The Stunning Stupidity of Europe’s Intellectual Class

The great enemy? “Googlization.” Why, you might ask?

A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information overload. Ordinary people have hijacked strategic resources and are clogging up once carefully policed media channels.

Disturbing! Without an exclusionary gatekeeper, people get to learn. Can’t have that, now, can we?

Before the Internet, the mandarin classes rested on the idea that they could separate "idle talk" from "knowledge". With the rise of Internet search engines it is no longer possible to distinguish between patrician insights and plebeian gossip.

Emphasis mine, by the way. The intellectuals, heaven forbid, will have to interpret the veracity of information for themselves. Something any real academic or reader has always had to do to earn the respect of those whom they talk down to.

The distinction between high and low, and their co-mingling on occasions of carnival, belong to a bygone era and should no longer concern us. Nowadays an altogether new phenomenon is causing alarm: search engines rank according to popularity, not truth.

I cant imagine why this is alarming to any honest person, since academics on the make for attention have never promised any sort of truth, especially in a continent obsessed with the false intellectualism of post-modern rants and tripe as a means of trying to make the individual ranter think himself smart.

Geert Lovink’s complaint seems to have more to do with being found out and having the regard an appointment or named position in society being taken away. This is no different that the complaints of the monarchs of earlier age seeing the poplauce just as most european though seem to see the world – slack jawed and unworthy in spite of their actual achievements in the expansion of what is known and what CAN be known.

Not only has popular noise risen to unbearable levels, we can no longer stand yet another request from colleagues and even a benign greeting from friends and family has acquired the status of a chore with the expectation of reply. The educated class deplores that fact that chatter has entered the hitherto protected domain of science and philosophy, when instead they should be worrying about who is going to control the increasingly centralized computing grid.

Quite the reverse is what’s true of the state of information sharing. By including those outside of an academic, political, or literary social milieu it has become less centralized, more accessible. As it undermines the currency of a “class” (something EUvians still seem to have a bipolar relationship with), this diffusion of access to publishing thoughts takes away what many believed was the monopoly of that class – one which carries still such a narrow range of world-views that it looks monolithic, desiccated, and has nothing left to say – not until it renews itself and lets others in.

The World Wide Web, which should have realized the infinite library Borges described in his short story The Library of Babel (1941), is seen by many of its critics as nothing but a variation of Orwell's Big Brother (1948). The ruler, in this case, has turned from an evil monster into a collection of cool youngsters whose corporate responsibility slogan is "Don't be evil".

Most people are no longer interested in the ubiquitous use of the casual use of Orwell, but it seems especially specious when it’s used to criticize the enablement of access to information, and to criticize the fact that information can be judged on the motives of author. The horror of the world of Big Brother is precisely that the source of information’s intent and content were singular, something Lovink seems to find comfort in when it comes to the repugnant and lazy elite that he seems so enamored with.

As such it doesn’t take much for him to find appealing any sort of invented nonsense shaped out of ignorance of a subject and grievance about others’ success in understanding it – in short, typical French popular intellectualism. Characterized by nativism massaging paranoia about the present and future, one must recall that the queen of the beehive in his day, Mitterrand, wanted to ban the personal computer because of the irritation it might cause other monopolists: book distributer’s cartel, the newspapers, attorneys, etc. For these people, the future doesn’t represent a possibility and an chance to exercise the best moral judgment possible, it’s something to be feared.

It’s an awfully strange thing for a subculture given to admiring any sort of fake revolutionary, even the mass-murdering types.

In 2005 the president of the French Biliothèque National, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, published a booklet in which he warned against Google's claim to "organize the world's information".[2] Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge remains one of the few documents that openly challenge Google's uncontested hegemony. Jeanneney targets only one specific project, Book Search, in which millions of books of American university libraries are being scanned. His argument is a very French-European one. Because of the unsystematic and unedited manner by which Google selects the books, the archive will not properly represent the giants of national literature such as Hugo, Cervantes and Goethe. Google, with its bias of English sources, will therefore not be the appropriate partner to build a public archive of the world's cultural heritage. "The choice of the books to be digitized will be impregnated by the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere", writes Jeanneney.

What Jeanneney couldn’t understand is that the globe would hold no cultural exception for his lazy ass, and that Google was in no way trying to gather an explanatory encapsulation of global culture, and certainly wouldn’t go out of its’ way to include the authors Jeanneney holds in as high a regard in the manner one man, Jeanneney would like to see them placed. That would be up to Jeanneney, and for Jeanneney to do something about, not insist that others do it on his exclusive behalf at the expense of other great eras, ideas, and bodies of thought.

If fact the things that his thesis reveals as a failure to find in those not legally structured to look up to him and the ideas he hold to be in high regard, not that differently than Big Brother is immense. We are to believe that less is more. Fewer readers is intellectually broader. Equality of opportunity requires a narrowing of the class permitted to express itself...

The stupidity of Europe’s intellectual class is stunning.