In my newfound condition as a part-time bureaucrat, I have dropped the ball on some of my academic projects. I’ve carved out a little bit of time in between grant applications, emails, and paperwork to write about a topic that I find critical for understanding the politics of knowledge today: the emergence of the influencer intellectual.
Let’s start with some definitions. What, precisely, is an influencer intellectual? The best way to understand this new social formation is by ostension: Emily Oster is an influencer intellectual; so is Matthew Yglesias; so is Leanna Wen; so is Vinayak Prasad; so is Josh Barro. These and other similarly prominent individuals share a structural position. They all sound like experts. They all write like experts. They are all treated as experts, at least by some recognizably authoritative institutions (I’m looking at you, New York Times!). But they all lack expertise, at least in the topics in which they publicly present themselves as reputable, authoritative, knowledgable experts. To extend a metaphor from the sociology of scientific knowledge, they are trough feeders, living away from the generation of knowledge but close enough to it that they speak with certainty about their sometimes ludicrous claims (here, I am referring to MacKenzie’s foundational model of uncertainty and knowledge, as presented in his classic 1990 paper).
Trough feeders are knowledge consumers, not knowledge creators. They vary in sophistication—some more naïve than others—but they are removed from the messy and uncertain creation of new findings and claims. Unlike those in the frontlines who understand the fragility underpinning even the strongest scientific claims (or, indeed, unlike science communicators who go to great lengths to learn the lingo of scientists and translate their claims as well as possible), trough feeders speak with impressive confidence. “Masks are clearly more dangerous than COVID” an economist without child-developmental expertise professes. “The democrats should assume my ten commandments!”, extolls a pundit that treats politics as a spectator sport.
How did influencer intellectuals emerge? Trough feeders have always existed. They are not new. People speaking assuredly about science, even though they lack actual domain expertise, is probably as old as science itself, at least in its most modern incarnation. What distinguishes this new generation of trough feeders from those past is the structure of incentives that shape their interests, engagement, and reach. Being a dubiously confident scientist in the 1980s was certainly possible—there were quite a few of those! But building a profitable career as an expert and on the back of dubious claims was a heavy lift. Key institutions of the public sphere—in particular, traditional media and scientific associations—constituted roadblocks for trough feeders to rise in public as authoritative experts. The system wasn’t perfect, of course (think of the merchants of doubt!), but it prevented some overly confident yet woefully uninformed individuals from shaping public conversations in significant ways. Damage could be contained.
The rise of influencer platforms, of the fragmented public sphere of Web 2.0, changed this fundamentally. Traditional media was no longer a filter. Audiences could be developed away from its reach, one click at a time, in the servers of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Driven by monetization, the algorithms running on these servers privileged clicks over content. Users curated their experiences, following those that said what they wanted to hear. And those who succeeded, those who managed to amass enough clicks, follows, likes, and engagements, became sources of authority and prestige beyond the platforms. Matthew effects travelled from the digital to the real, clicks were transmuted from fool’s gold into actual monies. Book deals, speaker deals, even tacky clothing-line deals. Deals galore! All tied to clicks. None tied to actually knowing how things work.
Some trough feeders thrived in this environment, circulating through magazines, podcasts, op-eds, newspapers of record, and the speaking circuit. Without actually knowing much about what they professed, they became experts for their audiences. Far detached from the core sets involved in the making of knowledge, in the production of claims, they became voices of wisdom, celebrities of sorts propped up not by their achievements as researchers or scholars, but by their structural position in the digital world. And unlike trough feeders past, these influencer intellectuals shape public conversations. Lacking a robust public sphere, their claims circulate, uncontested, frictionless, through the algorithms of monetization of the platforms on which they thrive.
So there it is. Influencer intellectuals. Beware.