> but instead [the potential intellectuals] are drawn to the easy honeypot of modern middlebrow culture because it is too nerdy, too attractive, too omnipresent, to ever leave.

What a strange conclusion. Ignoring auteur theory (the idea that you might bring artistic or intellectual value to an otherwise bland commercial work) entirely, all the author’s hypothesised potential intellectuals are simply making too much money doing Marvel movies…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?

I don’t think that really tracks at all. It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.

I think, generally, people who want to make meaningful contributions to a field are more driven than that, and there are tonnes of excellent critics and theorists - ‘intellectuals’ - working, unmurdered, in the arts today. They are less visible culturally partially because, with the decline of print media, they are not as profitable for media orgs as they previously were.

I do think that our puritanical cultural view of productivity-as-maximally-virtuous has created a lot of guilt in the middle classes about whether they spend their leisure time ‘intellectually enough’, which - though seductive in a masochistic way - is a completely absurd frame once broken down.

I wonder if the author might not be projecting their own anxieties, in this sense, onto their imagined peers.

It's interesting that your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture' bubble (reminiscent of a kind of a nightmare glass bead game, centered around the subset of mass media that smart kids enjoyed in the 70s/80s/90s - endless remakes, merchandise, collectables, conventions).

Camus/Hemingway were 'intellectual' in the sense that they sort to engage with the wider world, to explore and to understand and to improve it. 'Productivity' culture gurus are usually not 'intellectual' in that sense at all - and they are often caricatured as having a narrow focus in their work, reductive worldviews, social difficulties, and little compassion for other people. I'd argue that productivity culture is actually tied to nerd culture (both are rooted in the huge rewards that big tech has paid for insect-like specialization) and therefore just as anti-intellectual. People are 'guilted' into learning to code, side hustles, day trading, open-source software, streaming, extra-curriculars, making an app, creating content, etc - not studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization.

potential intellectuals are simply making too much money optimising ads on the internet…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…?

isnt this forum where potential intellectuals of this nature gather?

It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections.

It's a lot less hard to imagine a person with the potential to be the next Hemingway staying home because they're satiated by diving headfirst into the MCU though.

Intelligent people throwing their potential away because they've been distracted by some utterly trivial nonsense is not a new story, and it's not really anything society needs to worry about (it's their choice; society has no claim on their potential) but I reckon there's a fair few people who'll be lying on their deathbed with deep regrets about how they made becoming an expert in the canon and lore of a media franchise was a huge waste of time that only really served to funnel money to George Lucas or Marvel.

It seems like the author's point (which would have been easier to parse out had it not been placed at the end of the piece) is directed "nerd" culture's storytelling, which I would describe as being the kind of genre fiction that children consumed in the 50s (limited to comics and pulp novels), that teens consumed later in the century, and that, for the first time over the past couple of decades, is now viewed as entertainment for adults. "Intellectual" here would be someone who is well read and engages with challenging material.

The argument seems to be that this stuff, whose elevation into adult consumption involves situating itself firmly in the realm of middlebrow, lures intelligent and curious young people growing up. But, because there's very little outright critique of it as ultimately a fairly puerile type of content, these young people are never really pushed to try for more challenging stuff that aims at something higher than telling a titillating story. Why? Well for one, it's a self perpetuating situation. Everyone who reads YA fiction knows it's intended for children, but whenever that's said about these middlebrow works, people get defensive and react with insecurity ("You're just pretentious!", "Let people enjoy things!", etc.) I've found that readers of Sanderson's work are shocked when they first hear that people outside of the doorstop fantasy genre often think of it as childish and unremarkable. MCU fans were extremely upset when people like Scorsese leveled these critiques at those films. So people often just avoid pissing off the mob (which usually results in censure-by-vote on sites like reddit where the "Let people enjoy things" mindset not coincidentally has the strongest hold) and keep their opinion to themselves.

I can't disagree too much about the decline of literate intellectuals, but I'm not sure how much this is due to this nerd culture. I think the average person has always consumed primarily escapist slop, or, at best, middlebrow staples like Hemingway. The collapse of education in the US, in which students are often given as many chances to avoid reading as they could want, is likely far more responsible in most books being read belonging to a few low brow genres (romantasy porn for women, lengthslop fantasy novels for men, ghost written political memoirs, etc.) than anything else. The days of books like Naked Lunch being well known enough to cause major controversy are long past, as are the days of concert audiences critical enough to boo Glenn Gould's torpid tempo on Brahms 1 or cause a ruckus at the outrageously novelty of Rite of Spring.

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