These days there appears to be a million You Tube sites positioning themselves as the place where viewpoints and opinions that are outside 'the norm' can be found and indeed herd. So if you hear anyone complaining about being silenced or cancelled, you sort of go 'Are you, are you really?' because it looks very like they are being heard loud and clear, and are all over the internet like a rash, which these days appears to be the very opposite of being silenced.
An early entrant into this type of programming was UnHerd, owned and funded by the depthless pockets of Paul Marshall, hedge fund manager, philanthropist and media baron. Who, just to make sure you know where he's coming from also owns The Spectator and GB News, so a bit of a professional disruptor of the so called elite consensus. Unherd benefits from its main frontman and editor being the amiable Freddie Sayers, who gathers together a variety of subjects and viewpoints to create ocassionally quite interesting discussions. Yes, there are some frankly bat shit ideas too, that really don't have legs to stand on, from both right and left of the political spectrum. But that comes with the territory I guess.
This particular discussion, however, caught my eye, mainly because it features Jared Henderson a You Tuber who I rate quite highly for producing thoughtful content. Are we, in the age of AI and algorithms, on the verge of creating a Post-Literate Society, where people can't sustain reading anything long form, follow a complex argument or produce a thought through critique? And with widespread literacy in the past being the engine for democracy and social change, are those two things now doomed to become extinct? Discuss.
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