How Instapundit Has Fallen

I began following Glenn Reynolds as Instapundit not long after 9/11. His pitch at the time, as outlined in An Army of Davids (2006) was libertarian, and I was never quite comfortable with the title -- anyone who studies the Old Testament in any depth won't be comfortable with the prospect of a Sorcerer's Apprentice calling up legions of Davids. One was plenty -- ask Uriah the Hittite.

But this is just one illustration of the shallowness of Reynolds's thought processes. His intellectual mentors include Ayn Rand, Robert A Heinlein, and Philip K Dick. His predictions have fallen short. In the link,

Reynolds titles a chapter 'Small Is the New Big'. He discusses the rise of "armchair workers" (through companies such as eBay), doing work at home—as well as specialty-based cottage industries such as Coffin's Shoes in Knoxville, TN. He argues that future trends will create a mosaic of co-existing big box retailers, local firms, and businesses run from home.

The COVID lockdowns ended that fantasy. Insofar as they represented an experiment in working from home, it was a failure, with big companies across the board insisting that workers return to the office for at least minimum days per week. Retail is also collapsing. On the other hand, the idea of commuting from suburbs to urban downtowns has been in a long-term decline, hastened by rising crime in the cities, something libertarians, for whom legalized narcotics are a core principle, never envisioned.

Reynolds writes, "where before journalists and pundits could bloviate at leisure, offering illogical analysis or citing 'facts' that were in fact false, now the Sunday morning op-eds have already been dissected on Saturday night, within hours of their appearing on newspapers' websites". He states that the internet has redistributed access to information from professional journalists acting as media gatekeepers to millions of ordinary people in the blogosphere and elsewhere. He remarks, "many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession".

The army of Davids, at least the one with David Brooks, David Ignatius, and David Gergen, is doing as well as ever. The pundit who's faded since 2006 is Glenn Reynolds. He posted just yesterday, regarding the ads on his site, which have grown trashier:

SOME PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THE NEW ADS. Sorry, the problem is that InstaPundit has been demonetized by Google, for unspecified “dangerous” content. Between the overall trend of ad revenue decline — which hits everyone — and the trend of cutting advertising to right-leaning sites, and now this, ad revenue is down about 90% from its high, I’d estimate, and it may get worse. (The Amazon revenue, which we’ve been phasing out anyway, is similar). At some point I’ll probably have to go to some sort of subscription model — maybe one that lets you buy out of the ads — or a purely donation-supported model.

Wait a moment. The great libertarian hope, the little guy blogging the truth from his basement, or at least the law professor blogging the truth from his home office, has been demonetized by Google, which puts the big in big tech, and the law professor is suffering? I thought the new order was going to stop this, Google would fade away, and the internet would give equal access to all the individual blogger voices!

I think there are good reasons Reynolds is in decline as a commentator. For starters, he was and is part of the respectable Ivy establishment he criticizes, a Yale Law graduate, holder of an endowed chair at the University of Tennessee, son of a professor at the same institution, he nevertheless attacks academia as corrupt but always insists he's not like the grifters who actually run the place. In this, he set the pattern for innumerable academic bloggers whose disaffection with the culture went only so far, and whose disaffection they expressed only after they got tenure.

And the product he sells is shoddy. If his moral philosophy comes from Ayn Rand, his eschatology comes from Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, and Aubrey de Grey, luminaries of transhumanism, which at root means to adddress the issue of mortality by technologically extending the human lifespan in increments until humans are in practice immortal.

In the popular imagination, transhumanists have allowed themselves to be characterized as people who freeze their heads after death in hopes that at some future date, technology will allow them to be resuscitated and have their heads grafted onto new bodies, thereby achieving immortality or something like it -- should they die again, they can simply have their heads refrozen and be resuscitated yet again farther down the line. (Catholic cemeteries don't offer the head freezing option.)

One problem for admirers of Reynolds is that he's never had the intellectual depth to challenge the "head freezer" image of transhumanism, but to do this would imply that there's a dimension of the belief that goes beyond head freezing. In more recent years, he's stopped plugging for Kurzweil, Vinge, and de Grey on his blog, but I don't believe he's ever seriously renounced transhumanism. Instead, he plays small ball with little posts like this one:

MICROBIOME NEWS: In a Huge First, Scientists Transfer Alzheimer’s to Healthy Young Animals. “The study also revealed specific bacteria in the gut are directly linked to cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients. This highlights the gut microbiome as a key area of research for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and that could lead to new ways to treat the disease.”

The man is terrified of aging, especially Alzheimer's, and he buys into panaceas like fixing your gut bacteria. Yale really ought to be embarrassed, but so should the University of Tennessee.