Justin E. H. Smith

It's interesting that one response to our editorial seems to be that public intellectual life just IS about positioning, whereas disagreement and self-doubt should be kept to private conversations and graduate seminars.https://twitter.com/davidsess/status/1086141795547914245 …

Of course we've never denied that there is a time and place for positioning or framing (certainly, we're all exposed to it every day). But what's being claimed here is that disagreement with "friends"--or even with ourselves--has no place in public intellectual discourse.

Agreed. I think social media presents unique challenges to maintaining public spaces for non-platformable (is that a word?) thinking: somehow it encourages both narrow-casting to "fans" and paranoia about "enemies" at the same time.