Elias Aboujaoude (b. 1971) published Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality in 2011. The book drew on his clinical work at Stanford’s OCD and Impulse Control Disorders Clinics and on the largest American survey of problematic internet use to that date. Aboujaoude argued that sustained online activity produces a personality distinct from the user’s offline personality along seven axes: grandiosity, narcissism, ordinary everyday viciousness, impulsivity, infantile regression, the illusion of knowledge, and the collapse of privacy. He argued further that the online traits do not stay online. They migrate into offline life through a process he called virtualism. The offline person becomes over time an approximation of the online person.
The book has aged well in its central claims. The public intellectual is a distinct case within the framework because writing is the platform activity rather than incidental to it. An ordinary Facebook user in 2011 had an offline life to which the platform was supplementary. A working writer in 2026 has a platform-native career. Substack subscriptions, X reach, YouTube views, podcast rankings, and the reputational currencies these produce constitute the working conditions of the writer’s professional life. The writer cannot disengage from the platforms without disengaging from the career. The Aboujaoude framework, applied to ordinary users, produces recommendations that assume the user can moderate platform use. Applied to public intellectuals, the framework has to grapple with users whose moderation options are limited by economic and reputational structure. The stakes are higher. The exposure is longer. The reshaping is deeper. The framework’s core predictions accordingly apply with more force to public intellectuals.
The first axis, grandiosity, appears in public intellectual writing at the level of framing. A writer producing long-form essays on Substack faces incentives to frame each essay’s significance in terms that exceed what the essay’s argument supports. The Copernican-scale claim, the epoch-defining diagnosis, the world-historical framing, all attract subscribers and generate reposts. The academic-journal register punishes such framings because peer review has been trained to catch them. The Substack register rewards them because the platform’s economics select for engagement and engagement selects for larger framings. A writer moving from academic to platform-native registers therefore faces a systematic pull toward framings the earlier training would have suppressed. The pull operates on every essay. Across years, the framings accumulate into a body of work whose central claims sit above the ground the arguments establish.
Nathan Cofnas, the philosopher of biology whose “Hereditarian Revolution” framing appeared in February 2024 at the point where his register mix shifted decisively toward Substack, is one example. Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963), whose Substack essays across the early 2020s escalated in framing from what his New Republic work of the 1990s would have permitted, is another. Bari Weiss (b. 1984), whose founding of The Free Press in 2022 involved framings of contemporary media collapse that her earlier New York Times opinion work would have modulated, is a third.
The second axis, narcissism, appears in public intellectual writing at the level of self-presentation. The writer is presenting a curated persona that the arguments serve to instantiate. The bio page, the author photograph, the recurring self-references, the tone of intimate direct address to the reader, all construct a persona that the platform requires the writer to maintain and refresh. The academic register suppresses this construction because peer review formally strips the persona from the work. The platform register requires the construction because subscription revenue depends on readers forming an attachment to the persona rather than to the specific arguments. A writer producing on the platforms faces a systematic pull toward persona-maintenance activities that the academic work does not require. Across years, the persona becomes primary and the arguments become instantiations of the persona rather than freestanding contributions. The narcissism Aboujaoude describes in ordinary Facebook users appears in public intellectual writing as persona-primacy.
The third axis, ordinary everyday viciousness, appears in public intellectual writing at the level of tone. The platforms reward compressed dismissals and punish extended engagements. A writer responding to a critic on X has three hundred characters to work with. The response cannot reconstruct the critic’s argument or engage its strongest version. The response can register dismissal, contempt, or scorn in registers the academic work would suppress. The Substack notes format extends the character count but retains the register logic. The writer who spends years responding to critics in these compressed modes develops habits of dismissal that carry into the long-form work. The dismissals lose their qualifiers. The engagements lose their steelmen. The tone hardens toward what the platform rewards. Aboujaoude’s category of ordinary everyday viciousness names a pattern that appears in ordinary users as everyday online rudeness. In public intellectual writing, the pattern appears as the collapse of the argumentative virtues the earlier training installed.
The fourth axis, impulsivity, appears in public intellectual writing at the level of response speed. The platforms reward rapid response and punish delayed engagement. A writer who takes three days to formulate a considered response to a controversy watches the controversy move to the next cycle before the response lands. A writer who fires the response within the hour catches the cycle and generates the engagement metrics the career depends on. The three-day writer loses. The one-hour writer wins. Across years, the reward structure trains the writer to respond quickly rather than to respond well. Aboujaoude’s Mail Goggles example from 2011, in which Google engineered a delay-and-verify function for late-night emails, is a template for what public intellectuals would need to install to counteract the impulsivity training. Most public intellectuals do not install any such function. The output pattern shifts accordingly. The considered essays of the earlier career give way to rapid responses to whatever controversy is current, and the writer’s contribution becomes tied to the pace of the news cycle.
The fifth axis, infantile regression, appears in less pronounced form in public intellectual writing than in the ordinary user population Aboujaoude studied. Writers have professional identities to protect that ordinary users do not. Regression to the more juvenile modes appears at the margins of public intellectual output rather than at the center. It appears in the meme-adjacent framings, the compressed personal-attack registers, the willingness to conduct intellectual arguments in modes closer to schoolyard than seminar. Cofnas’s “coalition of stupid people” formulation applied to Anatoly Karlin’s audience is one example. Various figures in the dissident-right ecosystem operate at higher intensity.
The sixth axis, the illusion of knowledge, appears in public intellectual writing at the level of research practice. Aboujaoude’s category names the pattern by which horizontal scanning replaces vertical reading, and the scanner comes to believe he knows subjects he has only skimmed. Public intellectuals face the same pressures that produce this pattern in ordinary users, amplified by career incentives. A writer producing three long-form essays a week cannot read as deeply for each essay as a writer producing three essays a year. The compressed research practice produces confident claims about subjects the writer has processed at scanning depth. The claims accumulate in the writer’s mind as knowledge. The knowledge is not the depth of engagement the earlier academic training assumed. The gap between what the writer takes himself to know and what the writer has engaged widens across years. The AI-shorthand substitution is a version of this pattern. “I checked with AI” replaced survey data about economist consensus.
The seventh axis, the collapse of privacy, appears in public intellectual writing at the level of career exposure. Aboujaoude’s original category was about the disappearance of personal privacy in the ordinary user’s life. Public intellectuals have chosen public roles and cannot invoke privacy in the same way. The relevant category for public intellectuals is the exposure of intellectual privacy: the ability to hold half-formed thoughts, tentative positions, and unresolved uncertainties without the pressure to convert them into public positions. The platforms create pressure to convert every thought into content. A writer who has a preliminary reaction to a book is expected to post about it. A writer who has an incomplete take on a controversy is expected to weigh in. The private space for thinking-in-progress collapses. Positions get taken before they are ready. The taken positions become sticky because retreat is public. The writer accumulates a body of positions that would not have been taken under conditions that permitted private incubation.
The eighth concept, virtualism, is the migration of the online personality into the offline life. Applied to public intellectuals, virtualism is the migration of the platform-native writing register into all the writer’s registers. The four-register analysis I offered earlier of Cofnas’s writing tracks this migration across a single writer’s output. The pattern generalizes. Writers who spend years producing in platform-native registers find that the platform register colonizes the other registers over time. The academic register loosens. The long-form register takes on social-media register moves. The considered essay reads more like the Substack note than the essay of a decade ago read. The reshaping is the accumulated effect of years spent in the register the platforms select for. Aboujaoude’s virtualism describes this at the level of personality. The register migration describes it at the level of writing craft.
Aboujaoude assumed that the offline self was the authentic self and that the online self was the derivative construction that colonized the authentic self across time. The distinction is harder to maintain for writers whose primary work occurs on the platforms. What counts as the offline self for a writer whose career, income, reputation, and daily activity all run through the platforms? The offline self, in the sense Aboujaoude used, may not exist for such writers. The platform self is the working self. The colonization has already been completed before the framework’s diagnostic apparatus arrives. The writer has no offline baseline against which to measure the online drift. The drift is the life.
An ordinary user reading Aboujaoude in 2011 could recognize the patterns and take steps to protect an offline life that still existed. A working writer reading Aboujaoude in 2026 recognizes patterns that describe the totality of his professional existence and cannot easily identify what protective steps would look like.
Prior work on public intellectuals has addressed adjacent questions. Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001) documented the collapse of quality in American public intellectual life without diagnosing platform psychology as a cause. Nicholas Carr (b. 1959) in The Shallows (2010) documented the cognitive effects of internet use without extending the analysis to writers whose careers depend on the platforms. Sherry Turkle (b. 1948) in Alone Together (2011) and Reclaiming Conversation (2015) documented the relational costs of platform use without treating writers as a distinct case. Cass Sunstein (b. 1954) in Republic.com (2001) and #Republic (2017) documented the political costs of filter bubbles without addressing the psychological costs to writers who produce inside them. The gap in the literature is the writer-as-subject. Aboujaoude’s framework, extended to writers, fills the gap.
The extension has practical implications for how public intellectual work should be read and evaluated. A reader who does not know the framework reads a writer’s output as an accumulating body of contributions. A reader who knows the framework reads the output as a series of interventions produced under psychological conditions that shape the interventions in specific ways. The reading changes what counts as intellectual honesty in evaluation. Applying peer-review standards to Substack essays without acknowledging the conditions under which Substack essays are produced misses the framework’s central insight. Applying platform-native standards to peer-reviewed essays does the same in the other direction. Serious evaluation requires acknowledging what the platform is doing to the writer at the moment of production. The evaluation is not softer for the acknowledgment. It is more accurate.
Some writers maintain discipline across the register migration Aboujaoude predicts. Others do not. The distribution is not random. Writers who came up inside professional ecologies with codified standards (peer-review disciplines in academia, on-the-record and off-the-record disciplines in journalism, editorial disciplines in magazines) tend to hold more of the discipline across the migration than writers who came up inside the platform ecologies themselves. The prior formation operates as ballast. The ballast is not sufficient to prevent all drift. It slows the drift. Writers who came up in the Cathy Seipp (1957-2007) circle of Los Angeles bloggers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, internalized standards from a period when the ecology enforced them collectively. Some of those writers have carried the standards into the platform era. Others have not. The variation across writers from that ecology tracks how much of the earlier discipline each writer internalized deeply enough to survive the pressures the platforms have applied over subsequent decades. The correlation is not perfect. It is stronger than the correlation between platform standards and any other prior formation.
This has implications for the training of future public intellectuals. If the platforms erode the disciplines that produce serious writing, and if the disciplines can be transmitted only through ecologies that enforce them collectively, then the collapse of those ecologies threatens the collapse of the disciplines across a generation. Writers who came up entirely inside the platform era have not received the transmission. Their standards are whatever the platforms have taught them, without the ballast of prior formation. Aboujaoude’s framework predicts that these writers will operate under the pressures the framework describes with fewer resources to resist. Empirical observation of the writers who emerged in the 2010s and 2020s largely confirms the prediction. The prediction is not deterministic. Some writers construct their own disciplines. Most do not. The population-level effect across a generation of writers is a documented reduction in the standards the earlier disciplines enforced.
The self-defense strategies available to working writers are limited. Aboujaoude recommended in 2011 that ordinary users adopt structured moderation practices: scheduled offline periods, deliberate delays before posting, reflection before responding to controversies, and the maintenance of relationships and activities outside the platforms. Public intellectuals can adopt these practices at higher cost than ordinary users. The cost of a working writer taking a week off X is the loss of engagement metrics that affect subscriber growth. The cost of a working writer delaying a Substack post by twenty-four hours is the loss of the news cycle the post was addressing. The practices are available. The costs are real. Writers who adopt the practices trade platform performance for psychological protection.
Beyond the moderation practices, writers can construct their own equivalents of the professional disciplines the ecologies used to transmit. The two-part test I use is that every published claim is required to be both true and in the public interest. The test operates as an internal check against the platform incentives. A claim that would generate engagement but fails the truth test is not published. A claim that would generate engagement but fails the public-interest test is not published. The claims that survive both tests are the ones that go out. The test does not eliminate the platform effects. It slows them. Writers who install such tests protect themselves from some of what Aboujaoude describes.
The framework also has implications for how readers can identify writers whose work has been most affected by the platform pressures. The first is the register consistency across a writer’s output. A writer whose academic-register work reads differently from his platform-register work by a large margin has probably preserved more of the earlier register than a writer whose registers have merged. The second is the qualifier density in the writing. Writers under platform pressure tend to shed qualifiers because the platforms reward strong claims. Writers who retain the earlier academic qualifier density have preserved more of the earlier training. The third is the response time to controversies. Writers who respond within hours have accommodated to the platform pace. Writers who respond after days or weeks or not at all have retained more resistance to the pace. The fourth is the persona-primacy of the work. Writers whose recent output requires knowing the writer’s persona to make sense have accommodated to persona-primary platforms. Writers whose recent output could be read blind and still land have preserved more of the pre-platform standards.
Some writers preserve the qualifier density while shedding the response-time discipline. Others preserve the persona-independence while accommodating to the register migration. The indicators taken together produce a reasonable picture of how much a writer’s work has been reshaped by the platform pressures Aboujaoude’s framework describes. Readers can use the indicators to calibrate their reading of any given writer. Writers can use the indicators to calibrate their own drift.
A caution. Aboujaoude wrote as a psychiatrist. His diagnostic categories derive from the DSM and from clinical practice. The categories describe patterns that appear at subclinical levels in ordinary users and at higher intensities in writers whose careers keep them in the platforms. The extension of the categories to non-clinical subjects is analytical rather than diagnostic. Saying that a writer displays the pattern Aboujaoude calls online narcissism is not saying that the writer has narcissistic personality disorder. The framework describes a spectrum. The spectrum has clinical ends and non-clinical middles. Most public intellectuals sit in the non-clinical middle. The framework applies to them as analytical description of tendencies rather than as diagnosis of pathology.
A related caution. Analyses at the level of coalition mechanics (Michael Pinsof’s Alliance Theory, for example), at the level of institutional structure (Randall Collins’s Interaction Ritual Chains, 2004), at the level of political anthropology (John Mearsheimer, b. 1947, particularly in The Great Delusion, 2018), and at the level of the sociology of intellectual life (Pierre Bourdieu, 1930-2002, in Homo Academicus, 1984) all operate at levels Aboujaoude does not reach.
The contribution of the extension proposed here is to make the psychological level available for serious analysis of public intellectuals in a form the individual-user studies have not made available. The extension is small in scope but consequential in yield. Serious readers can use the framework to calibrate their reading of writers whose output they take seriously. Writers can use the framework to calibrate their own practice. Scholars of intellectual life can use the framework to fill a gap in the existing literature. The framework is not the whole picture. It is one piece of a picture the field has not previously assembled. The assembly is worth doing because the picture is worth having.
Two decades of research on internet use have produced substantial literature on ordinary users. The literature on public intellectuals as a distinct case within this research has not developed at the same rate. The gap is worth closing because public intellectuals produce disproportionate influence on public discourse and because the patterns Aboujaoude identifies operate with special force in this population. Closing the gap requires taking Aboujaoude’s framework seriously, extending it to the writer-as-subject, and holding the extension to the standards of analytical rather than diagnostic language. The extension has been done here in preliminary form. Further development would require case-by-case examination of specific writers across their careers, controlled comparison of writers with different prior formations, longitudinal tracking of register migration across output, and empirical measurement of the indicators proposed above. The methodological apparatus for such research is available in the sociology of intellectual life. Its application to the specific questions the extension raises has not yet occurred.
Two propositions summarize the extension. First, sustained platform activity by public intellectuals produces the effects Aboujaoude described for ordinary users, amplified by the writer’s structural position within the platforms. Second, the effects can be slowed by self-imposed disciplines equivalent to those the professional ecologies of an earlier era transmitted collectively, though the slowing requires costs most writers do not choose to pay. Both propositions are testable. Neither has been systematically tested. The propositions are offered here as the framework’s yield when extended to a population Aboujaoude did not address. Their empirical fate is for subsequent research to determine. Their analytical value is available in the meantime for readers and writers who want to think more clearly about what the platforms have been doing to the people who write on them.
Aboujaoude’s book has aged into unexpected relevance for a population his clinical practice did not reach. The extension of his framework to this population is a small contribution to a literature that needs the framework and has not previously been given it. The contribution is offered in that spirit. The writers who most need to read it are the writers who will find it least comfortable to read. The discomfort is not a reason to withhold the framework. The framework describes a real feature of contemporary intellectual life. The feature has been operating without adequate analytical tools to describe it. Aboujaoude supplied the tools in 2011 for a different population. The tools work for the population addressed here as well. Using them is now available. Whether the field uses them is a separate question the field will answer in its own time.
