The Internet’s Great Intellectual Fraud: How Influencers Have Turned Ignorance into Authority
I write against the great intellectual fraud of the digital age: the transformation of confident ignorance into public authority. Today, many people no longer need to know what they are talking about; they only need to look certain, intimate, outraged, or profound in front of a camera. Influencers, gurus, performative politicians, and content creators have learned to sell posture as thought, self-promotion as mission, and ready-made phrases as wisdom. Artificial intelligence has merely industrialized this imposture: emptiness now writes scripts, gains a soundtrack, receives cinematic aesthetics, and appears in the feed disguised as depth. Against this factory of prefabricated certainties, I still prefer the simple violence of the Socratic question: “how do you know?” Because that is where the mask falls. Bertrand Russell had already understood the tragedy: fools are often too sure of themselves, while the intelligent remain pierced by doubt. The internet merely gave the former a camera, a microphone, a teleprompter, and monetization.