Eric Weinstein

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital. He coined the term “Intellectual Dark Web”.

The Term

The coinage entered general use through Bari Weiss’s May 2018 piece in The New York Times, reported over dinner in Los Angeles with Weinstein, Sam Harris and Dave Rubin. The article introduces him as “a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital”, and its account of the term’s origin includes a qualifier that is usually dropped when the phrase is quoted: it was “coined half-jokingly by Mr. Weinstein”.

That qualifier matters for how this site treats the label. “Intellectual Dark Web” was never a name a group chose for itself in earnest, nor an analytic category; it was a joke that a newspaper profile made durable. This site uses it as the name of a moment, not of a movement.

Digital Political Impact

• Supplied the label under which a set of independently-operating podcasters and writers came to be discussed as a group, which changed how they were covered and how they were argued with
• The label’s origin — a joke, fixed in place by a single newspaper article — is a clean example of how a category can be created by coverage rather than by the people it names
• Sits at the intersection of technology finance and independent media that recurs across this site

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: his birth year; his undergraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania and the 1985 date; his Harvard Ph.D. in mathematical physics, its 1992 date and his stated doctoral supervisor; his research positions at MIT, Harvard, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford; and the characterization of his podcast’s subject matter. The Mathematics Genealogy Project’s search endpoint returned no result for him in this pass, and no other record of the doctorate was reached. His role at Thiel Capital is retained because the cited article states it; the Harvard University affiliation has been removed from frontmatter.