Better deaf than deafened.— Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those who want to sell and without hoarseness there no longer is any genius.
This is surely an evil age for a thinker. He has to learn how to find his silence between two noises and to pretend to be deaf until he really becomes deaf. Until he has learned this, to be sure, he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches.
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Poor Nietzsche thought David Strauss was a symptom of cultural decay. He thought the public intellectual arena was a fraudulent carnival in the early 1880s. Luckily for him, he never had to see Strauss presented as a thumbnail image: mouth agape, eyebrow raised, with three red arrows pointed at his face, under a caption screaming, “Scholar’s new book DESTROYS divinity of Jesus!” He had hucksters, yes — barkers, pamphleteers, academic charlatans, literary careerists: the usual fleas on the hide of civilization. But he didn’t have the algorithm: that tireless pimp of the nervous system, forever urging even decent minds to hitch up their skirts and show a little more leg for engagement.
In one of his unpublished notes, he says, “Becoming famous surrounds us with humans and their demands upon us. We must cast our fame into the sea.” Sour grapes in his case or not, he was right. Live unnoticed, said Epicurus. Scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs, said Montaigne. Worshiping the bitch-goddess SUCCESS breeds moral flabbiness, said William James. Our age always has a bargain ready: your face for a little reach, your anger for a little traffic, your shame for a little recurring revenue. Refuse it. Do not become a window prostitute in the red-light district of opinion. Bite the hand that offers the platform. Leave the bell unrung. Keep something unsold, for the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the algorithm, sponsored hysterical branded, dragging themselves through the monetized depths of content creation, looking for angry subscribers to smash that like button and subscribe…