They’re selling something more valuable: a way to understand the world…
For a while, the aspirational internet person had a fairly predictable morning.
Wake up at 5:30. Cold shower. Protein. Meditate. Journal. Build a startup. Perhaps stare meaningfully at a sunrise while wearing an Oura Ring.
Something has changed.
The new aspirational internet person appears to be sitting in a café reading Plato. Preferably with annotations. And apparently we’re all supposed to notice.
I recently read J’Nae Phillips’ excellent SSENSE piece, “The Rise of Intellectual Clout,” about the emergence of what we might call the intellectual creator: people building audiences around reading, philosophy, history, geopolitics, interdisciplinary learning and self-directed education.
The educational creator isn’t new, obviously. Education has always been one of the internet’s best businesses. But I think the product has changed.
From Teaching to Orientation
The old educational creator usually promised something fairly concrete. Learn Python. Understand marketing. Lose weight. Build a startup. Pass an exam.
The creator possessed knowledge. You wanted the knowledge. Somewhere between a YouTube video and a $499 course, a transaction occurred.
The new intellectual creator is doing something subtly different. They aren’t necessarily telling you what to do. They’re helping you figure out what the hell is going on. That’s a much bigger market.
SSENSE describes Jiang Xueqin’s long-form Predictive History lectures, for example, as moving between geopolitics, game theory, religion, philosophy, civilization and social change. The attraction isn’t merely acquiring individual facts. It’s entering a framework through which those facts begin to make sense.
This distinction matters. We have more information than any civilization in history. What we’re increasingly short of is orientation.
We Don’t Have an Information Problem
Open your phone: Ukraine. AI. Interest rates. China. Climate. Another breakthrough. Another crisis. Another paper. Another person explaining why the previous person is an idiot.
By breakfast, you’ve consumed enough information to keep a medieval monastery occupied for six months. And somehow you understand the world less.
This is one of the strongest observations in the SSENSE piece: the modern internet creates cognitive fragmentation, while these creators offer coherence. One of Jiang’s metaphors captures it particularly well: facts are furniture; truth is the mansion.
That’s the product. Not more furniture.
A floor plan.
Once you see it this way, the boom in personal curricula, reading lists, digital gardens, annotated PDFs, niche newsletters, long-form lectures and book clubs makes perfect sense.
People aren’t merely collecting knowledge. They’re trying to construct their own operating system for reality.
The Creator Becomes the Curriculum
This also changes the creator’s role. Previously, you followed someone because they were an expert in something.
Now you may follow them because you trust how they decide what is worth knowing. That’s a very different kind of authority.
A good intellectual creator might move from economics to architecture, then to AI, philosophy, history and a novel written in 1897. Their value isn’t necessarily superior expertise in every field.
It’s selection. Connection. Interpretation. Taste.
And this produces new content formats naturally:
Reading lists.
Book clubs.
Personal curricula.
Niche newsletters.
Long-form conversations.
“What I’m learning” collections.
Curated archives.
The creator is no longer merely the teacher. The creator becomes the syllabus.
And Then, Inevitably, It Becomes Lifestyle
This is where the trend gets much more interesting. Because intellectualism isn’t staying inside education.
It’s becoming lifestyle content. The books you read. The newsletters you subscribe to. The lectures you watch. The ideas you reference. The fact that you can sit through a 90-minute discussion without checking TikTok seventeen times. All of this communicates something about you.
SSENSE notes that being well-read and even being conspicuously offline are increasingly becoming status signals. Deep attention itself is becoming aspirational.
This is wonderfully ironic. We spent twenty years building technology that makes information instantly accessible.
Now scarcity has moved to the ability to ignore most of it.
Plato Is the New Pilates
Lifestyle creators have always sold more than products.
Buy this jacket and you aren’t merely buying cotton. You’re buying proximity to a particular world. Eat here. Travel there. Wear this. Know that obscure Japanese designer.
Intellectual creators increasingly operate through the same mechanism. Read these books. Know these references. Understand this philosopher. Join this book club. Follow this curriculum.
You aren’t merely purchasing education. You’re purchasing participation in a cultural identity. And if the creator has successfully built the right intellectual atmosphere, consuming their work says something about your taste.
That’s where education becomes status.
Of Course, There Is a Performance Problem
There’s an obvious danger here. Once intelligence becomes aesthetically desirable, people begin performing intelligence.
The internet is extremely good at this. You don’t need to read Proust. You need a photograph of Proust next to an espresso. You don’t necessarily need to understand Foucault. Sometimes mentioning Foucault appears to be sufficient.
The SSENSE article handles this contradiction well. Sedo, one of the creators interviewed, makes the distinction between genuinely spending time with an idea and optimizing intellectualism into an aesthetic. Platforms inevitably reward the visible performance because visible activity is what algorithms can distribute.
So we get something strange:
learning as content about learning.
Sometimes that’s genuine intellectual development. Sometimes it’s cosplay with better typography. Usually it’s somewhere in between.
AI Makes This Trend Stronger, Not Weaker
There’s another reason I think intellectual creators are going to become more important. AI makes raw information almost worthless.
Want a summary of Plato? Ask ChatGPT.
Want an explanation of game theory? Done.
A reading list about Roman history? Ten seconds.
A personalized curriculum for behavioral economics? Perhaps twenty.
Information itself is rapidly becoming commodity infrastructure.
Which makes selection and taste more valuable.
The important question stops being: Can you give me information?
And becomes: What deserves my attention?
That’s a human problem AI doesn’t automatically eliminate.
In fact, AI makes it worse because the amount of available content becomes effectively infinite.
When everything can be generated, curation becomes more valuable. When every answer is available, knowing which questions matter becomes more valuable. When everyone can publish, knowing whom to trust becomes more valuable.
Taste Is Becoming Capital
This connects to a much broader shift. Technical production is getting cheaper. Software is getting cheaper to create. Content is getting cheaper to create. Images, music, research summaries, presentations and increasingly video are getting cheaper.
So differentiation migrates.
Toward judgment. Reputation. Context. Community. And especially taste.
Pierre Bourdieu would probably find all of this extremely familiar. The SSENSE piece explicitly connects the trend to his idea that status reproduces itself through cultural fluency, language and taste, even when access to information itself becomes more democratic.
The internet didn’t eliminate cultural capital. It gave it analytics.
Final Thoughts
I don’t think the rise of intellectual creators means everyone suddenly developed an uncontrollable desire to study philosophy. Something more interesting is happening.
The internet solved access to information and accidentally created an orientation crisis.
AI is now solving access to explanation and making the orientation problem even larger. So people search for individuals who can provide coherence. Not necessarily professors. Not necessarily traditional experts. People whose judgment they trust.
People who can say:
Read this. Ignore that. These ideas connect. This matters. Here’s why.
And once that judgment becomes trusted, it naturally expands from education into identity and lifestyle.
The reading list becomes a product. The curriculum becomes content. The book club becomes community. The intellectual aura becomes status. And the creator’s real asset isn’t knowledge itself.
It’s the ability to make an audience believe: this is worth knowing. Because information is becoming free. Attention isn’t.
And taste may be one of the currencies that appreciates precisely because everything else is becoming easier to produce.