An End to Pornography, Sophistry, and Panty Raids
August 31, 2022 12:28 PM   Subscribe

The Origins of the Elite EdgeLords: I never met Epstein; I didn’t know that some Edgies jetted around in the zillion-dollar private plane known as the Lolita Express. But over the years I got eyefuls of what I was excluded from when Brockman, in our meetings, showed me photos of events packed with men he said were billionaires, Nobel laureates, or somehow both. A bowling league for übermenschen, that Edge: Sergey Brin, Yuri Milner, Jacqui Safra, David Brooks, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jeff Bezos.

Sleepy old wisdom was further disparaged, somewhat opaquely, by early member Stewart Brand as, “the old human interest stuff … the same old he-said she-said, the politics and economics, the same sorry cyclic drama.” The tiresome “old he-said she-said” was over, per Brand; it was now just he-said, and he said science.
[wired version]
posted by mecran01 (22 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Funny thing is, you could not pay me to be in a room with most of those guys, and not because I expected attempts on my virtue (I'm about 30 years too old, apparently).
posted by praemunire at 12:51 PM on August 31, 2022 [7 favorites]


As mentioned in the article, there's big overlap between this circle and the MIT Media Lab which has been discussed before. The anecdote confirms my prior beliefs about John Searle, even when I was reading about his consciousness debates in the 90s he sounded like a complete asshole that other philosophers had to pretend to respect.

I wonder if it's possible to form an "exciting edgy intellectual" group like this that doesn't turn into a fraternity. I've read several pieces this year about how the excitement of "transgression" against the boring (often seen as feminine) cultural/intellectual mainstream leads many well-meaning science and tech folk directly to right-wing beliefs. "Kill All Normies" by Angela Nagle has a good chapter about this (while also being kind of mean-spirited).
posted by JZig at 1:38 PM on August 31, 2022 [15 favorites]


So what you're telling me is...there is a cabal.
posted by medusa at 1:42 PM on August 31, 2022 [24 favorites]


I wonder if it's possible to form an "exciting edgy intellectual" group like this that doesn't turn into a fraternity.

Here's a Galbraith quote from 1963 or thereabouts:
The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. The man who has struck it rich in minerals, oil, or other bounties of nature is found explaining the debilitating effect of unearned income from the state. The corporate executive who is a superlative success as an organization man weighs in on the evils of bureaucracy. Federal aid to education is feared by those who live in suburbs that could easily forgo this danger, and by people whose children are in public schools. Socialized medicine is condemned by men emerging from Walter Reed Hospital. Social Security is viewed with alarm by those who have the comfortable cushion of an inherited income. Those who are immediately threatened by public efforts to meet their needs — whether widows, small farmers, hospitalized veterans, or the unemployed — are almost always oblivious to the danger.
So, the roots here are deep and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer to your question is no. Real progress isn't edgy, it's inclusive. This is just power, performatively exercising power, to show that it can do so without consequence.
posted by mhoye at 1:46 PM on August 31, 2022 [127 favorites]


I'd like an update on this 2019 article (seriously, it was good then, but more shit has happened to/been done by the antagonists,)
posted by lalochezia at 1:46 PM on August 31, 2022 [5 favorites]


I wonder if it's possible to form an "exciting edgy intellectual" group like this that doesn't turn into a fraternity.

There are circles of very smart science-adjacent people who I admire a great deal and don't think succumb to this. But I think it requires a fundamental sense of generosity, a willingness to see people as inherently worthwhile and interesting, and concerns that involve people as fundamentally valuable, even universally and eternally so.

I've been thinking a lot about Ursula K. Le Guin's commencement speech to Bryn Mawr in 1986. The brief version of what she says might be something like:
What I learned was the language of power - of social power; I shall call it the father tongue. It doesn't speak itself. It only lectures. It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity. In our Constitution and the works of law, philosophy, social thought, and science, in its everyday uses in the service of justice and clarity, what I call the father tongue is immensely noble and indispensably useful. When it claims a privileged relationship to reality, it becomes dangerous and potentially destructive.

The language of the fathers, of Man Ascending, Man the Conqueror, Civilized Man, is not your native tongue. It isn't anybody's native tongue. You didn't even hear the father tongue your first few years, except on the radio or TV, and then you didn't listen, and neither did your little brother, because it was some old politician with hairs in his nose yammering. And you and your brother had better things to do. You had another kind of power to learn. You were learning your mother tongue.

Using the father tongue, I can speak of the mother tongue only, inevitably, to distance it -- to exclude it. It is the other, inferior. It is primitive: inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal. It's repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women's work; earthbound, housebound. It's vulgar, the vulgar tongue, common, common speech, colloquial, low, ordinary, plebeian, like the work ordinary people do, the lives common people live. The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a word the root of which means "turning together." The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity: it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart.

Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse.
I was not familiar with Edge or with John Brockman, but he's quoted on his Wikipedia page as having said: "Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody." Something you can only say with a straight face if you've accepted a definition of "serious" that Le Guin would call the pinnacle of the father tongue.

Edge's own web site, meanwhile, posits a world in which "literary intellectuals" are at war with "scientists." It offers a "third culture," and opens up by feinting that it will somehow be a synthesis of these two worlds, but no:
In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. Although I borrow Snow's phrase, it does not describe the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.
(Emphasis mine.)

In other words, his vision of a grand unification to culture isn't one where these two visions of intellect meet: it's one where scientists reclaim the "dominant" position that these assholes resentfully claim the "literary" world seized from them. There is no cooperation: there is only extermination.

That site also lists Murray Gell-Mann as a third culture thinker, which: wooooooof.

The problem is that "edgy" is oftentimes just another word for onanism: it's people sharing what thrills them without much self-reflection, and souring on any opposing perspective as somehow anti-thought. It's afraid of criticism. Cowardly. Because it's not really an intellectual culture: it's a culture that dons "intellect" as a kind of cosplay. (Which isn't to say that each and every person involved here is stupid, but when you decide that "intellect" is your whole personality and the sum of your being, challenges to your mannerisms or beliefs are seen as challenges to your intellect, full-stop.)

It purports to be a collaborative tradition, but in more of a bundled-sticks-equals-fascism sense of the word: individuals claiming to share "values" when what they really share is an opposition to any possible counterpoint to those values.

The thinkers I find the most interesting—and whaddaya know, they seem to like each other!—are the ones who are extremely open to alternative voices. Even the ones that hold extreme or "edgy" positions make room for other voices. And, miraculously, by doing so an awful lot of their edge tends to be gradually worn away. Because it turns out that, when you listen to people, you realize they have reasons for being what they are.

Lastly, I used to live with a guy who had a lot of money and favored the sort of "intellectual" playact that Epstein is described as putting on here. That whole "What does that have to do with pussy?" routine sounds so like that guy that I'm suddenly irrationally convinced I know exactly what Jeffrey Epstein sounded like, and all the inner workings of his sad little mind.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:56 PM on August 31, 2022 [50 favorites]


I missed this in 2019 so glad to read it now. It hits very close to home to me. My early career was at not one but two hyped academic places: the Santa Fe Institute and the MIT Media Lab. I personally knew various Epstein-adjacent men like Murray Gell-Mann and Marvin Minsky and Seth Lloyd and most directly, Joi Ito. I still haven't figured out how to sit with all of it.

Those places did give me a deep seated skepticism of demi-celebrity Great Thinker Men and the self-important culture of Edge and TED. At their worst they are more about social status and entertainment than science or technology. I think most academics are insecure and many take pride or solace in the fawning attention of people telling them they are very smart and intellectually important. Particularly men with fragile egos.

I recently listened to the BROKEN: Seeking Justice podcast which goes into great detail on Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and just how awful their crimes were. It's particularly good in centering the stories of their victims and how some of them fought back, for years, and eventually achieved some measure of justice for themselves. It greatly humanized the crimes for me and made me understand more just how awful Epstein's world is. (There's nothing specific about Epstein's science dilettantism there, just oblique mentions.)
posted by Nelson at 2:08 PM on August 31, 2022 [11 favorites]


I wonder if it's possible to form an "exciting edgy intellectual" group like this that doesn't turn into a fraternity.

I imagine it's the same as asking why so few self-styled "conservative comedians" are actually funny: they're more concerned with being conservative than with beings comedians. There have been and are intellectuals and groups of intellectuals who seriously challenge the status quo, but they do so by actually developing and disseminating serious intellectual work, not posturing as edgy provocateurs. From the author's description and other things I've read, none of these Edge/Epstein/TED-type circles actually engaged in any kind of serious intellectual work, they just had parties and functions where they bloviated at each other and jerked off to their own proclaimed genius.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:22 PM on August 31, 2022 [8 favorites]


Another commencement address by Le Guin was to Mills College in 1983, which is a bit briefer and less thoroughly-developed than her 1986 address to Bryn Mawr that Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted linked above, but exploring essentially the same ideas. I think what Le Guin had to say in those addresses about language, power, and gender is still as radical today as it was then, and I believe we could still learn from what she had to say then to make a better society today.
posted by biogeo at 2:30 PM on August 31, 2022 [9 favorites]


> "What does that have to do with..."

In TFA, it's quoted as "What does that got to do...

Was he too ignorant to correct his speech around intellectuals, or was it an intentional attempt to sound like a no-nonsense tough guy?
posted by Rat Spatula at 2:51 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I went to an Art workshop at Dixie college, yup, in way Southern Utah. One of the events was a genius panel where oh, eight guys set themselves up as geniuses and sat in front of a roomful of women, largely Art teachers. I guess they couldn't find any women of genius in Utah education, I viewed it as a comical, pathetic sex scam. Their wives were all at home. The geniuses has come down to southern Utah, from Northern Utah. The food was good. Kanab, Utah, that "hot bed," of genius, and red sand.
posted by Oyéah at 4:46 PM on August 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


I'm not sure I would have been into Marina Warner's talk as Heffernan describes but the difference between her work and the others....
Winding confidently through a dozen thorny disciplines, Warner was thinking circles around so many Edgies whose derivative books I’d felt obliged to read. I wondered if others in the room were hearing what I was hearing. Maybe being in the room for Warner’s lecture on the Glabrous was like being present in 1980, the very first time 48-year-old John Searle gave his lecture on the Chinese Room—if the Chinese Room had been an actually interesting idea.

After Warner’s talk, Searle, then 84, raised his hand. His young companion sat mum beside him. He jumped right in. About “the disappearance of female pubic hair,” he said, “since it appears a high percentage of internet use is directed at pornography use, and that is a general term for sexuality, are there any studies, what are the effects of this on people?”

In other words, What does that got to do with pussy?!

That’s bad faith, plain and simple. A person aims to phrase as scholarship what’s in fact an infantile and urgent narcissistic project: to gouge as much more sex and power out of this world while he still can.
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:40 PM on August 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


All Edge. No point.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:13 AM on September 1, 2022 [7 favorites]


Yeah, the overlap between techbros who are deeply into "reason" and defenders of Epstein and pedophilia is horrifying.

Richard Stallman, the infamously smelly and ill mannered man who created the GNU and GPL and is largely repsonsible for the existence of Linux, went on several screeds defending Minsky by arguing that pedophilia wasn't really all that bad, that maybe the girls wanted to be raped, and more.

It was so bad there was move to try to get him off the baord of the EFF, which failed becuase the EFF decided it really wanted a very smelly guy with an unmekpt wild beard who defended pedophilia to be one of their public faces.

And of course even before the whole incident with defending Minksy, Stallman was pretty deep into casual misogyny and edgelording it in ways that (by total coincidence I'm sure) othered and excluded women and were predatory.

But most people at MIT and other big institutions just shrugged and said it was becuse he was a crazy genius and we shouldn't expect him to keep to normal standards because genius and madness go together and anyway he was a genius so it was fine.

I don't know if Epstein had any special tropism for techbros, or if it's just that rich techbros include a higher than normal percentage of sexual predators. But Epstein had a lot of techbro friends and clients.
posted by sotonohito at 9:33 AM on September 1, 2022 [6 favorites]


Intellect and class power go together like government and religion. The embodiment forever.
posted by eustatic at 9:48 AM on September 1, 2022


> sotonohito: "I don't know if Epstein had any special tropism for techbros, or if it's just that rich techbros include a higher than normal percentage of sexual predators. But Epstein had a lot of techbro friends and clients."

I suspect there are two separate but related things going on . The first thing is that many sexual predators like Epstein don't just groom victims, they also groom collaborators and defenders. Specifically, they cultivate networks of high-status people who would be able to vouch for the predator and defend against any allegations (e.g.: "how can this guy be bad, he hangs out with all these credible, high-status people?"). Some of these high-status people may also share the predator's proclivities but that's not always necessary for them to be defenders of the predator.

The second thing is that Epstein, by all accounts, thought of himself as a so-called "great thinker" and loved to associate himself with other people people who were also so-called great thinkers. Whether this was out of a desire to learn from them, insecurity in his own genius, just plain fandom, or something else, who can say. But, I think combining these two impulses is how you get this whole thing where everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton have been linked to Epstein.
posted by mhum at 11:08 AM on September 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'd like to mention that EFF was unionized because of Stallman. Whatever hold he has on the board, it's not shared by the rank and file. Also, his aversion to plants led to the greening of many offices.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:21 AM on September 1, 2022 [6 favorites]



It was so bad there was move to try to get him off the baord of the EFF, which failed becuase the EFF decided it really wanted a very smelly guy with an unmekpt wild beard who defended pedophilia to be one of their public faces.


You mean the FSF. Which is pretty defined as the People Who Can Stand Stallmann Club.

In this day and age, avoiding Stallman does not hurt your career. And there are so many analogues to the FSF publishing free software these days that there's not much reason to care that the brand "FSF" is just a warning label for "Beware of the RMS"
posted by ocschwar at 11:31 AM on September 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


I think, for me one of the most infuriating parts of this kind of patriarchal edgelord parasitism is the damage it does to perverse and sexually open cultures. Being perpetually horny and fixated on sex is all very well and good, but these monumental merkin lice create such a one sided culture it means that forming alliances to protect sexual liberty as a progressive value is hampered.

I'm semi-active in my own circle of thirsty perverts, and it is infuriating that assholes like this not only exist but are lionized, oftentimes for publicly bragging about how they've mistreated women.

They brag! They get accolades! They break the law in ways that aren't quite bad enough for any one woman to want to suffer through the exhaustion of police reports and courtrooms for, and then they go out of their way to convince other men that this is what it means to be "successful."

And it's tragic because this community also has some of the most enlightened and self-aware role model-y men on the planet in it. Men who serve as proof that it's very easy to be a total horny doofus and contribute to the net sum of human happiness. It's hard to see the contrast and not conclude that, for the shitlords, the point is ultimately not sexual at all—it's flaunting power.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:57 AM on September 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”
posted by Jacen at 12:16 PM on September 1, 2022 [5 favorites]


They all seem terible - read the article about Epstein's close friend who claims he had satyriasis, which is the male version of nymphomania. Fine, maybe he did, but he abused under-age women and kept them as sex slaves, not had a proclivity for visiting actual working prostitues. Those are not actually the side-effects! But as long as you can crouch it in some vaguely 'sciency' mumbo-jumbo, then his friend can justify it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:50 AM on September 2, 2022


Oh that satyriasis claim is just 100% garbage, Stuart Pivar trying to reconcile his friendship with a monster. In the interview Pivar tries to turn this claim into aggression, claiming the interviewer is ignorant. For his authoritative source he cites Psychopathia Sexualis, which indeed is a ground breaking book in sexology but in the 135 years since its publication the field has advanced a bit.

So yeah, great example of bad science mumbo-jumbo being used to justify a man raping children.
posted by Nelson at 8:26 AM on September 2, 2022 [4 favorites]


« Older Nirvana - Live at Reading Festival (30th August...   |   Blue Check, Please Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments