The end(s) of books
By 
I’m linking here to a couple of, from the perspective of somebody who writes books, extremely dire essays about the future of reading in general and books in particular. (Thanks to LGM reader Ira for pointing me to the first one).
This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.
In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.
Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.
Those of you who have read Amusing Ourselves to Death will recall how Neil Postman, who Marriott quotes extensively, makes a similar argument about the link between the explosion of literacy and the promise and possibility of a democratic politics in America in the 19th century and after. (A less well known but equally thought-provoking variation on this general theme is Paul Fussell’s classic academic study, The Great War and Modern Memory.)
There’s a lot of data now from the US and around the world that people, and in particular young people, are no longer reading books in anything like the quantities they did in the past. Again this is a long-term trajectory: Postman was talking about how the television culture was destroying deep literacy well before anybody had ever heard of TikTok and Instagram, or blogs for that matter.
This data is quite disturbing: it shows, for example, that over the past 40 years the percentage of American teenagers who hardly ever read for pleasure has gone from about 15% to fully half. And this seems to reflect an international trend.
I’m instinctively wary of arguments about the degeneracy of today’s youth, since first encountering them in Plato and various Roman authors a couple of thousand years ago or thereabouts. And Marriott’s diatribe does seem to take things pretty far in that direction: Were children actually reading Bleak House a century ago? (I don’t mean the rare freakishly literary child obviously, although nothing is obvious on the internet, curse its very name).
But even with all appropriate caveats, it does seem harder now to get Kids Today to read actual books, or even long articles, that it was when I first got into the academic rackets 35 years ago. And again this isn’t merely impressionistic: there’s a lot of data backing it up.
Marriott is pretty apocalyptic about all this:
The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.
That golden thread is breaking for the second time.
This is as he recognizes in the footnotes — another thing that nobody reads any more — an oversimplification of a complicated history, skipping over the monkish scholastic culture, the entire Islamic world, and other things as well — but it’s still true in its general outlines. Is the internet plunging us back toward a preliterate world of intellectual and political barbarism? Subscribe to Marriott’s Substack to find out!
Paul Skallas explores similar themes, although in a vein that doesn’t see the return to orality as all bad:
The reason I decline offers to write a book because we are in the midst of a monumental shift, we are exiting the age of literary culture and returning to the age of oral culture. This is one of the big stories of our time and no one is directly talking about it.
I know many authors. For most of them, they write them for speaking fees, not cultural transmission. The book exists so the author can say they wrote a book. It’s the new business card for “intellectuals.” It’s become a means to build a career, it’s something else, not the main thing.
People are reading less now. Instead they’re consuming short form video, images, AI summaries, tweets, newsletters and podcasts. This is what we call today Oral Culture. What we are returning to.
Look, books will always exist, and individual books will become Lindy. They are not going totally away. But they are not for the masses anymore. They are not the engines of cultural transmission. Yes, I’m writing long-form essays while arguing against long-form’s dominance, but newsletters and blogs occupy a different space than books in the cultural hierarchy. They’re more more conversational, more… oral.
Cool cool cool, but the modal poet of the pre-literate world was not Homer, while the modal thinker of our increasingly post-literate world appears to be Homer Simpson (d’oh!).
Skallas emphasizes, as does Marriott, that deploring this trend does not mean it isn’t happening:
Everyone feels this happening and It’s really hard to blame the individual. You have to really enjoy books to keep reading them. Books seem slow and hard and boring to the modern mind. There is this constant buzzing in your head from all the stimulation and rapid-fire information you get from short form video, podcasts or AI summaries.
But it’s not like planes are falling from the skies. The world keeps marching on. You can have conversations with people about things. I don’t think we are getting dumber, necessarily, but we are changing. The way we consume and communicate are changing. The good news is, this is how it’s always been, except for a brief period of literacy. We’re just returning to a previous age, which seems new to us now.
I would note that the “previous age” here could be described as the pre-18th century world, that featured political arrangements of a most unpleasant kind if you’re not a crazed plutocratic techlord, or an integralist Catholic with a deep affection for the theology of Boniface VIII, and some serious doubts about the liberalish tendencies in the Summa.
And I would also add that even in the darkest of the dark ages, real intellectual life survived here and there, although the Venerable Bede didn’t have a blog or a podcast AFAIK, or internet acronyms for that matter.
Ultimately, what limbic capitalism is creating is a narcotized populace, that is getting stupider by the year. The world’s most powerful tech companies are constantly refining their strategies for expanding a customer base that is addicted to social media, to video games, to compulsive shopping, and to mindless entertainment of every kind. This is a kind of particularly exploitative economic system, that recognizes that mindless consumerism is a way station on the road to literal addiction, since addiction is, from the perspective of the supplier, the most profitable of human conditions. It follows that the last thing consumer capitalism needs is any kind of self-critical intelligence to arise amid its “target demographics.”
So it’s not a coincidence that the attention economy destroys attention spans, promotes endless amounts of false information and other cognitive garbage, and has become a machine designed to activate lizard brain capitalism, transforming people into unreflective consumers, who reflexively buy things they don’t need or even actually want.
The political consequences of all this are immense. Donald Trump got elected president, twice so far, because people have become so easily bored, and so desperate for constant stimulation, that the election of this subliterate carnival barker with the morals of a pimp and the intellect of a dull normal junior high school bully was sufficiently entertaining to them to entice them into making this fundamentally insane choice. Trump was entertaining to the voting public in the same way he was entertaining as the host of The Apprentice, which, crucially, allowed him to present himself to millions of television viewers as a “successful businessman.” He was entertaining as the host of Wrestlemania, and as a constant gossip column item in New York in the 1980s, and in the pages of People magazine. He wasn’t, as so many of his voters emphasized when asked about why they were voting for him, “a politician” – meaning, above all that he was amusing, rather than boring.
We can only hope that, in the words of Neil Postman’s prophetic polemic on the degradation of knowledge in the information age, we are not now in the process of amusing ourselves to death.
From The Triumph of Stupidity