That's the title of a new post by Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution. It's derived from a piece Cowen published at The Free Press, Why I (Often) Choose My Phone Instead of Flesh and Blood. Here's part of what Cowen posted at Marginal Revolution:
The internet, in other words, has invented a new means of human connection, characterized by “the perfect people for me.” For me, it’s people who are into analytical thinking and tech and AI and music and economics, and much more. For others? It can be Survivor obsessives or vegans or knitters or Survivor obsessives who are vegan and love to knit. The point is that there is a niche for all 8 billion of us. And now we know where to find each other.
And it turns out we value that very, very highly. So highly that we are willing to obsess over our little devices known as smartphones.
Here's a comment I posted at Marginal Revolution:
Makes perfect sense to me. The online world is well-suited to intellectual life, though you have to pick and choose carefully. The fundamental point is that, to a first approximation, you can communicate with any thinker who is online without having to worry about institutional barriers.
That's what makes the online world essential to me. I am by temperament an intellectual explorer, going boldly where none have gone before. What's utterly remarkable, that's how I was trained as well, first at Johns Hopkins then later at SUNY Buffalo. Why's that remarkable? Because going boldly is NOT what the academic world is about, though that's what it thinks it's up to. I mean, how do you train someone to do that, to be a Leif Erikson, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, or Morton Stanley? There's no training for that, no way to institutionalize.
No, the academic world starts when the territory has been explored and preliminary maps drawn up. Now, a few academic will slip through the cracks and explore new territory. But most do not. Some particularly venturesome academics will take those preliminary maps and go in there and start building infrastructure, roads, water wells, logging operations, etc. A less venturesome group will buy plots of land and start building on it. At the other end of the spectrum we have brokers who traffic in existing properties.
I see Tyler as a diversified real estate investment firm. A very few of his Emergent Venture picks will explore new territory, but he has no idea which ones and since many/most are quite young and not yet mature, they are somewhat insulated from his own preferences and mood affiliations. For the rest of it, he's invested all over the place, every continent, every type of terrain, at various levels of development.
As for me, Johns Hopkins let me undertake a structuralist analysis of "Kubla Khan" and awarded me a master's degree for the result, which is an analysis of a poem unlike any that had been done at the time (I eventually published a somewhat revised version, Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ”Kubla Khan”, 1985). Though I didn't think about it this way at the time, it's clear in retrospect that that's when I left the profession, I "lit out for the territory," to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain. Which implies, then, that I was doing postdoc work for my Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo. I was in the English Department, but my real teacher was David Hays, a computational linguist in Linguistics. My 1978 dissertation, "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory," was as much a quasi-technical exercise in knowledge representation as it was literary theory. I used Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, "The Expense of Spirit," as an example and got two publications out of it: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics (1976), Lust in Action: An Abstraction (1981). I took a faculty job at Rensselaer Polytechnic in 1978, failed to get tenure, and left in 1985. I spent two years looking for another academic post and failed. I've been a ronin scholar ever since.
I kept on publishing, did two books (Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution, 1987, and Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, 2001), and a bunch of articles. By the early 2000s the web had developed to the point where I could re-engage with the larger world – actually, that got started for me in the mid-90s with various email mediated forms. There's no point in detailing all that, but if you're curious, I talk about it at some length here, Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines.
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