The history of literacy is a list of complaints. Critics reliably decry each new technological development as an attention-stealing toy. Before recent grousing about ChatGPT, protestations were uttered about the detrimental effects of the internet (fearing endless distraction, Jonathan Franzen destroyed his laptop’s ethernet port); the word processor (the ease of moving text around declared “an irresponsible whimsicality” by Alexander Cockburn in the eighties); the typewriter (“The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in 1959, to a schoolgirl requesting writing advice); and the very reproducibility of the book (Song-era scholar Ye Mengde held that woodblock texts too often propagated uncorrected errors). In Plato’s Phaedrus, writing itself is suspect, as the literate “will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing.” Amid the breathless techno-optimist awe of artificial intelligence—and ahistorical dismissal of its novelty—it is easy to forget that the current crises of reading and writing are unprecedented in degree, but not in kind. “After Words” considers what’s actually different about today’s information overload and whether we’ve been postliterate for far longer than we’d like to believe.
“Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say,” Friedrich Kittler wrote, but that lofty moment was in the eighties, and the fin de siècle of the written word had yet to give way to the twenty-first century’s incessant logorrhea—a second age of orality, Noah McCormack explains, the Homeric epic replaced by short-form video content and podcasting. (Brace Belden reports from the latter industry, a heady mix of dick-pill ads and Kamala Harris interviews.) Whatever heights our devices have reached, McCormack warns, do not succumb to a technological determinism that ignores class. Accordingly, the siren song of Ms. Rachel cannot be understood outside of America’s ongoing impoverishment of families, writes Sophie Pinkham, lamenting the YouTuber’s death grip on toddler attention spans, to the detriment of the world of books. More than laudable, however, is Ms. Rachel’s vocal support for Palestine. As Bruce Robbins writes in his account of the Sokal affair some thirty years on, the occupation is also a uniting cause between the physicist and the editors of the magazine he so famously hoaxed.
Often falling short of such political demands, our literati may indeed have little to say, as Chris Lehmann points out in his survey of the Trump novel. (If the MFA lifestyle has failed you, consider, as the protagonists of Jess Row’s short story do, assassinating a war criminal.) Andrew Leland contemplates how deaf artists and writers are grappling with a second Trump administration keen on dismantling the Americans with Disabilities Act. Looking outside the imperial core, non-anglophone writers hailing from South Korea to Mexico join a forum on brain rot across the globe. Domestically, Mina Tavakoli writes on the devolution of American culture into chaotic slop over the past twenty-five years—a descent made graphic by Michael Oswell in the issue’s exhibit.
Where does the reader find respite, then? One possible path, though usually maligned: video games, at least in the case of Disco Elysium, the Estonian blockbuster built upon a novel that exceeds said book as a literary experience, as Gabriel Winslow-Yost argues. In it, more than a million words evoke both postrevolutionary melancholy and communist fervor for a more just world, as experienced by an amnesiac cop with the DTs. Call it harm reduction of the digital variety: if we’re to be addicted to our devices, let us be bound to something better on our screens.