The Internet Is Getting Smarter

Somewhere between "get ready with me" and "link in bio," a new type of creator started showing up online. Less polished, less optimized, more thoughtful. More willing to make you sit with an idea for longer than thirty seconds.

Now people are calling it the era of the intellectual influencer, and the question worth asking is whether this is a real cultural shift or just another aesthetic rebrand of the same attention economy we have been living in for years.

We have been watching this unfold closely, and we have already talked about how we are living in the intellectual girl era, which, as the nerdy girls we proudly are, we absolutely love. For the first time in a while, it feels like people do not just want to look smart. They want to learn how to think. There is something exciting about that.

There is also something worth questioning about it.

Because there is a difference between curiosity as a genuine practice and curiosity as an aesthetic. Between someone who reads because they love ideas and someone who photographs their books because it looks good on a grid. The trend is real, the question is whether the intention behind it is.

Let's get into it.

Agus Panzoni, Head of Culture Strategy at Death to Stock, put this into sharp focus in her conversation with Vogue Business, and the framing she offered is one of the most honest things said about the creator economy in a while. At the core of it is a simple but uncomfortable truth: the hardest thing to have today is not access, not visibility, not even creativity. It is intellect.

Not intellect as a performance or as a personality trait. Intellect as a practice.

For a long time, the internet rewarded speed over depth, hot takes over informed opinions, aesthetic over substance. The algorithm did not care if you understood what you were talking about, as long as you looked like you did. Now we are seeing fatigue, and not just content fatigue. Empty content fatigue. The kind that builds quietly until one day you realize you have been scrolling for an hour and absorbed absolutely nothing.

This is where the intellectual influencer comes in.

These creators are not here to simplify everything into bite-sized quotes you can repost without context. They are not here to replace books, research, or critical thinking. They do the opposite: they make you aware of how much you do not know, and they make that feeling exciting rather than shameful.

According to Vogue Business, we are entering what some are calling the "bookish influencer" era, a space where creators are building audiences not through relatability alone, but through curiosity. They talk about theory, culture, history, and systems. They reference thinkers, not just trends. They make content that requires attention, not just consumption.

There is a misconception worth clearing up here. People tend to treat intellect as something fixed, something you either have or you do not. That binary is part of the problem. As Panzoni explains “Intellect is not a state. It is a direction”. It is the ongoing act of seeking, questioning, connecting ideas, and staying in conversation with the world around you.

So when we talk about intellectual creators, we are not talking about people who know everything. We are talking about people who are willing to think in public. That is a very different skill, and a much rarer one.

The timing is no coincidence. As Panzoni puts it, we’re living through a moment “defined by anti-intellectualism, escapism, and AI tools that let you skip cognitive work entirely,” which makes intellectual creators inherently countercultural.

Audiences are responding. A Nielsen Trusted Advertising Report from 2026 shows influencer trust rising to 67% (up from 61% in 2025), with 18–34 year-olds now ranking creator content as their single most trusted information source, above search engines and peer reviews, for the first time ever.

Trust, however, is earned on specific terms. BBB National Programs’ Influencer Trust Index identifies authentic reviews (including negative ones) and transparency about brand relationships as the top trust builders (79% and 71% respectively), while lack of genuineness is a dealbreaker for 80% of consumers. Intellectual creators tend to score well here by default: as fashion commentator Rian Phin told Vogue Business, she trusts scholars and scientists more readily than traditional creators precisely because selling isn’t their primary agenda.

The commercial case follows. TopRank Marketing research finds that 64% of B2B marketers report stronger brand credibility when campaigns feature recognized industry experts over lifestyle creators. Expertise is becoming the new currency of influence, and intellectual creators have it built in.

One of the more fascinating dimensions of this shift is what it is doing to how people socialize. A This Vogue Business interview, pictures that knowledge-seeking has become "a site of belonging," with Gen Z gravitating toward book clubs, lecture series, and reading cafés as social spaces. Intellectual life is no longer confined to solitary study but embedded within community.

This reframes the entire conversation. Intellectual influencers are more than content creators because at this point they are community architects. They are building spaces where curiosity is the entry point rather than aesthetics or aspirational lifestyle content.

For brands, this matters more than most marketing teams have realized.

Relevance today is not built through visibility alone. As Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, recently noted, "The bar is going to shift from 'can you create?' to 'can you make something that only you could create?' That is the new gate." Intellectual creators clear that bar almost by definition, because their content is inherently tied to a specific perspective, body of knowledge, and way of seeing the world that cannot be replicated by someone with a bigger following and a content calendar.

Brands wanting to work with intellectual creators should focus on substance, authorship, and cultural relevance. The partnership has to make sense intellectually, not just aesthetically. Vivian Tu of Your Rich BFF reframing resale through a financial lens for Depop is a strong example of what this looks like when it is done well. The creator brings a genuine intellectual framework to the brand story, and the brand benefits from that layer of credibility and depth.

There is a real tension in all of this worth naming. When intellect becomes a trend, it risks becoming performative. Suddenly, reading becomes aesthetic. Thinking becomes branding. Complexity becomes a filter you apply to your content rather than a process you actually engage with.

You have seen it already. Niche references with no real understanding behind them. Over-intellectualized captions that say a lot and mean very little. A kind of curated "smartness" that feels just as hollow as the content it is trying to replace.

That is the trap. The value of this shift is not in looking intellectual. It is in creating space for deeper engagement, for slower content, for ideas that are not immediately digestible. Moving from performance to practice is a harder standard to meet, and most people trying to ride this as a trend will not meet it. The Future Laboratory predicted the rise of this creator group as far back as 2023, which means the window for doing it authentically is narrowing as more people try to copy the format without the substance.

We are in a moment where the audience is genuinely changing. People are more aware, more selective, and more interested in content that gives them something to think about rather than just something to scroll past.

Intellectual influencers are not the final answer. They are a signal that the internet might be recalibrating, that depth is becoming desirable again, that curiosity is starting to outperform pure entertainment. Eve Lee, founder of creative agencies Digi Fairy and Source Material, put it well: "Against a backdrop of AI reliance, attention hacking, and short-form overload, audiences have started reaching for something that means something. Depth has become its own signal of credibility."

Whether that leads to a more genuinely informed audience over time is still an open question. As Panzoni puts it, creators can open the door. They can frame the conversation. They can make knowledge more accessible. Walking through that door is still on the audience.

Maybe that is the real shift. Not that content is getting smarter, but that we are being invited to be.