CATEGORY: MODERNITY (17 min)
Maybe Big Brother doesn’t need to be watching you. Surveillance has become crowdsourced.
That’s one of the upshots of The Crowdsourced Panopticon, Jeremy Weissman’s new book that Taylor Dotson reviews in The New Atlantis.
And this person-to-person surveillance is fostering mass conformity. Weissman’s book worries that dissenting views, and fresh artistic expression will all go extinct.
But Dotson argues that The Crowdsourced Panopticon doesn’t go nearly far enough in diagnosing why social media fails us . . .
. . . or what a solution might be.
See what you think about the conclusions he reaches—about the “extremely online” and about our notions of community—right here.
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CATEGORY: THE RULING CLASS (30 min)
Conservatives worry a lot these days about a resurgence in socialist policies and ideologies.
But we need to be crystal clear on what’s driving the attack on democracy . . .
. . . or rather who is driving it.
In the April edition of The New Criterion, James Panero shines the floodlights on America’s progressive elites and finds them wanting.
You know these elites as purveyors of wokeness and diversity-mongers, pouring contempt on Middle America from their Madison Avenue and Ivy League institutions.
But what you must recognize, Panero insists, is how elites are engaging in class warfare from above—a top-down assault on democratic institutions and values.
“How much better—so our elites would maintain—for power to be handed over to them. Only they have been trained in the language of identity. Only they have been conditioned in the syntax of grievance. Only they have worked their whole lives so as not to misgender others. The elites, simply put, will take it from here.”
No longer the guardians of culture, today’s elites have driven Western Civilization to a perilous crossroads.
Where do we go from here? And how should we recognize and respond to this elitist power grab? You’ll have to read Panero’s article to find out.
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Because our student editors and writers are bravely bringing conservative ideas to their campuses, we’re highlighting their efforts here.
If You’re On the Fence About Talking About Your Beliefs: A Message to Undergrads via the Rambler Review
Michigan’s Mask Mandate Repeal Falls Flat via the Michigan Review
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CATEGORY: LITERATURE (4 min)
Remember the character who woke to find himself a captive giant in a land of tiny people?
Whether you read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in high school or not, this strange and surreal tale deserves your attention.
It’s less like Alice in Wonderland and more like Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes.
See the World at Scale
In this week’s Intercollegiate Review essay, Casey Chalk holds this literary classic up to our contemporary culture and politics. You’ll be amazed at how little human behavior changes.
Yes, it’s 2022, not 1726. But some jokes don’t get old . . .
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You know that America is at a moment of crisis.
Rapid social decay, a bloated federal bureaucracy, and increasingly unaccountable multi-national corporations are putting unprecedented strains on the constitutional system created by the Founders.
Do the principles, institutions, and mores at the heart of the American Founding have a future?
Or are the problems we face today the result of foundational Enlightenment principles that were doomed to fail from the start?
You're invited to join ISI for an evening debate next week, Thursday, April 7th, at 5 p.m. EST, at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on how we should view our Founding principles in the light of modern challenges.
You can attend this debate in person or sign up to watch via livestream.
The debate will be held at the Sheraton Commander Hotel (16 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138) and will feature renowned conservatives Michael Anton, author of The Flight 93 Election and Hillsdale College professor, and Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame professor and best-selling author of Why Liberalism Failed.
You'll get to hear our debaters discuss their perspectives on the best conservative approach to the American Founding in the 21st century.
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“Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
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