Inside the intellectual dark web

In January, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman interviewed the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. The channel broadcast a short version of the interview on the evening news bulletin, where it would have been seen by the few hundred thousand people who watch the programme nightly. But to its credit, Channel 4 also published online the full half-hour encounter. Within days, it was viewed by millions around the globe. The interview, in which the presenter repeatedly tried to misrepresent the views of her interviewee, and in which his responses finally brought her to a confounded silence, became a sensation. Memes of Newman saying ‘So what you’re saying’ washed across social media. Channel 4 News and Newman had become internationally famous through one interview with an Toronto academic. As an online commentator noted: ‘Mainstream media, meet internet.’

Much has been written about Peterson, not least here in Spectator Life. But the two factors that have worked in Peterson’s favour — a refusal to bow to the orthodoxies of the age (in his case on enforced gender pronouns) and a willingness to use YouTube and other new technologies to bypass traditional media to disseminate his ideas — are not his alone. Indeed, it is now such a pattern there is even a term for this collection of disparate thinkers: ‘the intellectual dark-web.’

The phrase is the invention of Eric Weinstein, a brilliant West Coast mathematician and economist who has observed and participated in part of this trend. He has also seen up close the way in which the world now discovers otherwise forbidden ideas and opinions. Until last year, Eric’s brother, Bret, was a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. A Bernie Sanders supporter and life-long leftist, Bret also came to national attention because of a stand he made.

Since the 1970s, the college had celebrated a ‘Day of Absence’ in which black students and faculty met off campus.