The digerati cheered and said, implausibly, that experts were no longer needed, and that “crowds” were wiser than people who had devoted their lives to knowledge. This ultimately led to a debate, now old hat, about experts versus amateurs in the mid-2000s. There were certainly notes of anti-intellectualism in that debate.
Around the same time, some people began to criticize books as such, as an outmoded medium, and not merely because they are traditionally paper and not digital. The Institute for the Future of the Book has been one locus of this criticism.
But nascent geek anti-intellectualism really began to come into focus around three years ago with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, when Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” in The Atlantic. More than by Carr’s essay itself, I was struck by the reaction to it. Altogether too many geeks seemed to be assume that if information glut is sapping our ability to focus, this is largely out of our control and not necessarily a bad thing. But of course it is a bad thing, and it is in our control, as I pointed out.
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So there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope more forthrightly. You are opposed to knowledge as such. You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it; you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far; you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don’t want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college.
In short, at the bottom of the slippery slope, you seem to be opposed to knowledge wherever it occurs, in books, in experts, in institutions, even in your own mind.
Hat tip to @sebpaquet and @sebprovencher for linking to the above quote. I responded on twitter that Larry Sanger "conflates disrespect for authority with disrespect for knowledge". I would like to expand on that thought here...
What I mean by this is that Sanger has a very specific idea of what knowledge is...it is contained in the classics, it requires dedicated intentional effort at regular intervals, it is comes in neat packages likes books, courses, and curricula.
What does this have to do with authority?
Well obviously Sanger trusts in the traditional authorities, the "experts", to identify what constitutes knowledge and what does not. But there is a more subtle point as well. The viability of authority itself relies on the legibility of knowledge. An expert is necessarily an expert in something, in some subject. Sanger argues elsewhere in his essay:
"Knowledge exists only inside people’s heads. It is propagated not by being accessed in a database search, but by being learned and mastered."
Yet, it is precisely this notion of knowledge that he is arguing against because knowledge in people's heads is illegible to him and the other authorities. In arguing for the classics, traditional education, and the importance of experts, Sanger is crying out for legibility. He needs the credentials....he needs knowledge to be defined in terms of discrete units that he can wrap his head around.
Some time ago Seth Godin wrote a post on surfing:
It seems, though, that the growth industry of our generation is surfing.
Talk to surfers and they'll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for that blissful moment that combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment.
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More people, though, are finding a way to surf and get paid for it. Freelance projects, joint ventures, entrepreneurial startups are all paying off for people who are hooked on this feeling of plan, launch, cowabunga, repeat. Each time you do it, you get to take on a bigger project, a bigger wave. The cost of wiping out is low (if you plan for it) and so you can do it again and again. You don't even have to be solo... now there are teams and corporations that seek out people who want to surf their way through fundraising or product development or customer delight.
Sanger fears exactly what Godin describes. He fears surfing. He fears illegible knowledge, unpredictable life paths, and an uncertain world.
