Did the Enlightenment succeed because of brilliant individuals, or because ideas had addresses?
Something I've been thinking about and I'd like to push on it.
The Republic of Letters worked not because the thinkers were smarter than us. It worked because there was an infrastructure for structured intellectual exchange. Letters were signed. Claims were attributed. Responses were public. If you said something wrong, your peers knew who you were and could hold you accountable.
Ideas had addresses. You could find them, respond to them, build on them. The whole network was structured around attribution and accountability.
Today we have more thinkers, more output, more access. But ideas don't have addresses anymore. They're scattered across Twitter threads that disappear in 48 hours, Reddit posts that get buried in a week, blog posts that lose their URL when the hosting provider changes.
We've gained volume and lost infrastructure.
Is this analysis right? And if it is, what would modern intellectual infrastructure actually need to look like?