The public intellect is dead – and nobody came to the funeral.

The public intellect is dead. No one shot it, no one burned its books, no tribunal silenced it. It was rationalized away—by a machine that degraded its only asset, knowledge, into a commodity. Intelligence is now available by monthly subscription, delivered in seconds, politely phrased, and explained on request as if for a six-year-old.

What was considered the hardest currency for centuries now lies in the digital bargain bin. And a society that no longer needs to marvel at knowledge will eventually cease to marvel at those who possess it.

When thinking still cost money to enter the country
There was an era when linguists filled lecture halls and novelists were treated like rock stars. Anyone who could weigh Marx against Rand was considered educated, and anyone who quoted Kerouac in the student dorm was seen as interesting. The reason was simple: knowledge was scarce. If you didn't know something, you went to a library, ordered interlibrary loans, or knew someone who did. A lawyer would pore over precedents for eight hours, a student would photocopy their way through card catalogs, a journalist would wear their fingers to the bone on the phone. This scarcity generated awe. The thinker was a high-performance athlete of the mind, their crammed brain a treasure, their bookshelf a demonstration of power. Then came the search engine and answered the quiz question. Then came the chatbot and did the rest. Today, every intern sounds like a professor when they use the right input field—and that's precisely why the professor no longer sounds like anything special. The influencer, who doesn't read books but manages reach, has taken over the vacated airtime of public intellect – and who no longer has to defend his theses because the algorithm only displays approval anyway.

The numbers read the eulogy.
Anyone wishing to view the body only needs the statistics. A study published in the journal "iScience" Long-term analysis of more than 236,000 Americans shows that the proportion of people who read for pleasure on an ordinary day fell from around 28 percent to 16 percent between 2003 and 2023 – a decrease of 40 percent in two decades, even generously including audiobooks and e-readers.

The universities provide the accompanying program: The proportion of humanities bachelor's degrees at US universities It fell from 16,8 to 12,8 percent within ten years. and Survey by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences It reports that more than a third of departments saw further declines in enrollment between 2020 and 2023 alone. Philosophy, history, literature: the subjects that once nurtured the public intellect are being wound down like failing branches of a department store chain – quietly, administratively, and without anyone observing a moment of silence.

Knowledge work on sale
Death is not only culturally measurable, it is also economically measurable. Stanford study based on wage data from millions of employees The report notes that in the professions most exposed to AI—software development, accounting, customer service—employment among 22- to 25-year-olds has plummeted by around 13 percent since the end of 2022, while older workers in the same jobs have remained unaffected. Machines are first devouring the codified book knowledge that young professionals have painstakingly acquired at universities. Experience still offers some protection for now, but a degree no longer does. Even experts who are still in their positions are experiencing this demotion on a daily basis: lawyers report clients arriving with machine-generated contracts and requesting only a proofreading—the highly paid consultant is becoming a machine's proofreader. The very education that made knowledge workers indispensable and gave intellect its aura has become a mass-market commodity. This also means that a monetary system based on human labor for millennia is beginning to unravel. I have dissected it elsewhere.

Beethoven from the Automaton
Music shows where things are headed – it has always been the early warning system for cultural decline. In the past, great music was scarce: anyone wanting to hear Beethoven's Ninth sat in a concert hall, not in front of a button. Today, the streaming service Deezer delivers the final result: Around 75,000 of the tracks delivered daily are completely AI-generated., 44 percent of all new arrivals.

They are practically unheard – they make up only one to three percent of streams, and the platform classifies 85 percent of these streams as fraudulent and withholds the money. While the synthetic flood swells, The number of human-produced submissions has stagnated. The platform has been almost entirely empty for over a year. A flood of content that no one asked for, produced by no one, streamed by click robots for click robots. This is the blueprint for the mind: endless supply, evaporated value, and fraud as the last remaining viable business model.

Funeral oration without mourners
The question remains: what becomes of a society that has surrendered its critical thinking skills like a coat to a wardrobe? What does the machine do to the human being who submits to it without resistance? I have already declined it. And humanity doesn't come out of this looking good. Because the answer to the truly crucial questions isn't stored in any database, nor can it be retrieved in nanoseconds. It's not about information, but about judgment, and judgment has always been the only thing that distinguished intellect from mere prompters. The lecture hall is empty, the library a coworking space, the essay a prompt. The society that once celebrated its thinkers now wipes their life's work from a chat window in three seconds. And if one day no one can formulate a question that a machine hasn't yet been trained to answer, the chatbot will simply write the obituary – flawlessly, politely, and delivered in seconds. A civilization has rationalized away thinking – and calls this the "democratization of knowledge"!