhappy with *intellectuals*. Our current crop of ‘intellectuals’ is the least deserving of that title ever, and have wrough inestimable harm upon the world and seem intent upon causing even more.
An intellectual responds to the critcism of his poor judgement and atrociously bad decision making by…suggesting that we need to restrict content on the internet more.
Alan Bloom wrote a book back in the day that speaks to this subject entitled “The Closing of the American Mind”…great book, and highly recommended for the anti-intellectual geeks out there.
As a side-note, Jose Ortega wrote a book called the “Revolt of the Masses”…replace “Mass-man” with “Geek-man” and you have something similar to what you describe in your article.
By the way, I’m not a “geek” per se, but I am a software developer by trade and I “delve” a bit. But I also read other things called “books”.
I wonder how much of the geek disgust is with intellectualoids rather than true intellectuals. So many of the so-called intellectuals I’ve known over the years are liberals who haven’t had a new thought since the early 1970s. Even the younger ones are stuck in that era. They read the same type of NYT bestseller books they’ve always read, and echo the same opinions and news stories they’ve heard on NPR, MSNBC, etc. And of course have a sanctimonious attitude toward people not-like-them.
OTOH, the true intellectuals I’ve come across avoid political labels, are wide-ranging readers who are fascinating, have fresh ideas and see a lot of power to revolutionize society (from the bottom up) with technology.
[…] Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? Once upon a time, anti-intellectualism was said to be the mark of knuckle-dragging conservatives, and especially American Protestants. Remarkably, that seems to be changing. […]
There’s a difference between being anti-college/school and being anti-learning/knowledge. Also, high schools and college campuses can be anti-intellectual environments their damned selves.
College is 4 years of your life spent endlessly memorizing and compartmentalizing facts (math/science) or endlessly theorizing over the big picture (humanities). College sells you short by forcing you to pick one or the other, while the real world will still expect you to be well-rounded.
When our brightest students are feeling like college is a waste of time, that means something is wrong and needs to change. But try saying that to someone who could actually do something about it, and you get branded as anti-intellectual.
It’s a tad ironic, is all I’m saying.
Zach Dexter, I agree with you… +1
OK, normally I’m careful not to go overboard on claiming a stake in an idea, but this time I have to risk the charge of hubris:
I am THE #1 poster child for protesting anti-intellectualism in geek circles. My entire life’s work has been devoted to this cause. More than half the posts on my blog at http://penguinpetes.com/b2evo/index.php over five years will attest to that.
And I have two things to say to Mr. Sanger:
#1. Anti-college != anti-intellectual!
It’s just that colleges lately have been more about pumping out diploma-mill quality MBAs at inflated debt-inducing prices than actually turning out useful STEM-career graduates. The problem with college graduates is not that they’re too intellectual, but actually that they are hitting the bottom of the barrel in the brains department.
This is hitting the tech industry the hardest. It’s a side effect of how fast computing has progressed in the past couple of decades. A self-starter who grabs the route with the lowest barrier to entry in order to master the latest hot tech trend is going to be ahead of the college loop where books have to be published and professors have to attain expertise before a new crop of students can be spoon-fed. Surely I don’t have to reiterate here how autodidacts have attained the same level of respect in computing cultures as their degreed peers; ESR, Jeff Atwood, Paul Graham, and Joel Spolsky have been talking about this for years.
Meanwhile, I’ve had jobs where I worked my way up from the ground floor and ended up training college graduates who were newly hired and – there’s no point in trying to be tactful about it – I basically found them to be no better-educated than a rock and had to teach them *everything* up to and including how to wipe their own nose.
#2. BOOOOOY are YOU late to the party!
The horse has already been stolen, the barn burned down, the ground seeded with salt, and the horse turned into glue and you just now get here and say “We’d better lock that barn door before something happens to that horse!”
Google the word “elitist”. Everywhere you land, that is one more place where an anti-intellectual has sown a seed. It’s the new epithet to hurl at anyone who has done anything that you yourself have not accomplished. Now Google “arrogant” or “patronizing”. There’s a lot more. These words are used against intellectuals with the same spirit that the N-word is used against African-Americans, with exactly the same kind of feeling behind it. And don’t forget every time somebody lashes back at you for suggesting they “RTFM” or Google for the answer to the stupid question they just asked.
Oh, and anybody who falls on the anti-intellectual side of the debate has no right calling themselves a “geek”. But of course, that statement alone can get you hanged. The dictionary, that’s one more authoritative book there.
Anti-intellectualism: Don’t look now, but you’re soaking in it. Ask any help-desk employee, going back to even before computers, and also consult with some spirits in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, who can tell you a thing or two about anti-intellectualism. To quote Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
> “During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who had the potential to undermine the new state (including intellectuals or even those that had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses) and killing many others for even breaching minor rules.”
Yeah, there’s about a shelf-full of books already on this subject.
On the contrary, I am a self-made man. I started as so many others did. A poor kid From the wrong side of town that slipped through the cracks. As far as geeks go, I did pretty well for myself and have taught many classes and hosted a number of seminars on the subjects of computer systems architecture, security, network security and systems design to college students in a college classroom. Not only did I fail to get myself a college diploma before I called myself a professional; I didn’t graduate from high school either.
The problems with college and the technical world is not new. In fact, its very old. I started working in 93 in the tech field without paper of any kind. Ability is the commodity in the tech industry that is in high demand, not theory or science. Moore’s law insists that our computers become more powerful every 2 years. That requires game-changing events in the industry driven by consumers. This violently changes the landscape of everything digital. What is a sought after skill will surely turn into something a million freelancers with laptops will do for $5 a day six months from now. Imagine that happening to your trade every six months. Would you take a few years off work to go to school? Everything you knew would change so drastically that your ability to do your job would be crippled. Unless you want to work in a farm, you have to stay out of the barn. Welcome to my world.
Depends on the Intellectual. Being against intellectuals that seek to leverage their knowledge of a particular subject into political power to advance their wide-ranging ideology? HELL YEAH I’m against that. I’m also against Intellectuals that are also hypocrites, espousing a particular ideology for others, but not for themselves.
And anyone in Paul Johnson’s _Intellectuals_, they can all eat a bag of d–ks and die in a fire, except they’re already dead. Especially Rousseau and Marx, f–k those guys.
I wish someone would clarify what an “intellectual” is, at least for purposes of this discussion.
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