The Intellectual Dark Web Is A Year Old. Do We Know What It Is Yet?
We’ve met its renegades. But what are its preoccupations?
May 8 marks a year since the publication of “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” the influential New York Times article by Bari Weiss that popularized a term originally coined by mathematician—and IDW “member”—Eric Weinstein. While the term hasn’t become common currency in the way that the labels “alt-right” and “social justice warrior” certainly have, it’s catching on quickly. Entire publications—including Areo, UnHerd, The Stranger, Arc Digital, and my own, Quillette—now are praised (or damned) for their connection, however tenuous, to the IDW label.
As yet, however, no one seems to have defined its doctrine more systematically than did Weiss when she first listed its core tenets:
There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.
As we pass the IDW’s first birthday, I’d like to take a stab.
One reason for the lack of clarity over the nature of the IDW is that most articles about the movement have focused on identifying and profiling its leading voices rather than delineating its ideas. In part, that’s because many well-known IDW figures are refugees from other intellectual traditions, and their personal narratives represent an important component of their belief systems. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were tenured professors at Evergreen State College in Washington State and held conventionally progressive political attitudes before being viciously hounded out of the school for opposing an officially sanctioned “Day of Absence” that required white students to leave campus. James Damore was fired from Google after circulating a politically incorrect but scientifically sound document regarding low female representation in the tech industry. Even I have my own (admittedly more obscure) tale of displacement. The IDW has no foundational text or mythology. But if it did, that text would look more like Exodus than Genesis.
Because of this aspect of the IDW, it’s tempting to define it with reference to the negative space in a political Venn diagram: the area that exists outside of the circles represented by, say, dogmatic progressivism, populism, and traditional conservatism. Some thinkers associated with the IDW would call this space classical liberalism. But if you examine the issues that animate many of the leading thinkers, you’ll find that this label isn’t entirely suitable.
For one thing, classical liberals generally favor limited government and low taxation in a way that sometimes blurs into libertarianism. But fiscal issues do not figure heavily for most IDW thinkers. Moreover, classical liberalism is a philosophy that specifies a citizen’s relationship with his or her government; it does not concern itself so much with the social norms which structure our interactions. To give an example, classical liberalism is entirely mute on the question of what we’re allowed to say on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and all the other social platforms which have now become the de facto gatekeepers for most forms of ideological and political self-expression. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of IDW advocacy is that it often isn’t oriented toward changing government policy. Instead, the messages typically are targeted at social-media entrepreneurs, academic institutions, scientists, and intellectuals at large.
This is one of the reasons why defining the IDW is difficult: There is a mismatch between our inherited political vocabulary and the modern concerns that spring out of digital culture. When people are mobbed and deplatformed, it feels like a species of censorship — though that is a technically incorrect term, since there is typically no government actor involved in the process. Likewise, terms such as “due process” and “civil liberties” historically have been defined by reference to a citizen’s rights vis-à-vis the state. But now they are often used as a shorthand to express our concerns about everything from online privacy to Twitter’s terms of service.
So if we proceed with the assumption that the IDW is something new, and not just a reformulation of some old set of ideas, and that it is a movement shaped by forces of exodus more than genesis, how may we define it?
Answering this question is impossible without at least some passing discussion of what it is that IDW thinkers are fleeing from — which, in a nutshell, is the twinned husks of liberalism and conservatism. This subtask is itself a complicated project because liberals, many of whom now prefer to be called progressives, behave in the cultural sphere much like the right-wing authoritarians they once opposed; while many conservatives now have gone all-in on populist movements that amount to little more than nativist personality cults, and which reject core components of historic conservatism.
Modern progressives trace the most morally urgent problems of society to bigotry and institutionalized prejudice. The overarching theme is that our modern society is suffused with the original sins of sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and that enlightened citizens are morally obligated to enlist in the fight against these evils — including through the act of proselytizing to others on their social-media channels. Whether under the banner of intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-oppression, or social justice, these progressive ideas now have coalesced into something approaching a recognizable ideology, albeit one that has little resemblance to traditional liberalism, and appears cultish and authoritarian to ordinary people.
The populist right, on the other hand, embraces the opposite idea. Instead of asking us to look inward and cleanse our souls, alt-right demagogues encourage us to feel victimized by outsiders, such as refugees, Islamists, Hispanic gangs, and Chinese exporters. As with the progressive left, the populist right has broken free of the elite institutions that once circumscribed mainstream politics; and, aided by the balkanizing effects of social-media algorithms, they can now manufacture a whole universe of fake facts for circulation among the faithful. Free trade doesn’t work. Global warming is a sham. Illegal voters stole the popular vote.
In a different time, the IDW thinker was someone who might have existed in some subculture within the intellectual ecosystem of the left or right. But it is harder and harder for these subcultures to survive, because ideological enforcers on both sides now can leverage crowdsourced communications tools to identify and even silence dissent: Since people now organize their professional, social, religious, and even family lives within the same small handful of social-media networks, the compartmentalization of one’s various roles in society is impossible, and the cost of heresy becomes higher. Perhaps the easiest way to describe a member of the IDW is someone who is willing to pay that high cost because he or she is unable to stomach the stultified intellectual atmosphere and cultish group dynamics that now typify both the progressive left and populist right. The typical IDW thinker is someone who takes his excommunication from either left or right (or both) as an invitation to actively carve a new path, though not one that can be traced on the conventional political spectrum.
By this, I don’t mean some version of the “Third Way” that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced in the late 1990s as a means to reconcile free-market capitalism with the welfare state. That was fundamentally a political project aimed at synthesizing economic and regulatory policies. The IDW thinker is more concerned with analyzing the phenomena that lie upstream from politics, and which have led us to this moment: culture, literature, education, philosophy, and technology. Having become alienated by tribally organized ideological movements, the IDW thinker will be unusually curious about how advocates on both sides of any issue are getting information, framing their cases, punishing their critics, propagandizing their supporters, and gaining psychological succor from their actions.
Many IDW thinkers also are interested in religion, spiritualism, and mythology — not (typically) because supernatural concepts directly inform their analysis, but because they seek to understand how the quasi-religious fervor of nominally secular ideologues may align with our apparently ingrained appetite for revealed prophecies, martyrdom cults, and a divinely ordained moral order. IDW thinkers likewise are less likely than others to smugly dismiss Christian thought and values, since they recognize the continuum that exists between formal religion and today’s ideological zealotry.
Many of my own initial works for Quillette were about the climate of hypocrisy and fear that exists in Canadian journalistic circles in regard to ideological taboos. This makes me a typical specimen: IDW thinkers have a tendency to turn their own professional and academic experiences into objects of study, since it is in these milieus that the group dynamics governing modern ideological cults exert themselves in the most obvious and powerful ways. (Bret Weinstein presents a particularly vivid example.) What’s more, IDW thinkers often produce mea culpa manifestos in which they examine their own contributions to these pathological group dynamics. My own publication has published several fine examples of this genre, with titles such as I Was The Mob Until The Mob Came For Me and I Sold My Soul on Twitter. Now I’m Trying to Win It Back.
Because of my position as an editor and podcast host at a publication that is described by some as a hub for IDW ideas, I have had an opportunity to examine a wide sampling of thinkers who are interested in this area of thought. A disproportionate share, I have observed, are Jews, gay men, lesbians, and immigrants who have some personal knowledge of life under communist or religious dictatorships. This is not surprising, since members of all of these groups (a) have a special sensitivity to intellectual movements that exhibit totalitarian or cultish impulses, and (b) are more likely to feel alienated by the old-stock WASP-ish cultural reflexes animating both self-lacerating social-justice movements and alt-right populism. Moreover, a disproportionate share of IDW aficionados are introverts, or even self-identified autistics (such as Damore), a status that aligns broadly with a tendency to prioritize truth-telling over group acceptance.
The common ideological bonding agent embraced by all IDW thinkers is an aversion to any mechanism that prevents someone from speaking, writing, or carrying out research consistent with their opinions and interests. From the perspective of policy-making, we favor policies that allow the greatest possible range of opinions, and which reflect our wariness of any process that may be co-opted by ideological inquisitors — which, in the traditional political idiom, translates roughly to free speech, due process, free scientific and intellectual inquiry, rationalism, and civil liberties.
Being left, or right, or anti-left, or anti-right, has little to do with this agenda — because IDW members oppose the imposition of any orthodoxy. Since orthodoxies tend to be imposed and enforced by the ideological faction that happens to be winning the culture war at any particular time, IDW thinkers now tend to exert themselves primarily against the so-called ctrl-left. But that could easily change.
On social issues — abortion, gay marriage, welfare entitlements — prominent IDW members such as Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson are typically progressive in their attitudes. But in our reflexive opposition to ideological manias and social panics, we arguably draw influence from the antique conservative principles of Edmund Burke. And our opposition to the often childish-seeming sentimentalism of intersectionality and other social-justice doctrines borrows elements from atheism, skepticism, and arguably even Marxism. In many cases, we simply skip formal ideological analysis altogether and proceed directly to historical comparisons — focusing on how the patterns of ideological policing among poets on Twitter mimics the crowdsourced “call-out culture” (avant la lettre) relied on by the Stasi.
It is also notable that there are many important areas of discourse and policy that often are passed over entirely by most IDW thinkers, such as foreign policy. Unlike social-justice ideology, the IDW does not present itself as a totalizing system of thought. In fact, its entire formulation rests on a skepticism of such totalizing creeds. As such, it is a movement characterized more by certain epistemic sensitivities than by inflexible metaphysical convictions. (That’s how and why Quillette is able to publish a piece like this, and Arc Digital a piece like this—both have generated backlash from members of the IDW.)
All ideological movements mutate over time. By this time next year, when it’s time to celebrate the IDW’s second birthday, perhaps the movement will be no more, or perhaps it will have schismed, or been carved up and appropriated by factions of the left or right. Maybe we’ll become the Mensheviks of anti-wokeness.
Who knows?
But for now, the movement does feel precious and important to those who are a part of it. Speaking for myself, I am proud to have had some role in encouraging a body of intellectuals who can speak to one another honestly, and in good faith and humor, without fear that we will be cast into purdah for engaging in this or that thoughtcrime. Whether or not you self-identify as a member of the IDW, I believe that this is the very least you should expect from any intellectual movement.
