What happens when we shift from a literate culture to something resembling an oral culture? The answer to this question is before us. A post-literate culture took shape, and few seemed to notice as people distracted by symptoms became blind to the cause. But we didn’t revert to the oral cultures in which humanity was immersed prior to Gutenberg’s arrival. We transformed into something new, a post-literate culture that takes on the characteristics of an oral culture but is fueled by entertainment.
A literate culture seeks wisdom, and an entertainment culture seeks performance and comfort. A literate culture can both reason and react, whereas an entertainment culture can only react. A literate culture is free to explore thoughts and form individual opinions, whereas an entertainment culture is captured by tribalism and groupthink.
While most people have been focused on what AI can do for them, I’ve been far more concerned with what AI does to us, and AI may very well be the final nail in literacy’s coffin, ushering in a world of unintended consequences.
Table of Contents
Post-Literate Culture
In simple terms, literacy is the ability to read and write. With such a simple definition, it can obscure real problems. After all, someone who can read social media posts and write status updates is technically able to read and write.
In a broader sense, what we mean is the capacity to identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate using the written word. This requires the ability to sit with long-form content and clearly articulate our thoughts on paper (or a word processor).
A literate culture is one in which the written word is the primary means of recording history and passing down knowledge. Eric Havelock noted that the shift from oral to literate culture represented a profound transformation in human cognition, changing not only what people thought but also how they thought.
So, what is a post-literate culture? Oddly, Wikipedia defines this as:
A post-literate society is a previously literate society in which people no longer read, write, or correspond, instead preferring to consume new forms of multimedia.
This is a fairly incorrect definition. In a post-literate culture, people still read, write, and correspond. Even people using AI to perform these tasks on their behalf still need to provide the bot with the specifications. Technically, reading, writing, and correspondence are still part of a post-literate society/culture. You can’t ever completely remove the influence of literacy from a culture that has been touched by it. However, you can rewire its perspectives, values, and just about everything else.
Here’s my definition of a post-literate culture.
A post-literate culture is a previously literate one that devalues the written word in favor of other forms of media. In this culture, literacy is no longer privileged as the primary means of recording history, acquiring knowledge, transmitting ideas, or reasoning through problems.
Such a simple definition with a world of negative consequences. This will be our definition moving forward.
Note: To clarify, when I use the term “literacy” generically in this article, I don’t mean the ability to look at a word and understand its meaning or any other ability to read and write on a basic level. I mean the ability to comprehend a piece of long-form text, including the capacity for deep reading and the ability to capture thoughts in writing with sustained focus.
I’m referring to a deep engagement with the written language, which doesn’t necessarily mean books. This content could be in various formats such as long essays, papers, journals, etc.
The Idiot’s Conclusion
Let’s begin with The Idiot’s Conclusion. This is what I call the belief that literacy is a waste of time in the age of technology, that a post-literate society is actually preferable to a literate one because tools like AI can perform these tasks better than we can.
The claim is that knowing things isn’t important. What’s important is knowing where things are stored. Having knowledge stored in our heads becomes a dated notion, a relic of a time before smartphones, search engines, and now, AI.
We’ve become increasingly comfortable with not owning things, including our own knowledge, choosing instead to rent temporary access or leave knowledge scattered in unknown locations requiring tools to retrieve and, increasingly, make sense of. Knowledge is no longer associated with cognitive retrieval but with tool use.
Literacy also requires “friction,” and anything with friction needs to be optimized. The belief that points can be distilled into bullet points. That long-form information is useless, and summaries are what’s valuable. In short, the belief that modern technology replaces the centuries-old technology of literacy.
In a previous post, I brought up Sam Bankman-Fried’s comments on reading. It seems cliché at this point, but it’s unavoidable since it perfectly sums up The Idiot’s Conclusion.
In November of 2022, notorious tech bro and crypto con man Sam Bankman-Fried told a writer interviewing him, “I would never read a book.” He went on to say, “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Six paragraphs on a topic is still in hot-take territory. It may be more than 280 characters, but still potentially a hot take. Imagine any book you’ve ever read being a mere six paragraphs. What SBF wants is a summary, not details, not understanding, not questions, always taking the author at face value. SBF is hardly the only one who thinks this way. This perspective is pervasive, like termites infesting the already rotting boards of a house.
In addition, there’s a perspective that reading can’t be enjoyable, as though anything difficult can’t simultaneously be satisfying. Like the thought of spending hours of your life reading a book is somehow a waste of time, but hours on a screen, mindlessly scrolling, is somehow fulfilling.
In reality, a lack of literacy risks creating a world of digital peasants, dependent on the mercy of external systems outside people’s control to shape and make sense of it. This resembles priests in the Dark Ages, preaching to the illiterate masses. Only the illiterate masses of the Dark Ages did not understand the symbols on paper, while the modern equivalent just can’t be bothered to make sense of them. It’s scary to think that, with all of the advanced technology we have, we may usher in a new digital dark age.
Only the illiterate masses of the Dark Ages did not understand the symbols on paper, while the modern equivalent just can’t be bothered to make sense of them.
Literacy is the gateway to knowledge, and the modern world has become increasingly comfortable with not knowing things. My grandfather used to say, “Whatever you learn, they can’t take it from you.” Who they are, I learned from George Steiner, are the bastards, and these days, the bastards hold all the cards.
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” -George Orwell
Considering Orwell’s quote, it may be that mass manipulation of people through AI doesn’t occur within the algorithms themselves, but in the blast radius of the effects outside the technical system that strips away defenses.
Without literacy, not only does wisdom become damn near impossible, but the path to attainment disappears beneath our feet. After all, modernity hardly creates the template for stamping out more like Socrates.
The Post-Literate Masses
If people like Marshall McLuhan noticed a shift away from literacy in the 1960s, then there is no doubt that, in comparison, we are now fully engulfed. One professor commented that her students arrived at school unable to read sentences.
"It's not even an inability to critically think. It's an inability to read sentences."
She’s hardly the only one noticing that students are unable to read.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it."
When Jagt asked why:
"When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them."
What’s happening here isn’t purely a story about distractions like smartphones and social media, though they play a part. There’s even some evidence to suggest that the mere presence of a smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. But this isn’t all.
When we discontinue deep reading, our brain’s neuroplasticity recycles the neurons previously used for the task. Since we haven’t exercised these skills, the task seems impossible, or at the very least, the challenges seem insurmountable.
Imagine showing up to the gym after a decade without exercising and approaching a bar with weights on it that you once lifted. You try to pick it up, but it doesn’t budge. You know you have some work to do to get back to where you were. Regaining the ability to read deeply also requires work.
In the previous scenario, at least you know the task is possible since you’ve done it before. You may also be aware of the value this activity provides. This knowledge may encourage you to regain these skills, but for those who’ve never read deeply, this isn’t the case.
For people who’ve never read deeply, the activity may seem impossible, or at least impossible for them. The perceived impossibility means people won’t even try. Still others may understand that it’s possible, but it’s just too much work to attain the ability. This is where we’ve arrived today.
Referring back to The Idiot’s Conclusion, people seem unfazed by their inability to read deeply and their lack of reading comprehension. After all, every possible piece of information is available at the press of a button. Reading is perceived as irrelevant.
Due to information overload and the amount of information presented to us, we are transformed into what the playwright Richard Foreman calls “The Pancake People,” becoming spread wide and thin. There is no depth to our knowledge and no depth to us as individuals.
Many search for shortcuts and find a willing conspirator in generative AI, but there’s a problem. Knowledge and understanding aren’t generated from bullet points, and wisdom will never be attained from the sidelines. Yet, many fail to notice or even care. We have an entire generation that views the precept know thyself as absolutely terrifying.
When it comes to AI, we are often told, imagine if people like Von Neumann or Einstein had something like ChatGPT. Imagine all of the amazing things they would have done. I’ve already addressed why this is nonsense. In this theoretical scenario, Einstein never stares back at the clock tower because he’s looking down at his phone.
In this theoretical scenario, Einstein never stares back at the clock tower because he’s looking down at his phone.
From Oral to Literate
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of literacy on humanity. The only way the modern world could emerge was through the technology of literacy. No matter how advanced AI gets, it will never overshadow literacy in terms of impact, because without literacy, there would be no AI.
The delineation and shift from oral to literate culture can be reduced to several transitional figures, as outlined by Eric Havelock in The Muse Learns To Write. These characters are:
- Socrates
- Plato
- Aristotle
Socrates was firmly in the oral tradition. He never wrote anything down. The only reason we know anything about Socrates is that people like Plato and Xenophon did write things down.
Plato is the transitional figure. Despite writing things down, he also wrote the Phaedrus. This is the famous dialogue of Socrates in which he criticizes the written word, and for which so many tech bros use him as a punching bag today.
Socrates’ objections to the written word are more nuanced than people make them out to be. In the Phaedrus, Socrates makes some points about writing. The most famous of which is that writing would implant forgetfulness in the mind. Another is the inflexibility of the written word.
Socrates can be forgiven for not understanding the benefits of the written word, and how it opens a reader to a whole new world of facts and opinions they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Keep in mind, in Socrates’ day, reading wasn’t the solitary, contemplative activity it is today. This was the age of scriptura continua, where writing had no spaces between words and no punctuation. Writing was very much meant to be read aloud and often to groups of people.
This impression of the written word no doubt tainted Socrates’ perspective on the value of the activity. Even in this dialogue, Socrates doesn’t read the words of Lysias to himself. Phaedrus read it to him.
Ultimately, Socrates may have been wrong about the technology of the written word implanting forgetfulness, but he wasn’t wrong about the concept. Today, we have generative AI, arguably our most powerful potential forgetfulness-implanter. Socrates may be right, but about the wrong technology.
Literacy has other benefits. For example, it opened the door for linear thinking and contemplation. Deep reading really is deep thinking. When you read, you are making connections between what you know and what is being read. Even when what you know was buried deep in long-term memory. The act of reading allows your working memory to retrieve relevant information from long-term memory and make associations with what is being read, allowing novel ideas to emerge.
Literacy enabled the creation of science and technology. The precision of the written word allowed for exact replication. Oral cultures are imprecise. Stories are often never told the same way twice. Oral cultures often use other devices to aid in memory, such as poetry, dance, and song. But there is a limit to what could be passed on using these methods.
Marshall McLuhan makes another critical observation about literacy:
Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. -Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)
This is the ability to separate the emotion from an activity. The example McLuhan gave was a surgeon who skillfully performs their work despite the overwhelming weight of the responsibility on their shoulders.
Of course, by the time we get to Aristotle, we are firmly in the literate tradition, allowing people like Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school, to have intercourse with the dead. (Not that kind of intercourse.)
From Literate to Entertained
We know what happens when oral cultures become literate, but what happens when cultures shift from literacy to something else? Unfortunately, this is the experiment we’ve been running on ourselves for almost a century now.
A few writers throughout the decades observed the shift away from literacy. For example, Marshall McLuhan and Eric Havelock in the 1960s, Walter Ong and Eric Havelock in the 1970s and 1980s, Neil Postman in the 1980s and 1990s, Maryanne Wolf and Nicolas Carr in the 2010s and 2020s. These are but a few of the explorers of this topic, all with thoughts about what this means for us and our culture.
Once again, Marshall McLuhan had a prescient observation.
Entertainment pushed to an extreme becomes the main form of business and politics. -Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)
This is our current environment. However, I’m not sure a UFC fight on the White House lawn is what McLuhan envisioned, but I get the impression he wouldn’t be surprised.
My claim is that we are not shifting from a literate culture back to something resembling an oral culture or even an oral/visual culture, as some have claimed. We are shifting from a literate culture to an entertainment culture. This has profound impacts on the future of humanity. McLuhan is correct in observing that extreme entertainment consumes business and politics, but it also consumes everything else.
Just as a culture of literacy changed what and how people thought, entertainment culture has the same effects. A literate culture rewards contemplation, revision, delayed gratification, solitude, and abstraction. Whereas an entertainment culture rewards immediacy, emotion, novelty, identity, and spectacle, and this provides the fuel for our current fire.
A literate culture rewards contemplation, revision, delayed gratification, solitude, and abstraction. Whereas an entertainment culture rewards immediacy, emotion, novelty, identity, and spectacle.
Entertainment and reaction are the forces shaping the modern world, making us ignorant and pushing everything to extremes. There is no middle ground, no nuance, no details when the “truth” is viewed as existing in extremes. This perspective leads to the devaluation of freedom and democracy in favor of systems like authoritarianism.
Literacy enables us to grapple with difficult topics, whereas entertainment provides distraction. Literacy creates enduring fulfillment, whereas entertainment provides only momentary respite from woes. Literacy teaches us and empowers us, whereas entertainment diminishes us, pushing us back into magic, mysticism, tribalism, and confusion.
One person who wouldn’t be surprised by a UFC fight on the White House lawn is Neil Postman. He captured the entertainment sentiment in the introduction to his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. -Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves To Death)
In Postman’s time, someone consumed with entertainment from television was purely ignorant and mostly content with this ignorance. People now consume information junk food all day as entertainment, yet feel informed. They feel empowered, ready to put their ignorance into action. This makes people trivially informed and overconfident, even in highly complex scenarios.
For example, researchers found that simply showing a video of a pilot landing a plane was enough to inflate people’s confidence that they could do the same, even though they’d never flown before. This isn’t simply the Kunning-Kruger effect. It’s deeper. This condition results from entertainment culture and the overvaluation of video content. Video content now trumps all other forms of knowledge cultivation and instruction. We think that by watching videos, we are like Neo, having information directly planted into our brains.
We must acknowledge that most information available is low-quality crap, dopamine-hitting distractions, despite having a veneer of value. It may not have true value, but people find it entertaining and therefore assign value.
But even with high-quality information, we aren’t Neo. Time, effort, reflection, and practice are necessary to refine raw materials of information into knowledge and wisdom. All devalued factors today. However, in our current environment, interest in a subject isn’t enough if content isn’t experienced as entertaining. If content isn’t entertaining, then it’s perceived as low value and not worth the time or effort, which is interesting, since the opposite is often true.
Maryanne Wolf points out in her book Reader, Come Home: “If information is continuously perceived as a form of entertainment at the surface level, it remains on the surface, potentially impeding real thinking, rather than deepening it.” This is a harsh lesson for the entertainment era.
President Obama, in a 2010 commencement address at Hampton University, also called out this condition of information as distraction and entertainment:
“Information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you, it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.” -Barack Obama
President Obama makes an important point about democracy. People around the globe are starting to think that democracy is a bad idea. Comfortable people. Democracy may die in darkness, but it absolutely dies in comfort. But this is a topic for another day.
The truth is, although some continue to struggle, many people around the globe have never been more comfortable. One of the biggest misconceptions we have as humans is assuming that comfort means contentment. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
When people are comfortable, they get restless, they get uneasy, they demand things, they demand entertainment. If they don’t get it directly, they find it, sifting the sediment of digital streams in search of entertainment nuggets. If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, then busy hands are the algorithm’s, and hands are rarely idle these days.
Algorithms tuned to maximize time on platform antagonize and excite the very characteristics exposed by the shift away from literacy. People find these excitements entertaining. Doomscrolling, rage bait, and all forms of brainrot are on the menu. If literacy provides us with the ability to act without reacting, then entertainment culture provides us only with the ability to consume and react.
If literacy provides us with the ability to act without reacting, then entertainment culture provides us only with the ability to consume and react.
We live in a world that prioritizes performance and consumption. Almost everything we do or see involves performing and consuming. We act more like automatons this way, following a program. Even the content creators aren’t purely creating. They are reacting, held captive by their audience and expectations outside their control. These factors mold everyone into characters performing choreographed actions that bear little resemblance to the underlying human beneath. In a way, we attempt to method-act a conception of ourselves rather than be authentic.
We attempt to method-act a conception of ourselves rather than be authentic.
However, if we take entertainment to extremes, which we seem on a collision course to do, it takes us to strange places. Virtual Reality is the pinnacle of entertainment. No, I’m not talking about current technology with bulky headsets and subpar graphics. I’m talking about more advanced technology that makes the experience more indistinguishable from reality. Far too many people view The Matrix as a utopia if only they can be the hero or villain of their choosing. An entertainment culture values entertainment above all else and isn’t afraid to take entertainment to extremes.
Back in 2024, in response to an astrophysicist’s AI-doom scenario as an explanation for the Fermi paradox, I called out entertainment as a more plausible explanation. It’s terrifying to imagine that this may be humanity’s destiny: not exploring our world, or the cosmos, or interacting with others we love, but as sedentary meatsacks locked into our individual simulations.
Note: For a look at documentaries, YouTube, and podcasts, see the additional notes section of this article.
A Robbery in the Bank of Our Minds
Whenever we appear to gain something, we rarely think about what we lose, which is bad since pretty much everything in life involves tradeoffs. Marshall McLuhan observed that every new augmentation is a self-amputation with a numbing effect. This numbing effect blinds us to a technology’s true impact.
To focus on the trade-off aspect, rather than what we may lose, we should think of something being stolen from us, because this is a robbery from the bank of our minds.
Literacy isn’t something we are born with. It’s not a genetic trait handed down from generation to generation. It requires a rewiring of our brains. Literacy is something we have to work at and earn, and even after earning it, we have to maintain it through practice. If we don’t, the neurons used for the task recycle.
Nicolas Carr summarizes the situation well in his book The Shallows:
“Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work.”
We lose so much in a post-literate culture. The ability to reflect and understand, the loss of creative thought, the loss of critical reasoning and analysis, the loss of empathy, and the list goes on. All of these and more are handed away or diminished so that we can become constantly shifting, passive observers of life.
The use of AI mitigates none of these negative impacts. The use of AI makes them worse because it gives us the illusion of competency and reinforces the very same issues that caused them in the first place.
It’s not that literacy completely prevents negative impacts. I see plenty of “smart” people who I assume exercise literacy, wrapped up in idiotic views, captured by their biases. Plenty of highly literate people have held terrible beliefs. Literacy alone is not sufficient for wisdom. But it does create the cognitive conditions under which reflection, criticism, and self-correction become far more likely.
I already alluded to several negative impacts of the shift away from a literate culture. But let’s call out a few specific impacts here.
The Rewired Brain
Rather than talk more about the rewired brain, let’s look at an example. This article has an error.
The article mentions that students kept returning to AI tools because of their addictive design, but this isn’t the case. What’s being attributed to addiction is actually dependence. The students, in this case, aren’t swarming to AI tools because of sycophancy or dopamine hits from usage. Their brains have been rewired by cognitive offloading.
The brain prefers the path of least resistance, so it takes it. The prospect of adding friction back into the process is painful, or at a minimum, very uncomfortable for these students. Given this, they fall back on using AI. No addictive design required, just the continued decay of the prefrontal cortex.
Inability to Reflect
The modern world rewards reaction over reflection. Reaction has the word “action” and gives us a false sense that we are doing something. So when we see something political, or that aligns with our biases, we share it and make our voices heard. But this reveals a more sinister issue: we’ve lost our ability to reflect.
Loss of Deep Knowledge, Critical Thought, and Analysis
We enter an age when, at best, people grasp only the gist of things. Never anything deeper. To this extent, we resemble our ancient ancestors in oral cultures, who lacked precise knowledge. Only now, we have increased confidence because of data stores and AI. We are now the pancake people. It affects culture too because you start to believe narratives that “sound” solid. Even more so when they align with our biases.
When going in for an operation, I want a surgeon with deep expertise and experience, not one who basically gets the gist of opening up a body or where the organs are located.
As Maryanne Wolf puts it in her book Reader, Come Home, “Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.” This is a profoundly important point.
Deep reading really is deep thinking. Writing is really thinking on paper (or screen). Deep reading and focused writing encourage the retention of content in memory, fortifying our internal knowledge.
Deep reading opens the door to making real connections between the information we encounter. The less we know, the fewer opportunities we have to make connections between information and expand our knowledge. When knowledge is located outside our heads, we can’t make these connections and are at the mercy of our tools.
We need to use our own internal knowledge to interpret new information, applying our own critical analysis. We can’t depend on external tools to do this for us. Not doing so leaves us open to manipulation and misinformation. Something we can all witness today.
Destruction of Focus and Attention
“Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects.” -Daniel Levitin (The Organized Mind)
Nobody would deny the complete shattering of attention in the modern era. It’s a resource so precious, yet it’s tossed away as though it’s worthless. Seneca made this observation about time. He observed that people were so careful about money, yet so careless with their time, the one resource they couldn’t get more of. After all, we say we spend time doing things, but treat it so carelessly. Thankfully, we can get our attention back, but our time, not so much.
Far too many are swept up in the vortex of infinite scroll, mindlessly swiping and tapping, losing countless hours. These activities, fueled by dopamine rewards, rewire their brains. The neurons previously supporting focus and attention are recycled. This is in large part why you hear people complaining of an inability to focus or having ADHD. Yet, these same people spend an inordinate amount of time on nothing but attention-fracturing activities.
Deep reading and focused writing require focus and attention. These attributes must be cultivated and maintained. The good news is, we can use deep reading and focused writing to strengthen them. But focus and attention have other rewards.
Focus and attention reward us with a state of flow. The state of flow is far more rewarding than the dopamine hits we get from things such as a social media like. The like on a status is quick and temporary, but the state of flow can provide satisfaction, something lasting much longer than the temporary dopamine hit from a “like.”
Transforming Texts Into Ciphers
The decline of literacy transforms books from previous eras into a complex code that people can’t decipher. To crack the code, people are forced to use technology or ignore the lessons altogether, pretending that previous eras had nothing to offer the present or the future. The narrative is always that there is no problem created by technology that the application of even more technology can’t solve. This perspective obscures the real issues.
Lack of literacy prevents people from going to the source and seeing for themselves, relying on out-of-context snippets or, more commonly, on an algorithm’s comprehension rather than their own. This opens the door to misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and manipulation.
Return to tribalism
Or we might return to the state of tribal man, for whom magic rituals are his means of “applied knowledge.” Instead of translating nature into art, the native nonliterate attempts to invest nature with spiritual energy. -Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)
There can be no denying our modern return to tribalism. Everything has been transformed to fall along these tribal lines. Magic and religion make a comeback, not in their old, traditional forms, but by transforming everything into dogma sprinkled with all manner of conspiracy and beliefs.
The absolutist nature of our current tribal moment requires people to adopt the entire tribe’s beliefs. They can’t pick and choose; the tribe doesn’t allow this. For example, we don’t see a conspiracy theorist believing in only one conspiracy. The tribes beliefs become like Pringles; you can’t have just one.
The lure of the tribe is such that once someone who may initially only believe in one specific conspiracy theory engages with the tribe, they end up adopting the tribes beliefs, in many cases mindlessly, but it makes them feel good. They become like Winston, who learns to love Big Brother.
This return to tribalism hasn’t gone unnoticed. In an email between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel, they discussed how a return to tribalism and economic collapse would be good for them because they could buy everything up.
Loss of empathy
When we read fiction, we are forced into the heads and situations of characters. This means that we take the perspective from inside the character. No other medium can do this.
There’s evidence that literary fiction promotes empathy, theory of mind, and critical thinking skills. It’s the simulation of others’ minds that fosters empathy. As literacy declines, so does empathy. Remember, empathy has to be learned, but anger can be triggered.
Loss of a Sense of Self
Exercising literacy is an act of self-discovery. Literacy and the quest for knowledge and wisdom help us form a sense of self and create a sturdy foundation on which to approach life. Without this foundation, we are tossed about in the washing machine of information with no center or grounding. This gives us the impression of helplessness, which can ultimately lead to hopelessness.
This condition is partly why everything is vibes now. When people don’t have a deep understanding, or when there is no grounding amid so much uncertainty, all they have are their vibes.
Reclaiming Literacy
Chance comes only to the prepared mind. -Louis Pasteur
Reclaiming literacy doesn’t mean giving up entertainment, devices, or even guilty pleasures. I certainly haven’t given them up. It’s about finding a balance that puts the power back in your hands, making you more robust so that the negative impacts from interactions with technology and entertainment are diminished. A sharpened mind dulls negative impacts.
It is unlikely that literacy will stage a comeback. The modern world, which owes its very existence to literacy, seems content to put the final nail in the coffin and bury it beneath six feet of dirt even though the nail gun is also pointed at its foot.
Although a resurrection of literacy in the broader culture isn’t in our future, that doesn’t mean we can’t individually reclaim its power and reap its benefits. Literacy creates robustness that can be a crucial defense against the issues of our modern world.
When I suggest people reclaim literacy, I’m not talking about a sort of highfalutin literacy where people absorb themselves in the classics and thumb their nose at people who haven’t read Tolstoy. I’m merely talking about a practice of reading and writing, with no preconception about the content.
For me, literacy is a quest for wisdom. This remains true whether I’m reading fiction or non-fiction and regardless of what I’m writing. Far too many write off fiction as having nothing to offer in the quest for wisdom, but this is far from the case. Fiction is a great simulation. It’s a way of seeing what happens when playing with ideas and concepts, something an author like Ursula K. Le Guin does so well. As proof, governments throughout history have banned works of fiction because of the ideas they contain.
For all of the claims that AI democratizes this and that, the reality is that literacy truly democratizes. Literacy empowers humans in a way that other technologies available today cannot. When we cultivate a literacy practice, we find that things change. We are more centered and aren’t so shoved about by the day-to-day rage bait and hot takes that algorithms seem intent on feeding us.
We also find that knowledge is far more useful when it is in our head. In my previous article on books, I mentioned Calvisius Sabinus. A man who spent a great deal of money on slaves to store his knowledge for him. It didn’t turn out so well.
Benefits come with directly interacting with a written work that we can’t get from summarizing it. For example, I can’t imagine having an AI summarize Seneca’s works. It tears out of-context examples and slaughters their true value, leaving so much untouched. Not only that, we are letting an algorithm dictate what’s valuable to us, shoving us into a statistical distribution that makes sense for a system, not for us individually.
Time and Space
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that both deep reading and focused writing are something we can reclaim. First and foremost, we have to want it. I assume anyone who’s made it this far at least has that want. After that, what’s important is time and space.
Time is a resource that everyone claims not to have. People often tell me they wish they had time to read or write. I reply with, “Me too.” When we analyze how we spend our time, we often find the time we need.
To start with, dedicate a block of time for reading or writing. Many find the time before bed the most opportune. Don’t be too ambitious at first, and be happy with small victories. Your goal should be to work toward an hour and see where that leads. You’ll find that as you initially struggle to sustain 10 or 15 minutes, the task gets easier.
Time is only one challenge, but space can be even more difficult. We need to create space for literacy by reducing distractions. This is an all-but-impossible task in our modern world with devices, notifications, pets, children, and all manner of distractions swirling around us.
As I write this, I’m sitting in my office early on a Saturday morning. My house and the world outside are currently quiet. My devices are in do-not-disturb mode. These factors give me the space to explore my thoughts and enter a state of flow, to absorb myself in the task of writing. Only the occasional meowing of my cat’s demands for pets breaks the silence, to which I oblige.
You can utilize do-no-disturb mode on devices, close apps, and reduce notifications. You can also close doors, wear noise-canceling headphones, and use other techniques at your disposal. These will help reduce distractions and create space. You’ll find what works for you.
Space is different for everyone. For me, my home provides space, but for others, their home provides far too many distractions, even outside their devices. This is why you see people at coffee shops or at the library reading and writing. And this brings up another point: space isn’t purely about physical surroundings; it’s also mental.
Mental space is often far more important than physical space, which is how people can overcome busy surroundings. Putting yourself in the right frame of mind for the activity is key. When you go to work, you may be in a work mindset. The shift in location supports this mental shift. The mental shift to reading or writing is the same.
One of the best methods to maximize both time and space is to create a routine or a habit. Getting yourself to the gym when you haven’t built a habit can be difficult. It’s easy to talk yourself out of going. But after you’ve built the routine, you go even when you try to talk yourself out of it. This is the same for literacy. Build your routine, and you’ll find it comes easier.
Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t hit your goals or experience other hurdles. The important thing is just doing it. After all, you don’t get better at playing guitar by thinking about playing guitar. You get better at guitar by actually playing guitar and putting in the reps. Put in the literacy reps, and you’ll see the gains.
It will no doubt be uncomfortable at first. Push through this discomfort, and you’ll find that it becomes easier as your brain rewires and acclimates to the new normal. The build to deep reading and focused writing requires delayed gratification.
The reward is that literacy brings contentment and satisfaction no AI can match, no matter how good it gets. This can be nearly impossible to explain to the uninitiated and is something that people need to experience themselves. It’s like trying to explain a flow state to someone who’s never experienced one.
In the end, it’s strange to consider that the cure for many of our woes created by the modern world may be found in the technology of literacy. A technology that has been with us for many centuries.
Conclusion
We often assume that newer technologies inevitably replace the old, but literacy remains one of humanity’s greatest cognitive technologies. Unless we preserve the technology of literacy, we’ll lose the very capabilities that allowed us to build AI in the first place. Literacy also equips us with capabilities to interact with modern technologies and minimize negative impacts, giving us the best of both worlds.
We’ve become seduced by the mantra “work smarter, not harder” and apply it to everything as a universal truth. The problem is that working harder is necessary for being smarter. This fact remains constant, even in the face of new technologies that promise otherwise.
Additional Notes
Here are some additional notes that, if included inline in the article, would have interrupted the flow.
Documentaries, YouTube, and Podcasts
Some may point to documentaries as proof that entertainment can also be educational or even informative. Sure, we’ve all learned things from documentaries, but it’s a mistake to assume this is the same as deep reading about a subject.
In essence, documentaries themselves are summaries. Not to mention, in our modern environment, these things need to be flashy, shocking, bias-aligning, or any number of attributes that grab our attention.
Speaking of our modern environment, people often multitask when interacting with entertaining material such as documentaries, which pulls focus away from the content. This multitasking isn’t possible when reading. What I mean is, it’s not possible to read and do a crossword puzzle at the same time, or more realistically, read and engage with social media.
In The Shallows, Nicolas Carr includes a comment on multitasking from Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Grafman notes:
“The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.”
Of course, there’s also the bullshit angle. Both documentaries and literature can contain bullshit, but it’s much easier to present bullshit in the form of a documentary than it is in a book. Take Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse for example. Stunning visuals, exotic locations, cinematic shots… all bullshit.
I should note an exception, although it should be fairly obvious. There are some scenarios, mostly related to applied skills, where video content may be preferable to literature. For example, if you are trying to learn how to change the oil in your car, properly swing a baseball bat, or assemble a piece of furniture, seeing a demonstration of these types of activities is often preferable to reading directions. In most cases, these are scenarios that require little deep thought and are primarily focused on replication of a technique.
I’m not claiming that documentaries and other content posed as educational on platforms like YouTube or even on Podcasts are inherently bad, or that you shouldn’t consume them. I’m calling out that they should be considered the beginning of the journey. They can set you down the path to learn more, while you follow it up with a technology like literacy. Use them as inspiration. The mistake is assuming this content is the journey itself. Educational entertainment should pose questions, not provide answers.
Audiobooks
Audiobooks, on the surface, seem to blend the best of both worlds as a proper replacement for traditional reading. After all, they contain the same information as a book, just presented in a different format. However, this isn’t the replacement it seems to be.
I don’t know anyone (including myself) who only listens to an audiobook in quiet contemplation. Audiobooks are built for multitasking. They provide information from a book when reading isn’t feasible, such as commutes, road trips, treadmills, walks, etc. This can inherit all of the same drawbacks of multitasking previously covered.
This isn’t meant to diminish the value of audiobooks. They are a tremendous resource, but I like to think of them as supporting material for the reading, further reinforcing the content in the book. I’ll often listen to the audiobook first before reading. This provides familiarity with the content, allowing important points to pop out when reading.
There’s no doubt that reading is an investment, an investment of time, a resource we can never get more of. Audiobooks can be an indicator that you may not want to make further investment into a book. You were already multitasking to begin with, so time isn’t wasted.