Image Credit: Mustafa Suleman via SquareSpace
I recently came across a TikTok by Tilly Middlehurst, a Cambridge graduate who speaks out on social and political affairs. She was responding to people mocking her for using “big words” such as “norm” and “culture”, or commenting “word salad” under a video in which she mentioned “religion” and “economy”. One of the top comments read: “anti-intellectualism will be the end of me”. Anti-intellectualism refers to the rejection of intellectual thought. When did sounding clever become something to mock? Why do we feel the need to dumb ourselves down to fit in?
This discomfort seems to extend beyond the words we use to the way we express ourselves altogether. In a video shared on 24 August, François Hollande said he prefers to express his feelings through words and says “je suis heureux” (“I am happy”) rather than use a smiley face or a heart. Explain your feelings in detail, and someone might respond with a crying emoji, as if that were enough. Emojis aren’t evidence of intellectual decline, but in a culture built around brevity, irony and self-deprecation, taking an idea (or yourself) too seriously can feel unacceptable.
AI makes this question even more relevant. When someone writes something polished or uses sophisticated language, people can quickly assume it’s AI generated. This creates a strange contradiction: AI makes it easier than ever to produce articulate writing, but it also makes us more suspicious of people who express themselves well. The problem is not simply that we rely on AI, but that we are becoming less confident in our own ability to find the right words.
And yet, France complicates this argument. Having grown up between British and French cultures, it's difficult to ignore the protests in France in which young people are fighting for education at the moment. Protests that began in Créteil on 21 September spread across the country, with students raising concerns about teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating school buildings and concerns about Parcoursup (France's university admissions platform). These are not abstract demands: students are asking for the basic conditions they need to learn. At Rosa-Parks High School in Saint-Denis, students organised a session to voice grievances and present demands to management, putting their education in critical thinking into practice, as Le Monde reported.
Still, the coverage of these protests raises a related question. Some demonstrations have involved vandalism and clashes with police, and images of these incidents have sometimes overshadowed the students’ actual demands. Does social media make being seen to participate almost as important as understanding the cause? This does not mean the students are performing: their demands are concrete. But the tension is the same one running through this article, in which visibility can start to matter more than substance, just as looking intelligent can matter more than being intelligent.
Intelligence still matters to us, but looking intelligent matters more. In many online spaces, we are increasingly concerned with how we come across to others, and less comfortable with showing the effort it takes to think something through. It’s ironic: we celebrate being informed, but have made “trying too hard” socially embarrassing and we encourage young people to have political opinions, provided they look convincing. The problem is not that young people have stopped thinking, but that showing it has become embarrassing.