In my forthcoming book, The Digital Wasteland, I make two broadly defined observations. First, our democracy is unravelling before our very eyes and second, the role of public intellectuals as gatekeepers of our cultural realities and actualities has been subsumed by an overarching digital paradigm that reduces the dense layers of ideas to information consumption. These two dialectic forces – the implosion of democracy on one strand and the death of public intellectuals on the other – move forward, always intersecting and overlapping, in such as a way as to describe a perfect storm. The gathering storm I will describe is not political or ideological in origin. It is not religious or secular in its cultural orientation.  

The origin story of our collective discontent is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere in the sense that it envelopes our lives in such a way that we no longer can survive without it. It is nowhere in the sense that it escapes the very boundaries of our cultural awareness. This force I speak of is the Digital Revolution. In a single generation, the Digital Revolution, in all of its sweeping and concentrated transformation, has impinged upon our lives with more power and relentless ferocity than the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions combined.  

We are today living in an age of fleeting images and ephemeral ideas; an age defined by alternative facts and a dystopian affirmation of our twisted and distorted world view. We live in a ‘Google-ized’ world where we consume information rather than engage the richly textured layers of ideas. We live in a post-truth world that serves as a constant reminder that we are sleepwalking through a dystopian nightmare. The question, of course, is how did America come to such a pass. How did our hard-fought democracy descend to a level of mediocrity that is celebrated by millions of people who find themselves more comfortable engaging in conspiracy theories and mind-numbing trivialities than any kind of legitimate discourse that demands an ounce of critical thinking? 

The short answer is social media. One of the unwitting outcomes of our sophisticated digital technology is the “liberating” force of social media platforms that connect people and ideas in ways that can only be described as unimaginable a generation ago. The architects of this utopian vision of bringing people together may have actually believed in the unfolding potential of different cultural, political, and certainly ideological perspectives debated with a collegial sense of bridging differences. Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, certainly believed this optimistic vision for humanity. Years later, after Twitter, and similar platforms, proved to be architectural blueprints for a dystopian reality, Williams had this to say about his creation: “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.”  

One might argue that Williams was naïve to believe that technology would bring about the more noble aspects of our humanity, and perhaps he was, but he was not alone. Perhaps the architects of the Digital Revolution believed in some kind of utopian tomorrow. The only problem, of course, is that quite the opposite has happened. Social media platforms have become virtual spaces that both project and amplify our collective fears, ignorance, irrationality, frivolity, mediocrity, narcissistic tendencies, and every other human failing the reader wishes to add. It is within this electronic primordial soup that the origin story of the end of our democracy would find expression. In a historical blink of an eye, American exceptionalism; our striving to erect and maintain John Winthrop’s idealized city upon a hill, was replaced with a Romanesque culture that is gradually being buried under the dense weight of its glorious past.  

Prior to the Digital Revolution, which may seem to us now as part of the distant past, our democracy was governed by certain cultural norms – reason, rationality, and factual evidence – that were tacitly understood to be immutable. The cultural observers, and critics, of our pre-digital society were public intellectuals. Some of you may remember reading the work of these intellectual giants who were not necessarily experts or scholars, but cultural generalists who observed the human condition. Writers such as Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, William F. Buckley, George Will, John Rawls, Theodor W. Adorno, Milton Friedman, as well as seemingly countless others, shaped our discourse on a range of topics. From politics to philosophy; culture to economics, public intellectuals framed our understanding of the world.  

One of the unintended casualties of the digital age is the death of public intellectuals. I’m not suggesting that there are no more writers. That would, of course, be absurd. Newspaper editors throughout the country continue to produce powerful and compelling editorials. Thoughtful people continue to submit op-ed pieces that provoke conversations. What I’m suggesting is that public intellectuals, as a defined group of cultural thinkers, are glaringly missing – replaced with Tweets, and other social media posts, that require no effort on the reader to engage them. Public intellectuals have been moved aside by loud, crude, unsophisticated, ignorant, and narcissistic politicians who believe that ad hominem attacks are quaint leftovers from a civilized past. As corrosive as the lack of cultural decorum is to a free society, there is a far more dangerous reason why public intellectuals have been tossed aside. Thanks to social media and the endless parade of misinformation and disinformation, facts no longer matter to us. Our epistemic filters, the critical thinking skills that enable us to distinguish facts from fiction, have been obliterated.  

Millions of us, as a result of our constant consumption of falsehoods; delivered non-stop by those who wish to manipulate, and ultimately undermine our very perception of reality, are no longer capable of distinguishing between facts and fiction. The line has become so blurred that logic and reason are no longer incapable of penetrating such minds. In an environment where reason can no longer thrive, public intellectuals have nothing to say. Coterminally, democracy cannot survive in a dystopian age where reason is no longer our guide. It does not matter whether you are on the right or left (whatever these constructs mean), both sides have been guilty of undermining our democracy. 

Those on the right have been guilty of hammering away at the epistemic structure that enables us to apprehend the world. That is to say, knowledge itself has come under attack. For those on the left, intolerance, and the need to negate any perspective that deviates from accepted doctrine, is equally destructive. Try to imagine for a moment how public intellectuals could possibly survive in this atmosphere. Our democracy is indeed dying and if you are looking for diagnostic evidence of our cultural illness, look no further than the glaring absence of our public intellectuals.