Public Intellectuals

This semester my students are examining AI Companionship and exploring what happens when young people and senior citizens (the two demographics with the most robust data sets) use AI to gratify their therapeutic, religious, romantic/sexual, and fellowship needs. Although their research projects are not yet complete, their findings are not as dystopian as one might think.

Will the "Fast Food" nature of AI Companionship, lead us to seek out more "Gourmet" real-world forms of companionship?

On this episode of Long Island Change Makers with Tommy D on North Shore TV /NSTV, a local access TV network with a companion visual podcast, I discuss the possibilities. During the talk I reference Marta Andersson ( Uppsala University, Sweeden) article "Companionship in Code" recently published in Nature alongside some funny asides on lurking, popcorn, and bench press.

I'm grateful to do this kind of work that leans a bit more public intellectual. My book club just finished reading Anand Giridharadas' Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing The World, which charts the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader.

The former performs scholarship for the public good that is freely accessible and aims to critique the power structures that maintain inequities.

The latter monetizes their scholarship through "big ideas" books, courses, and other intellectual merch that resists a critique of power that advocates for real social and economic change. One doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds them.

Although Giridharadas' criticism of the big ideas industrial complex is spot-on, it is ironically presented in the form of a big ideas book.

To perform scholarship requires visibility, a platform, and to some degree influencing. We are all, Giridharadas and myself included, "Working for the Algorithim" as Taylor Crumpton writes in Time. No one gets to live outside of culture. And yet, we desperately need public scholarship more than ever.

My favorite scholarly interactions are ones like Long Island Changemakers, where you're not trying to directly sell anything (didn't mention my book once), but casually talking through new and interesting ideas.

Upper East Side Lurkers

The same can't be said for the folks over on the Upper East Side Mom's Facebook Group, where there's been a lot of drama lately.

Bookshop Reads

I just started a Digital Chick Lit shelf at Aurora Bookshop to track the growing genre of fiction that entertainingly captures digital culture. I've read them all, except Trad Wife, which debuts in early 2026. But TBH, I'm terrified of Penguin Random House's description: Rosemary’s Baby for the digital age.

On a more serious note, two nonfiction books that I do highly recommend reading side by side to understand female leadership and power in digital culture are Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams and A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern. Both millennial women are coming of age in New Zealand around the same time but choose distinctly different paths toward "making the world a better place."

Wynn Williams is frustrated by the bureaucracy and slow pace for change in international diplomacy, but sees the potential for platforms like Facebook to wield nation-state power and pivots to Silicon Valley.

Ardern leans in (pun intended) to local politics and through the New Zealand electoral process (distinctly different from the US model) is able to gain party leadership and become Prime Minister, developing a platform model that prioritizes mutual respect in care.

The haunting coda to these two stories is that the "democratizing platform" Wynn Williams helps to build ultimately creates hostile re-world conditions in New Zealand that endanger Ardern and her family.

Obviously, this is a global problem faced by all politicians, and not unique to NZ, but what makes New Zealand so unique is that Ardern writes in her memoir that in her pre-internet childhood she never felt her gender would hold her back. (She had other concerns, her sensitivity, her social class, etc). New Zealand was the first nation in the world to guarantee women the right to vote. New Zealand had already had two female Prime Ministers before Ardern took office. Living under these kinds of conditions made the kinds of careers these women have/had possible.

More Bookshop Reads next month and some video from Lit, Live!

Thanks for walking beside me,

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