The Democratization of Philosophy: A Return to Digital Utopianism
The late 1990s were optimistic times. Not only had the Cold War ended just a few years prior, but the internet promised to usher in a new era of global communication and free exchange of information, flattening hierarchies and eliminating the hegemonic nature of the modern systems of education. Not only would it be possible to communicate instantaneously with anyone around the world, but the internet would enable individual people to get their work out there for the world to see while bypassing the narrow gates of the traditional publishing process.
Collectively this late-1990s internet optimism is known as “digital utopianism,” the seeds of which were already in place in the early 1970s, as Fred Turner points out in his highly-recommended book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. As the internet became more commercialized, however, and with the less-optimistic worldview spawned by various economic, social and cultural, and geopolitical factors—such as the Dot-Com Bust of the early 2000s, the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Iraq War of 2004, the Great Recession of 2008, the cultural milieu of the Trump era, and now the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic—the digital utopianism of the dawn of the internet era has been on a steady decline from optimism to cynicism.
Having spent most of my career as a professional philosopher outside of academia, and having been a teenager in the mid-1990s when internet-era digital utopianism was in full swing, I am in a unique position to keenly observe the decline in digital utopianism and that decline’s effects on how philosophers in particular and academic in general think of philosophy and its relation to the internet in this now third decade of the internet age.
In the 1990s, Usenet groups and chatrooms were all the rage, and it was not uncommon to find those (relatively few) internet-savvy philosophy students and professors carrying on what can only be described as Socratic dialogues with each other both synchronously and asynchronously in the various pre-social-media platforms of the day. “Talking philosophy on the internet is in the spirit of Socrates!” we used to think to ourselves and proclaim to each other. Philosophers around the world were united in their quest for knowledge and wisdom, coming together en masse and bypassing traditional forums and platforms for philosophical discussion—the university classroom, conferences and symposia, academic papers and journal articles, and so on. For the first time in a very long time, philosophy was once again alive and (relatively) free from the shackles of the institutional constraints and structures that had come to define modern intellectual life and professional academia.
But then something happened along the way. Rather than releasing their stranglehold on philosophical discussion and what it means to be a philosopher, academia and its ancillary strong-arms in the academic and educational publishing industries tightened their grip and re-staked their claims on philosophy and philosophical writing, such that it is nearly impossible to be respected as a philosopher if you don’t have a university position and aren’t publishing in traditional philosophy journals, and they continue today to suck the liveliness out of philosophy that had been given a much needed dose of lifeblood by 1990s internet optimism and inclusiveness compared to the dreary halls and dreaded ivory tower of the modern university.
Modern social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc. have been a double-edged sword for philosophy on the internet. On the one hand, they are extremely egalitarian and thus inline with the optimistic spirit of free and open philosophical debate on the internet. Yet, the unfortunate consequence is the fragmentation of philosophical discussions on the internet onto different platforms, each of which encourages only pithy soundbites and witty retorts over sustained discussion and truth-seeking dialogue in the spirit of Socrates. It’s simply not possible to cram substantive philosophical debate into a tweet of 280 characters or an Instagram meme , however valuable those platforms might be for disseminating brief quotes from famous philosophers, which is all the rage on Instagram right now. There are still, of course, now-old-fashioned philosophy discussion forums that are better-suited to long-form philosophical discussion and debate. But the vast majority of internet users, even philosophers, spend their internet time on social media instead of frequenting philosophy discussion forums that saw their last design update in 1997.
Philosophy blogging has had a rather long day in the sun as well, of which this post itself is a typical example. And despite late-2000s predictions that blogging as a popular medium would soon die off as a result of popular media, blogging is once again on the upswing, in philosophy and otherwise. Having written over 100 philosophy blog posts now, I am finding that I’m rediscovering the optimism of philosophy on the internet in all its digital utopianism glory. Right now my website (zacharyfruhling.com) is getting approximately 150 unique visitors a day. This month alone my website has already been visited by readers from the following countries, according to Google Analytics:
United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Australia
Ireland
India
Germany
Denmark
Netherlands
Greece (There’s something poetic, by the way, about people from Athens, once the home of Socrates, reading my philosophy blog from half a world away!)
Hungary
Colombia
Switzerland
Italy
France
South Africa
Romania
Sweden
Turkey
Georgia
Philippines
Pakistan
Poland
Brazil
Spain
Japan
Norway
Israel
Mexico
Belgium
China
Cyprus
Portugal
Albania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Chile
Hong Kong
New Zealand
Russia
United Arab Emirates
Bangladesh
Czechia
Croatia
Indonesia
Republic of Korea
Lebanon
Latvia
Nigeria
Singapore
Slovenia
Taiwan
Austria
Estonia
Egypt
Iceland
Kuwait
Luxembourg
Nepal
Thailand
Uganda
Armenia
Argentina
Bulgaria
Costa Rica
Algeria
Ecuador
Finland
Guam
Iran
Jamaica
Cambodia
Morocco
Malta
Malaysia
Puerto Rico
Palestine
Serbia
Sudan
Syria
Venezuela
Vietnam
Looking at this list of website visitor locations, I can’t help but think that I’m both witnessing and participating in a true democratization of philosophy. No long am I teaching philosophy only to those privileged American students who can afford the luxury of going to college—even a community college like College of Eastern Idaho where I currently teach. Instead I am disseminating philosophy (reference to Jacque Derrida’s Dissemination intended) to people around the world from every country, from every socioeconomic background (except perhaps the poorest of the poor in third-world countries who still have no internet access), and from every conceivable political, religious, economic, and social worldview. We all know the power of ideas to change the world, and I’d like to think that I’m doing my part in planting the seeds of change and spreading the germs of existential self-awareness to free people from the tyranny of their own cultural and political isolation (which have themselves become even more tyrannical in this era of increasing nationalism, competing worldviews, and social-media-reinforced thought bubbles).
If you yourself are an academic philosopher and spend most of your time writing for philosophy journals that no one reads and teaching philosophy only to your privileged college and university students, I challenge you to spend less time in your own academic thought bubble and more time getting your ideas, your writings, and your own unique brand ands way of philosophy out there on the internet for the world at large to discover, to enjoy, and to benefit from.
For me, this is tantamount to reclaiming the digital utopian vision that we once had as philosophers in the late 1990s: using the internet as a platform to spread philosophy and open philosophical discussion to the ends of the Earth and to do an end-run around the narrow intellectual and institutional gates through which universities and publishing companies would like to keep us funneled—for their own institutional interests, not ours or the best interest of the world at large, no matter what pale egalitarian or open-access narrative your particular institution may be dishing out in a desperate attempt to keep dwindling student enrollments up, and no matter what false narratives major educational publishing companies are telling their customers about bringing education to the masses (“Buy our books, please!”—and be sure to retweet this post! 😉).
For Further Reading:
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner
Dissemination by Jacques Derrida
