The main thesis is that old-media was about finding channels of distribution. If you didn't utilize existing media channels, nobody would see your ideas. When technology made the mechanics of publication cheap and easy, it became easy for the artist and audience to interact without the need for an imprimatur or interacting with any gatekeeper. True "thought leadership" was made a lot easier - and a lot more powerful - because original thoughts could be conveyed with new types of media to create new audiences.
> If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected.
> The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully [old media's methods], is that clear speaking is generally obsoleted thinking. Clear statement is like an art object; it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete & uncertain.
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message". Utilizing existing mediums is by definition following what worked successfully in the past; the "thought leaders" and avant-garde artist are seen as "leaders" because they utilize new mediums, not just new messages.
You can disagree with how influential his ideas were, but it's hard to disagree with the results. If not for his essays, there's a good chance YC wouldn't exist.
You're right that the most effective thought leaders don't call themselves that, though.
PG's writing got the influence it has mainly because of his startup's success, and later YC's.
There are thousands of nerds with blogs musing about LISP and why nerds are the smartest kids in high school even though everyone thinks they're so lame; there's only one nerd that has such a blog along with a multi-million dollar startup buyout and multi-billion dollar startup accelerator.
If PG had never sold viaweb or started YC, no one would care about his blog.
You're right that money was a necessary ingredient, but it wasn't sufficient.
I didn't really care who he was or what his past achievements are, so at least in my case that proposition is false. I just liked his writing. It's probably impossible to know whether the audience resembled myself or your archetype, but it seems unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the Viaweb acquisition or about some rich Harvard graduate.
While the signals we look at to determine authority are varied and different for each person, style-of-writing is generally included in that list. Why would so much advice on etiquette and morality suggest ensuring one's written communications are of high quality?
I'll admit I didn't really read the links you posted but in looking over the first few paragraphs on http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html he is clearing signaling his authority in how he name-drops MIT and talks about his MIT educator friend. (And I don't mean to imply there is anything wrong with that; writers are often advised to establish their qualifications early) I imagine the 18-year-old me would have felt confident about his essay simply from this reference.
Finally, the wannabe theory of thought leadership isn't a hard-and-fast rule. There are exceptions...
It has been quite the ride to see this random dude whose work I started reading become a global juggernaut.
He came to give a talk at my university when YC was just getting started, and while I was a junior there, about how we could start a startup, rather than going to big companies and working for others. This was very eye opening and exciting, and it was completely independent of his previous achievements - I had never heard of him before that talk, and I had never heard of his startup.
There's no contest that his blog was an instrument in his popularity; I am questioning that it was the main one.
also, he makes more money than me.
Either this is a meme I'm not familiar with or we're being trolled. Perhaps both.
Source: I'm Australian.
http://www.msnbc.com/the-cycle/watch/the-digital-prophet-pre...
Shingy's Book of Nonsense Prophecies
Shingy Just Spent 20 Minutes Yelling Insane Gibberish on a Stage
SXSW In One Photo: Shingy on a Wrecking Ball
However, I am unsure whether she fits into the narrative of this piece, as her thought leadership would just be a side effect and result of her business career in a male-dominated industry.
That's one of the distinguishing elements of humans: we learn, and retain, knowledge, and transmit it beyond the individual.
We have an entire class of indivduals whose sole productive contribution is dedicated to the task of training and instructing others. No other species has anything remotely that.
Biology is an information transfer system: molecules, DNA, learned behaviour, taught behaviour. Humans came up with writing, teaching, and now electronic information, genetic engineering, and perhaps AI, as extensions of that.
Each allows for the acquisition, storage, transmission, and application of knowledge in new ways.
(I'm not saying "without limit" or "forever accelerating". But I am noting that we've far exceeded any other life forms of which we're aware in this degree.)