I have been turning over an annoying question all week, which is whether the intellectual is already extinct, and I read philosophy as a layman, not as an academic, so if I flatten the argument help me correct it.

The charge goes roughly like this. Social media mass-produced opinion-makers at such speed that the traditional intellectual lost value with remarkable rapidity, and the old figure was supposed to blend expertise with scholarship with new ideas, and pass moral judgement as a kind of meta-legislator who stops short of becoming a politician, with Gramsci’s organic intellectual as the exception who organises his own class from inside its lived reality, and this figure was also supposed to translate an ungraspable totality of knowledge into parcels people could use, and now nobody believes the claim because omniscience is unattainable and the marketplace is flooded with influencers, and super AI trained on more than any human can hold may sweep even that marketplace away, leaving the question whether the machine will have moral authority or a capacity to change anything.

That last question is where I put my cup down.

In my childhood the intellectual came to us through a very narrow pipe which was Doordarshan debates and opinion pages and EPW in college libraries and the adda in Kolkata where one man who had read Marx and Tagore could hold a room for two hours. The scarcity was the authority. There were maybe 200 such names in English India and you waited a week to read 800 words from one of them.

Then Jio in 2016 put data at something like 399 rupees a month into phones costing less than 7,000 rupees in India today, and suddenly 500 million Indians could publish, and the 200 names became 200 million feeds. In plain English; the pipe burst and the priesthood lost its monopoly on the sermon.

Its so sad to see how quickly we confused the burst pipe for the death of thought.

The features of that old figure always sounded noble and I keep returning to three cracks which were there before Twitter. Thought without action bothers me most, because the intellectual was told to legislate what ought to be done and then stop before politics, which meant the gap between declaring and doing never closed, and Marx had already named this when he said the need was to change the world and not merely interpret it, and a bureaucrat who ships a railway timetable changed more mornings than a column that judged it.

Then there is allegiance without honesty, since nobody floats free of class and funding and ideology, and the claim of neutrality was usually apology for the existing order wearing a kurta of objectivity, and my years around startups taught me to ask who pays for the seminar hall before I quote the seminar.

And the third crack is omniscience without a chance, because the expectation was Leonardo da Vinci in an age when knowledge doubles every few years, which no single head can hold, and scholarship in one well stopped counting because the audience wanted judgement on everything from Gaza to UPI in the same thread.

So the suspicion around intellectuals feels earned to me, since people stopped trusting the meta-legislator because the legislation never shipped.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we judged minds the way we judge saws, by the straightness of the cut instead of the polish of the paragraph?

On the closing question of whether the omniscient machine will have moral authority and a capacity for critique and change, I hold dharma, not a degree in ethics, and my answer is that morality never came from holding more parcels of knowledge.

Machines will absolutely sweep the low-level marketplace of takes, because 90% of hot takes are pattern-matching with confidence, and pattern-matching is what models do cheapest. But the machine does not sit in hospital waiting rooms with Baba and decide what care costs, and it does not stand in Himalayan rain watching a road with no lane marks decide who yields, and it does not carry karma for what it declares. Authority without skin in the game is just autocomplete.

Dharma always meant duty first, so build something everyday and let the artifact carry the argument, and the intellect that ships is the only one I still trust.

Tweet to me the last builder who taught you more than any columnist did. I am @troysk704.