How does the feed make a public, and whose speech becomes authoritative once it does? The May 2026 issue of e-flux journal, “Intellectuals,” guest-edited by contemporary media theorist and cultural critic McKenzie Wark, returns to the intellectual at a moment when intelligence is being enclosed, simulated, monetised, and returned as the property of platforms, machines, experts, and recognisable voices. Wark writes from an era in which “intelligence” is being redefined against our will by a new kind of power, in which intelligence-mining machines appropriate the materials through which people learn, communicate, and make sense of the world.
The same operation proceeds alongside the evisceration of public education and general-interest media, narrowing the conditions through which the “common task of knowing the world” can be sustained. The feed refers to the social-media stream of posts, clips, captions, recommendations, and metrics through which attention is organised. It is in this context that a conversation that begins in a studio, a lecture, or a column can be cut into a clip, attached to a face and channel, and carried beyond the relations that produced it.
For Denise Ferreira da Silva, a Brazilian philosopher and critical theorist, the public intellectual was produced at the “ethical corner of the post-Enlightenment political field” as a moral consciousness and an agent of truth. Legacy media became this figure’s preferred medium because its educational function tied intellectual discourse to the cultivation of the People as the nation-state’s ethical substance.
As institutions of mass education and national communication, newspapers, radio, and television helped produce the people they addressed as a public. They supplied the discursive forms through which dispersed readers, listeners, and viewers could be gathered. The feed reorganises this relation through “the mobilisation of the mass’s affect as a profit-generating strategy,” drawing the formation of a public through intellectual discourse into the attention that platforms retain and monetise.
The authority to determine which voices and issues become publicly visible is unevenly distributed because the channels that widen access to subjects held outside television still depend on hosts who retain full editorial control
Within Pakistan, Munira Cheema, a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, describes YouTube podcasting as a cautious counterpublic where subjects treated as untouchable on television pass into discussion only through calculated speech. A host weighs which institution must be named indirectly, which case must remain general, which guest can bear exposure, and which clip can circulate without legal danger, family pressure, harassment, or a warning.
Once an interview is cut into clips, captioned, and recommended, the feed separates it from the setting in which a host and guest could determine its terms. Editorial control, therefore, concerns something more than the subject of an interview. It decides how directly a political claim can be made and who is left to bear its consequences after it reaches the feed. Cheema does not frame this as a question of intellectual authority, but her account shows where such authority gathers, in the host’s control over selection, framing, and the terms on which a conversation enters public circulation.
The authority to determine which voices and issues become publicly visible is unevenly distributed because the channels that widen access to subjects held outside television still depend on hosts who retain full editorial control. As a result, Cheema argues that the question of visibility on these platforms follows the same uneven distribution of linguistic, educational, and professional capital, leaving people living closest to religious persecution, ethnic repression, or gendered violence unable to speak under their own names without placing themselves at risk. The counterpublic therefore, brings excluded questions into circulation without dissolving the conditions that decide who can speak, who can be represented, and whose presence must remain mediated through others.
The feed can also be used otherwise, as Black feminist theorist Amber Jamilla Musser argues in her reading of the anonymity of @the.black.gaze as a way of drawing algorithmic attention toward Black feminist thought without turning one Black femme into the public figure expected to explain it and bear the costs of visibility.
Argentine feminist theorist Verónica Gago finds a related possibility in the March 8 document, whose general language is composed through the demands and disputes of those involved in the movement rather than delivered by an individual commentator. Neither stands outside the forms of attention and circulation examined here. They alter the terms on which a public forms around political speech by keeping it attached to the sources and conflicts that authorise it without concentrating authority and exposure in one identifiable figure.