What Exactly Is the IDW?
Understanding what the concept even means
On January 5, 2018, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, and Ben Shapiro recorded an episode of Making Sense together. Eric pointed out that we needed an Intellectual Dark Web, an extra-mainstream space for freethinking about complicated topics, something that had become increasingly difficult over the past decade. Sam used that label as the title for the episode, and soon those three, as well as many of their recent associates, became tied to it.
When most people talk about the term, they seem unfamiliar with this origin point, often using it to suggest a very different concept. For some, it’s a select list of public figures and not a broader movement. Even if I can cite a point in history that led to the term even existing, that does not tell us too much about what the IDW really is. Certainly, there were antecedents to this podcast episode that inspired Eric to coin the term. Those are worth examining more deeply.
New Atheism
Let’s go back to 2004. Motivated by the events of 9/11, Sam Harris published his bestseller The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. He was not merely critical of Islam but religion more broadly, to include American Christianity. For the rest of that decade, he was joined by other prominent figures: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, whose own bestsellers and numerous public appearances established a shared set of ideas for a movement that was known as New Atheism.
The rise of broadband Internet, online discussion forums, and video hosting sites like YouTube facilitated the spread of their work. With this, millennials, who were coming of age, experienced an explosion of skepticism and shed the religious faith of their upbringings. While other figures gained fame in this time, the central role of these men earned them the wry nickname “The Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse.” Harris and Hitchens could each represent the two halves of this movement. Harris reflected the more generally skeptical half, not even identifying as an atheist despite being one. Hitchens was more confrontational, calling himself an anti-theist and being more harsh in his critiques of religion.
I myself was impacted by this movement. I began viewing many New Atheist talks (mostly Hitchens and Dawkins) in the late Aughts and by 19 became an atheist, during my freshman year in college. I met many students who had progressed similarly in a club for skeptics and atheists and had these discussions with them.
Many agree that New Atheism petered out around somewhere between 2011 and 2014, for multiple reasons. By being critical of religion, New Atheism was largely a liberal movement, usually finding itself at odds with conservatism, particularly under the presidency of George W. Bush, his poor handling of the War on Terror, and the power of the Republican evangelicals. As the Aughts wound to a close, Obama had been elected and sworn into office. The War in Iraq was ending. 9/11 had stopped being a wound and became more of a memory. The 2008 Recession had shifted liberal attention away from religion and toward capitalism (seen in the Occupy Wall St movement). Finally, in 2011, Christopher Hitchens died.
A specific event deserves mention. In 2011, Rebecca Watson, a New Atheist figure in her own right, had posted a vlog about a convention she had attended for skeptics in Dublin. She made a passing mention of a man who entered an elevator with her late in the night and asked her to get coffee with him. She calmly told viewers that they shouldn’t ask a girl out that way, since she was boxed in and had no way to exit in the event that he, a stronger person, would not tolerate her refusal.
Many argued that she was overreacting, considering that this man, in her own words, asked politely and did not harm her. Reasonable critics were accompanied by several sexist insults, to which Watson replied with less composure than in her initial vlog. The controversy, called Elevatorgate, took on a life of its own, with many now wondering if New Atheism was a male-dominated, misogynistic movement, despite its tendency to criticize religion for these things. There was vitriol from both sides, becoming so wild that Dawkins himself entered the feud, chiding Watson for complaining about a victimless incident, while women in the Muslim world deal with real threats of sexual violence when walking alone.
Whichever side you take, the moment revealed insecurities in New Atheists about other social issues that were starting to boil over. Many believe that Gamergate, a similar and non-Atheist controversy in 2014, had a comparable effect.
With almost a decade after being divorced from religion, it appears that people found themselves with little meaning in their lives. Who they were and what they were meant to do no longer made sense without divine assumptions. I myself struggled with this upon becoming an atheist. What people appear to have done in response is turn to liberal, political activism. This gets us to the point at which we saw the rise of “Social Justice Warriors” (or SJWs, a derisive nickname) in 2013 on college campuses, complaining about Halloween costumes and asking for buildings to be renamed. SJWs, after expanding influence into broader society, are now called “the Woke.”
Turning Point
Once again, Sam Harris plays a role. In late 2014, he made an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher, a comedian who had also featured prominently in New Atheism with his documentary Religulous, invited him to speak about his new book on meditation, Waking Up. He was unaware that Ben Affleck, the famous actor, who had not met Harris before, was on that episode’s panel and was prepared to confront him (those who watch the clip can see Affleck visibly angry as Harris arrives).
While the book was not about religion per se, Maher started Harris’s introduction by stating that he appreciated his willingness to remain critical of Islam, despite the woes of liberals. Harris, agreed, citing that liberals had failed to uphold liberal values by defending Islam as a minority religion, disregarding its many cruel doctrines. Affleck chose this moment to pounce, decrying Harris’s and Maher’s comments as “gross and racist” and degenerating the conversation away from meditation and into accusations.
It was not the first such conversation ever, but it was the first highly visible moment in which one of the Four Horsemen had feuded with someone else from the political left over religion and political correctness, highlighting the end of New Atheism. Michael Steele, former Chairman of the Republican Party, had also been present and was strangely not Affleck’s target. Steele later remarked that was he content to sit back and let two liberals tear each other apart. Indeed, the liberal-conservative rift that had defined New Atheism had ended, and liberals were now internally divided.
New Atheism’s end was further confirmed as 2015 began. Obama’s second term was winding down, and presidential candidates began to declare themselves, to include Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. While the former ran as a Republican and the latter a Democrat, both represented the populist angst that was felt among voters in the aftermath of NAFTA and the 2008 Recession. It was at this point that “skeptic” stopped having any connotations with religious skepticism and shifted toward doubting authority more broadly, whether it was Congress, corporate journalists, Wall St, intergovernmental organizations, et cetera. In particular, many were reacting to the rise of cancel culture.
While only Trump was explicitly boorish and insulting, both of their coalitions were lambasted by the establishment as being motivated by prejudice and bigotry (Bernie’s from his decision to run against Hillary Clinton and his winning similar areas as Trump). While several of Bernie’s supporters viewed Trump as just another selfish capitalist, the 2016 Election was not marked by the same liberal-conservative rift that defines most elections and that had defined New Atheism. It was a contest between populists and a perceived establishment, which did not fit neatly along the lines of the left or right. Traditional Republicans despised Trump and voted for Hillary, while union country in the Rust Belt amazingly flipped for Trump, giving him the win.
Harris ultimately voted for Hillary, but he nevertheless lamented the fact that only someone like Trump would speak honestly about the dangers of Islam.
The Podcasters and Freethinkers Rally
Around this period, media consumption shifted toward podcasting formats. Harris himself led the way with his Waking Up podcast (now called Making Sense). Joe Rogan had already been doing it for years and was gaining a steady following, and Dave Rubin, a former contributor to left-leaning The Young Turks, started his own show, The Rubin Report on YouTube. Tellingly, Harris was Rubin’s guest on the first episode of his segment, The Sitdown, which came to dominate his channel and certainly helped to boost Rubin’s following.
As people on the left and right despised the manipulative efforts of corporate media in 2016, they flowed into the audiences of these podcasters, seeking alternatives. Prime examples include David Pakman, Sam Seder, Stephen Crowder, and Sargon of Akkad.
Trump’s victory embittered many on the left and appeared to galvanize them toward aggression. Cancellations seemed to spread from college campuses and into everyday life. People were losing longtime friends over differences of opinion and sometimes, even their livelihoods. In the spring of 2017, Bret Weinstein, then-professor of biology at Evergreen State College, spoke against the school’s co-opting of the Day of Absence, in which they asked white students to stay off campus. That summer, James Damore, an engineer at Google, also responded to a company memo that outlined its goal to hire as many female workers as male. He cited the challenges posed by the statistical differences in behavior of the sexes and thus the lack of interest of women in engineering.
Heavy backlash haunted both men from left, causing them to be chased out of their jobs, with Weinstein even being hunted by violent protesters on the campus. Only after the damage was done to both did it become clear that the reactions against them were based on heavy distortions of what they had actually said or done. Skeptics became aware that the ability to be misunderstood, without even being offensive, could end one’s career and means of subsistence, especially when armies of Internet activists could have magnified effect to get a person fired or organize a violent protest. Even after the truth got out, very little could be done to hold anyone accountable for slander or libel. This was a new norm, and it frightened many people.
Weinstein, Damore, and others who found themselves in similar controversies became highly viewed guests on Rogan’s and Rubin’s podcasts. Other public figures such as Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray grew in popularity from the right as they denounced these cancellations. A more important, less partisan figure was also rising in this time: Jordan Peterson.
First gaining prominence in 2016 for his opposition to the “compelled speech” of Bill C-16 in Canada, which mandated the use of preferred pronouns, Peterson had been interviewing around and steadily accrued a following. He was helped, once again, by Sam Harris, appearing on Waking Up in January of 2017. The episode was notably rocky, with Harris and Peterson getting stuck on what the concept of “truth” is. Despite Harris’s apparent frustration, it was not marked by hostility like with Ben Affleck. They did a follow-up episode later in March, which was more productive, and managed to talk more openly about the concept of truth and their ideas, which impressed their audiences.
Peterson was unique in that his concept of truth was closely related to the concept of meaning, something that had been lost in New Atheism and which seemed to explain much of the bitterness of partisan divides. Collective anger, the kind that would get you cancelled and destroy your ability to earn a living, appeared to be our generation lashing out when deprived of meaningful existence. For many who had seen New Atheism fall apart, Jordan Peterson was the first person with something new and useful to say about non-religious meaning, evidenced from the traffic his YouTube lectures about the Bible and Disney movies earned him.
The IDW Is Born
This brings us back to the start of 2018. As stated, Eric Weinstein (Bret’s brother), Ben Shapiro, and Sam Harris do a podcast together, and Eric gives a name to this loose movement that assembled the previous year: the Intellectual Dark Web.
That happened on January 5. Just eleven days later, Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman interviewed Jordan Peterson. That half-hour segment made Peterson a star overnight. Newman asked questions that were almost entirely misleading or in bad faith, and Peterson calmly and carefully did not allow himself to get tangled in them or flustered by it. The esteem of Peterson’s performance here made it something like the Sermon on the Mount of the IDW, an example of not being baited and articulating one’s views without directing malice toward an unaccommodating host.
Several roundtable appearances of these figures followed on The Joe Rogan Podcast, The Rubin Report, and the Pangburn events. As momentum gathered, Bari Weiss released her famous piece for The New York Times, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. The piece brought the movement to wider consciousness but also planted seeds of confusion.
Terms like “New Atheism” and “Four Horsemen” allowed New Atheists to distinguish between the movement and the public figures of that movement. For the IDW, the term seemed to apply to both the movement and the list names cited in Weiss’s article. Many on the authoritarian left appear to have clung to this latter use, in attempt to make it an exclusive list of people to discredit and fit into their partisan narrative. Even for those whose motives are simpler, there has never been unified agreement on who is IDW or not or if one can lose association with it.
Deceleration
While 2018 produced a wealth of public appearances and rich conversations, many of the public figures shifted toward more personal projects in 2019 and 2020. The Weinsteins launched their own podcasts, The Portal and The Dark Horse Podcast. Dave Rubin became increasingly right-partisan and fell out of favor with the celebrities and followers alike. Today, his channel is a shadow of its more moderate origins. Ben Shapiro expanded his own media empire through The Daily Wire, having more of a free-speech approach but still cranking out partisan rage content as its main moneymaker.
While Rubin and Shapiro began burning more bridges than they were building, Jordan Peterson’s wife fell ill with advanced-stage cancer, leading him once again to battle depression. The benzodiazepines he had been prescribed resulted in a crippling addiction that severely compromised his health, causing him and his daughter to travel the world seeking medical care and bring Peterson on the verge of death. His long absence and the toll on his psyche left an impact on the broader IDW.
Moreover, as 2020 rolled in, the intensity of the election year, the COVID pandemic, and the death of George Floyd inflamed partisan tensions. For my part as a moderator of the IDW subreddit, it forced me and my co-moderators to issue hundreds of bans like never before just to make the community functional. There were many who had previously kept their cool that could no longer do so. It was a dark time in the community, for sure.
Both the public figures and the broader IDW became increasingly conspiratorial and susceptible to provocation by current events. Sam Harris’s distaste for election fraud conspiracies in 2020 even caused him to “turn in [his] IDW card” after seeing so many take false claims of Donald Trump too seriously.
The Current Day
To this day, the IDW survives more as a populist movement of small actors in online communities. The public figures are disjointed, frazzled, radicalized, or fatigued, with only a handful maintaining the credentials that associated them with this movement in the first place. Some might have honestly been caught up in the weight of celebrity and the 24/7 news cycle. Others appear to have been captured by the profitable incentives offered by their positions and given up their integrity.
Whatever the case, there is a bright side, as the IDW can finally stop being treated as a select list by folks such as the authoritarian left and more the community of free dialogue that it was always meant to be. That is the ethos that we seek to keep alive in this subreddit, and that is the mission we will serve with the newly created IDW Community as a nonprofit organization.
What the IDW will prove to be going forward depends on what the many within it are willing to do going forward. For my part, I want to influence the trend toward ideas worth supporting, as opposed to defeating bad ideas in debate. I want to see good works get accomplished, beyond just the armchair intellectualism that is been so far. That is why I will continue to create content on this blog and announce other events going forward. (Anyone who similarly wishes to assist the IDW Community in its charitable work need only email at idwnonprofit@gmail.com.)
More historically, however, and to answer the question of what the IDW even is, it seems to be an extension of the intellectual movement that was started by New Atheism almost twenty years ago, throughout which Sam Harris has been a key contributor. Because of this, even those who dislike him might well regard him as the Father of Millennial Freethinking.
Will a new movement be born out of this? Will it continue with this more general mantle? That is difficult to say. The real test we all have going forward is if we will allow ourselves to be pulled down into degenerate bickering or if we bear the Burden of Being and seek to bring the best in our peers, even those we hate. Hopefully the IDW can be the place where that best is brought out.