Decoding The Gurus

By Leo Gura - March 5, 2025

These guys are definitely trolls, and they’d have field-day “debunking” my work, but still, I have a guilty pleasure watching them troll online influencers. This is not serious sense-making, but it is fun. There’s so much bullshit, self-deception, ignorance, and corruption worth criticizing in the online influencer, heterodox, anti-mainstream, intellectual dark web ecosystem that much of it doesn’t even deserve the respect of a serious Tier 2 analysis. There’s a time for serious intellectual deconstruction, and then there’s a time to just have a laugh. Treating unserious people as though they deserve serious intellectual consideration is a kind of trap — the trap of wrestling with pigs. For example, treating Trump or MAGA as an intellectually serious project is already to capitulate too much. You will lose brain cells just doing that. Sometimes nonsense is just nonsense. Especially in this post-truth era of audience and algorithm capture.

The problem with the entire intellectual dark web influencer space is that there’s no epistemic standards, no fact-checking, no accounting for bias, and all of it is fueled by career-seeking. These people don’t give a fuck about epistemic rigor, they are speaking for the sake of speaking, because it makes for a nice easy career. Hyper capitalist social platforms reward verbal diarrhea.

As someone who works in this space, with a deep view from the inside, it is so clear to me why social media influencers are so easily corrupted. Producing meaningful intellectual work is so mentally laborious that it cannot be done consistently on a daily/weekly basis. But to be successful in this field requires constant near-daily uploads of content, which can only be done when the content is vacuous, speculative, opinionated, verbal diarrhea.

And it gets even worse because the more serious and truthful your intellectual work, the more effort you put into it, the less popular and successful you will be, because the algorithms are designed to serve slop — intellectual junk food — to the masses. So there is literally an inverse relationship between the intellectual rigor of your work and your success, fame, and profits. That is the epistemic disease of our online media system. The incentive structure is perverted. Slop is amplified, serious intelligence and maturity is buried into irrelevance. The people in charge of the algorithms don’t have enough intelligence, maturity, and integrity to restructure the system for anything but profit maximization. So here we are. As the comedians say, laughter is sometimes the best medicine.

As you consume online content, draw a clean line between who is intellectually serious and who is not. It’s fine to watch fun stuff just for fun. The problem occurs when people start taking unserious talk as serious sense-making. Politics is a serious domain, it should not be treated as entertainment fodder to feed the algorithm beast. If you want to understand politics, go to a serious intellectual political scientist — like Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Stephen Kotkin, John Mearsheimer — not an opinionated, motormouth, pop influencer like Russell Brand or Jimmy Dore.

If you fall into the trap of taking unserious people seriously, you will become unserious. And when you become unserious you will become profoundly self-deceived. Seriousness is the only way to have a chance of solving the problem of self-deception. All unserious people are self-deceived. This is a iron law of the universe.

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