I have been in two minds about referencing ‘We are living in a period of political anti-intellectualism. But in pop culture, clever is the new cool’ ( Morley, 2026). The subheading states: ‘At the very moment Trump’s rambling speeches and meme–fied (sic) inanity threaten to overwhelm us, fashion, music and film are moving in the opposite direction’.
The central point of the article is relevant to my research, in which I ask what we mean by intelligence as we come to terms with so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, while contending with the constant bombardment of unutterable nonsense on social media and beyond. Philosophy, science, politics, genocide: everything today must be an entertaining meme to be noticed. Meanwhile, the invective towards dynamic generative technologies may be understandable, but it is also potentially a distraction. Intentionally or not, this blinkered focus ends up casting AI as the ultimate evil, while unimaginable horrors take place across the world – yes, very often with the support of self-learning coded processes and machinery. But more saliently, always within an economic and political structure that has dispensed with decency in favour of greed and/or a complete lack of humane empathy (perpetuated across the political spectrum). Did the machines make us this way, or did we build the machines as they are because that is what and who we are after nearly two centuries of advertising and consumerism flowing through our veins?
In amongst all of this, there are increasing signs – if one looks closely – of people wanting something other than the regular tripe much of our media serves up. That society is tired of or tiring of the infantile entertainment that oftentimes nowadays passes itself off as news. And yet, I was in two minds about sharing the article because, despite it being relevant, it also somehow becomes the very thing it recognises by positioning the trend in the domain of entertainment, fashion and celebrity, even though it concedes that these areas tend to pick up on the zeitgeist before turning it into a set of accessories. But maybe that is all we have been left with. Without images of models, who on earth would read the thing?
Morley sets the scene in which she says it has become ‘cool’ to read philosophy, albeit a strange moment for ‘smart’ to get hot, since:
We are living through a period of pronounced anti‑intellectualism. Expertise is dismissed as elitism, procedure as dull, facts as irrelevant. Trump’s rambling, repetitive speeches have warped public discourse worldwide. The political motivations are clear, since anti-intellectualism has always been foundational to authoritarianism, depriving the people of the framework with which to question power (no need to remind anyone who burned the books). In the US, elite universities are being defunded, investigative newspapers such as the Washington Post depleted and defanged. Everywhere, we are being dumbed down for profit by an addictive social media, which turns us all into remote-working battery chickens of the attention farms of Silicon Valley.’ (My italics)
This is exactly my concern and has been for years. Ever since, I was advised to think less circa 2016. And to shy away from complexity. Think less? At a time when Donald Trump, a grotesque reality TV star who speaks using the vernacular of an enraged toddler (and seemingly thinks that way too but with clumsy fingers on nuclear codes and many world leaders too scared to challenge him – thank God for Pedro Sánchez, heh?), has taken over the most powerful country on the planet? Think less? Really? Many of my recent posts are underpinned by my frustration with the reality that Morely describes and the fact that even in places where one might expect some analysis or counter movement, somehow the overwhelming shift away from intellectual thought is supported and extended. Are even the intellectuals anti-intellectual nowadays, I’ve wondered? I will discuss this in more detail elsewhere at a later date, but suffice it to say I was relieved to discover Anna Kornbluh’s 2023 Immediacy and Amanda Beech’s (2021) critique of practice-led art pedagogy, two places that query and critique the ways in which the dominant status quo of ‘dumbing down’ potentially masquerades as opposing ideology in the arts and universities. In the main, however, it has not been easy to find cogent countermeasures to the defensive misogyny/racism/xenophobia that seems to accompany a universal dumbing down of everything, as memeification infects all we know. Plenty of social-media, attention-driven sanctimony, but often this is the same pap as the ‘libtard’ insults, merely dressed a little differently. A growing reaction against short-form, visually arresting nano-bite media, however, is indeed very real, exemplified in the links at the end of this post, some of which advertise lectures in pubs while others describe the phenomenon and what it might all signify. I have been noticing this shift for the last year or so and have even dared to let out a little sigh of relief.
Rampant anti-intellectualism has dominated our media and, subsequently, the air we all breathe for far too long. But it’s really important to understand that it did not begin with an uptake of the word ‘slop’, nor in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT and Midjourney. Nor in the early 00s and 2010s with the advent of social media. Neither did it flourish for the first time in the 90s with the proliferation of reality TV, a much cheaper form of production which also serves to titillate our basest voyeurisms. The tendency to shout and scream about the latest technology destroying the world without widening our view may be one of the effects of our long-time dive away from thought, reason and oh-so-unfashionable rationality (tarnished as it was by misogyny, racism and xenophobia). Indeed, as far back as 1956, as discussed here in earlier posts (2025), Günter Anders describes TV and advertising supported by an economic system that needs us all to be phantoms of ourselves, transfixed by capital, as a cause of our unhappiness. In that earlier post, I commented on Anders recognising that ‘when consciousness becomes divided across multiple simultaneous activities, our capacity for sustained critical engagement subsides.’ We were already carving up our focus, splitting, diminishing, reducing our capacity in the mid-twentieth century, according to Anders. His contemporary and ex-wife, Hannah Arendt (2006: 202), also laments this trajectory, identifying how turning everything into ‘entertainment’ deprives society of crucial sustenance as she writes, mass society ‘wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer goods.’ If everything becomes entertainment, everything is a commodity (just look at the universities…), but we cannot survive just on entertainment. Nor just on commodities. We need more than that to sustain a society. In the 1980s, Vilém Flusser (2013: 82) explained what happens when all is reduced to entertainment. For him, once we are only feeding on entertainment, primarily to distract ourselves from our unhappiness, we stop being human critters with functioning systems. We turn instead into nothing but mouths and anuses, input and outputs, whose only function is to allow crap to flow through the system.
They [the purveyors of the apparatuses] hammer our unhappy consciousness day and night with a bombardment of sensations. And they manage to divert us with all of this only because we collaborate with them. We want to be entertained and we demand ever more intense entertainment, because we cannot stand to be confronted with our unhappy consciousness.
I wonder if the trend Morley identifies suggests we are finally ready to confront ourselves – that living in a world where few give a shit, while consuming nothing but shit, has finally grown unappetising? Maybe the complete loss of ethical value, a world in which defensive misogyny, racism and xenophobia seem to reign, has finally grown stale, unappetising, vomit-inducing.
I have chosen to share the Morley article, despite some doubts about it, despite its ‘entertaining’ credentials. The trend she describes is real and important. I do wonder if it has arrived in the UK with as much gusto as it has in the States (perhaps for understandable reasons – we are pendulous creatures. And that being so, the reaction against Trumpism could and should be momentous.) Or perhaps because we in the UK are still so encumbered by our class system that education and or a desire for knowledge continues, accurately or not, to be perceived as tied up with who one’s parents are or were, and what size house we grew up in. Nor, I suspect, with as much energy in my generation of X’ers as it appears to have done with Generation Z. So much energy in fact, that I worry the trend will fizzle out before it has the chance to take root, especially if, as the Morley article suggests, there is a genuine risk that it is as superficial as anything else in our social-media driven surface paradigm. My 18-year-old explained to me that it has become somewhat passé lately to bang on about Camus on social media, and as for Diogenes… yawn! But perhaps that is a good sign too. Perhaps simply carrying a philosophy book down the catwalk was never going to be enough, even though it may signify something taking place in the wider world. After years of scrolling and passively consuming image-driven ‘pap’ (an earlier incarnation of slop employed by Samuel Beckett in his 1957 production, Endgame) or bilge, maybe it really is time for more substantive fare. I hope so.
A few places that seem to indicate intellectualism may indeed be a popular trend, or perhaps even something more substantive:
Lectures have invaded LA Bars and are selling out in minutes
Refs:
Arendt, H. (2006) Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin Books (Penguin classics).
‘Art’s Intolerable Knowledge’ (2021) Amanda Beech. Available at: http://amandabeech.com/writing/art-intolerable-knowledge/ (Accessed: 31 December 2024).
‘Cartner-Morley, J. (2026) ‘We are living in a period of political anti-intellectualism. But in pop culture, clever is the new cool’, The Guardian, 22 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/mar/22/living-period-political-anti-intellectualism-pop-culture-clever-new-cool (Accessed: 27 March 2026).
Kornbluh, A. (2023) Immediacy, or The style of too late capitalism. London New York: Verso.
Flusser, V. (2013) Post-History. Edited by S. Zielinski and N. Baitello Junior. Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal.
Further related reading:
Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia
The Unskilling of Art Education
The Revenge of Reason, Peter Wolfendale, Preface by Ray Brassier
Matt McManus, The Right Wants You Stupid (You will need to sign up Liberal Currents to read this – there is a free tier. And do read it all before flying off the handle. The column does not accuse people of being stupid, which has been a common trope on social media and an exceedingly unhelpful habit, but rather lists examples right-wing thinkers, such as Roger Scruton and Edmund Burke, suggesting people and society are happier when left uneducated.)
Minor edit made on 28th March 2026 (added the word perception)