Marxist bros have long been interested in the financial press. Karl Marx first turned to The Economist to help understand the failure of the revolutions of 1848, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he directed readers to that “organ” of the “aristocracy of finance” to understand what liberalism was up to. The mid-century American cartoonist Don Wright featured in one sketch a supposed Moscow newsstand selling three papers: Pravda, Izvestia, and the Wall Street Journal.
This tendency went into something of an eclipse in America as the Red Scare suppressed Marxism and the New Left and the cultural turn pointed attention elsewhere. But as interest in historical materialism surged after the global financial crisis of 2008, the left rediscovered the financial press as they searched for the rational kernel within the mystical shell. At first, the Financial Times was the center of attention. As Amber A’Lee Frost wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FT “covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.” After the FT came the writings of the Columbia University financial historian and blogger Adam Tooze, with people declaring themselves “Tooze bros” (mostly for reading his newsletter, Chartbook, not his mammoth histories). Lately, the left has fixated on the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots, hosted by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, with Marxists going gaga over their interviews with figures ranging from Zohran Mamdani to the CEOs of logistics companies—subjects who are uniquely able to offer insight into the supply chain shocks during Covid and, again, with the ongoing tariff volatility.
Odd Lots is engrossing, covering everything from the history and economics of firewood to the role of socialism and landlordism in New York politics. But I know this mostly by secondhand report. I can’t stand listening to podcasts. I’m too attached to the written word; it’s denser, more complex, and contains more information than the spoken word. I’m part of a dying breed in that orientation, and the shift in interest from the newspaper to the blog to the podcast has left me somewhat informationally marooned among my peers. Weisenthal would understand this: a special interest of his is Walter Ong, the Jesuit scholar who, two generations ago, discussed the transition from oral culture to print culture and the transition in the television age into what he called “secondary orality.”
The story Ong tells goes like this: for most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered. Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. Therefore, it was conservative and traditional, against innovation and any departure from the long-established norms of agricultural life. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential, as in Homer with his repeated phrases such as “swift ships” and “wine-dark sea.” With writing comes precision, analytical rigor, deliberate word choices, analytic remove from life, and abstract thought.
Ong writes that oral culture dominated the Middle Ages, despite the invention of writing five thousand years ago or so, and in some ways the twentieth century. With the arrival of the printing press in Europe in the 1440s, print fixed the written word in place and began to supplant orality. This gave rise to, among other developments, the novel and other modern forms of writing. Then, with the emergence of electronic media, Ong sees society regressing/advancing into a “secondary orality,” which brings back many qualities of the first orality (note the supposedly permanent basis of writing):
its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well.
A follower of Ong, Weisenthal applies him to the current moment. The podcaster sees Trump as the first postliterate president. Ong hovers over Trump repeating “Crooked Hillary” and “Lyin’ Ted,” the commander in chief re-creating in a much stupider fashion “swift-footed Achilles.” Looking at social media, Weisenthal sees the return of oral values to dominance in the public square, like loud one-upmanship. Rather than the ideal of reasoned debate, social media sets the stage for constant jousting, rewarding those who can be viral and have memes ready in their memory, as today’s Homeric formula shifts both our political and neurological landscapes. “When people say things like ‘Twitter is filled with fake news’ or ‘TikTok is ruining the attention spans of today’s youth,’” Weisenthal writes, “all of that may be correct. But the bigger story, that more and more people are grappling with, is that a return to orality will fundamentally rewire the logic engine of the human brain.”
This belief that technology “wires” the human brain has many parents, most notably Marshall McLuhan and his follower Elizabeth Eisenstein, whose mammoth The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe began the entire field of modern book history in 1979. Preoccupied with the “fixity” of print, she attributed a dizzying array of changes to its arrival, from the scientific revolution to Protestantism to political liberalism. Ong drew on her, while Neil Postman’s seminal 1985 tome, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, drew on all of them. There are internal disagreements between these authors, but fundamentally they are telling one story: technology changes us, and it is currently changing us for the worse.
The Power of the Written Word
I believe we are changing for the worse. I am not, however, a firm technological determinist. I agree with the media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan in his book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy:
Among the many problems with adopting this form of strong determinism is that it leads one to believe that when a new technology becomes so deeply embedded, it shifts society in such a way as to allow for few surprises, let alone corrections or reversions to old habits of mind. And by focusing on a technology at the exclusion of (and distinct from) economic and political factors one can generate a monocausal explanation for a complex series of changes.
The economic and political factor that needs to be recentered—and to which the technology is subordinate—is class. Marx must talk to Meta.
I do not hold that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” for various tedious factual and periodizing reasons, but I would argue that the history of all hitherto literacy is the history of class struggle. If we look back at medieval Europe, the origin of modern Euro-American civilization, literacy was rare. In the early Middle Ages, it was vanishingly so, although perhaps not as scarce as popular stories of heroic monasteries preserving the written word would have us understand. Paradigmatically, Charlemagne was himself illiterate even as he encouraged the Carolingian Renaissance, an organized effort emanating from his court to grow Christianity by reviving classical works, increasing Latin literacy and thus the number of people capable of civil and ecclesiastical administration. As the feudal age began in the eleventh century, literacy was slowly growing among the nonclerical elite, but it remained strictly vocational and concentrated in the clergy. In the centuries after his death, English King Henry I was called Beauclerc (from the French for “good cleric”) because he could read.
In the feudal order, there were those who fought, those who prayed, and those who tilled. Since those who prayed were most often those who also administered, what need had most for literacy? Reading was a form of power, which is why the nobility increasingly wanted it for themselves. No landlord would want his peasantry to read or even see the reason why they would want to. And why would a peasant worn to the bone with labor want to take the time to read? This is not to say that peasants did not understand the power of the written word. The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a rare medieval outbreak of something resembling modern class consciousness, burned paperwork on a mass scale: court records, records of rent, and various other documents in which the law was used as an instrument of class oppression.
The American elite wanted to use education on its newcomer population as Europeans did on their imperial subjects.
This pattern remained true as late as the nineteenth century in France. Landlords opposed educating their peasants, and many peasants resisted compulsory schooling. Children’s labor was crucial to the survival of the whole household, so much so that the socialist newspaper Égalité denounced compulsory schooling, declaring that the practice would “wrest from the working family a resource it cannot spare.” When future Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau encountered a peasant in 1884 and reprimandingly questioned the farmer as to why his child was unschooled, the paysan replied, “Will you give him a private income?” The peasants lived in a world of orality, with all the cognitive limitations outlined by Ong. Visually, any contemplation was spent on religious art, which simultaneously implied incomprehensible mysteries while reinforcing the verbal Bible lessons of the priest. As Umberto Eco puts it, “The universe of the early Middle Ages was a universe of hallucination, the world was a symbolic forest peopled with mysterious presences; things were seen as if in the continuous story of a divinity who spent his time reading and devising the Weekly Puzzle Magazine.” For Eco, the key early transition into modernity occurred when “a line was drawn between hallucination and sight” in Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century treatise on optics. With Americans gleefully sinking into AI’s hallucinatory dreamworld, this line blurs and fades.
Literacy rates had risen as the late Middle Ages transitioned into the early modern period, driven in part by the emergence of a protobourgeoisie. But they required the printing press to really change things. Suddenly books could be mass produced—they were, in fact, the first industrial commodity. The scholarship about this is absolutely obsessed with “fixity” as the defining feature of the print revolution: that compared to oral culture, ideas were “fixed” on the printed page, which enabled cognitive revolutions and the scientific revolution. There is some truth to the idea, although scholars like Adrian Johns have shown many people experienced print as far from fixed. Typos abounded, different editions (not necessarily marked as such) included different texts, and pirated editions might have only a loose relationship to the original, just for starters.
Even if true, however, fixity is less important than the emergence of a commodity that could spread written information to large swaths of the population previously undreamed of by the most fevered educationalists. Because of the low barriers to entry and easy smuggling of the product, print resisted those states that attempted to create printing monopolies. Literacy also saw explosive growth alongside the Protestant Reformation, which spurred further printing and created an ideological justification for reading: if man could commune directly with God, he would need access to God’s word as given in the Bible. The Tudor regime in England was obsessed with social control and hierarchy yet was built on Protestant foundations: it placed a vernacular Bible in every church and increased elite and middling educations, leading to rising literacy rates, including among women. Even into the early nineteenth century, heavily Protestant areas like Prussia and the Northeastern United States remained the most literate areas in the world. However, if print had relied on Protestantism, there never would have been a French Revolution, given the success of the French state in crushing, expelling, and marginalizing the faith. In 1775, French judge Malesherbes noted, “Knowledge is being extended by Printing, the written Laws are today known by everyone, everyone can comprehend his own affairs.” And the class that could most comprehend its own affairs and had a bottomless appetite for print was the rising bourgeoisie.
Literacy Wars
The bourgeoisie ascending on both sides of the Atlantic was a class made of ink and newsprint. Aristocracies across Europe were small; they could be bound by common culture and marriages. The bourgeoisie was large, heterogenous, and not able to form kin connections at scale; they required the “many replications” of print to cohere a class identity. Why then would the bourgeoisie allow, much less encourage, their subordinates to also be literate? Because they needed literate and numerate labor from some and hoped to rule others with a Gramscian hegemony transmitted by literacy. The British began trying to create a class of English-literate Indians because it would create, as Benedict Anderson recounts, using the words of one of the project’s architects, “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.”
This policy spread through the empire to much success in its stated goal. At home, however, the English were falling behind the rising Prussian state in formal, required education—one of the reasons Germany overtook industrial pioneer England in the Second Industrial Revolution was that it focused on more knowledge-intensive production, like electricity generation and chemicals. But what really shifted the tide was Germany’s crushing of France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, where better-educated Prussia beat the larger but less educated French army.
In Charles Tilly’s famous formulation, “War made the state and the state made war.” A corollary can be added: literacy made war and war made literacy. On the eve of the war between Prussia and France, England had already moved toward greater education funding and requirements, with W. E. Forster, the minister responsible, telling the House of Commons: “Civilized communities are massing themselves together, each mass being measured by its force; and if we are to hold our position among . . . the nations of the world we must make up the smallness of our numbers by increasing the intellectual force of the individual.” Gladstone noted that the war was “a marked triumph to the cause of systematic popular education.” By the end of the nineteenth century, England had comprehensive, free elementary education, and annually spent nearly as much on it as it did the Navy—a state of affairs that would have shocked anyone a hundred years earlier.
The United States was more complicated, as always, with regional patterns dictated in large part by race. Still, colonial New England had very likely been the most literate region on Earth, and Massachusetts, which had forms of state-sponsored schooling going back to the 1640s, imposed the first compulsory education law in the nation in 1852. Sixteen states had followed by 1885, but it was not until 1918 that the rest had too. The last was Mississippi, with its quasi-feudal economy and black population under debt peonage, discouraging modern education until the last possible moment. As Anthony Trollope described in 1880, “The influxions of [immigrants] are so rapid, that every ten years the nature of the people is changed.” The American elite wanted to use education on its newcomer population as Europeans did on their imperial subjects.
The period roughly spanning 1890 to 1914 was, in many ways, the high point of mass literate culture. In America, locally produced literature was only beginning to displace British writing to form a national canon. “For the first time in history,” per Adrian Johns, “it was really true that print—and therefore reading—had become a defining component of a nation’s everyday life.” In Europe, as H. G. Wells put it, “The greater gulf that had divided the world hitherto into the readers and the non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible difference in educational levels.” Common English soldiers went into the trenches of World War I carrying The Oxford Book of English Verse, having been state-schooled, and then attended workingmen’s institutes and read the classics in the Everyman’s Library.
The traditionally educated were not happy about this. Nietzsche’s condemnation of mass literacy, that “everyone being allowed to learn to read ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking,” was popular from socialists to reactionaries. Aldous Huxley spoke for many when he said, “Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.” Modernist literature, as John Carey explained in The Intellectuals & The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, was created as a form of elite expression that would be impenetrable to the newly literate masses. The masses would not read the classic literature and intellectual works of nonfiction that cultural elites of capitalist society wanted them to read. And not just the cultural elites: the Social Democratic Party in Germany was dismayed that the extensive library system it set up was being used mostly for pulp fiction. The capitalists themselves were more divided. While the Krupps in Germany created a sixty-one-thousand-volume library for their employees and stocked it with improving works, many were more relaxed: they just wanted workers to read what was profitable for the capitalist. It was no coincidence that this was also the great age of the popular newspaper, technologically enabled by the telegraph, and economically by the mass-reading public. The cultural elites hated this too. Nietzsche said that the rabble “vomit their bile and call it a newspaper,” while even decades into the twentieth century, the leading British literary critic F. R. Leavis spoke in horror of “films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction—all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.”
The Decline of Western Civilization
What is odd is that many of the greatest critics of the rise of electronic media and the depreciation of literacy also see this as a period of decline. Postman thought the downturn in literature began with the telegraph and its child, the mass newspaper. “Its language was the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal,” he writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death. “News took the form of slogans . . . to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message has no connection to that which preceded or followed it.” And it was full of ads! This looks different forty years later, on the other side of the collapse of the newspaper and print-advertising industries. Jokes now abound that classified ads were a load-bearing pillar of democracy, and the decline of the daily newspaper has, in fact, sped up to frightening speed the descent into a discontinuous and deathly information environment. Partly this is due to eternal slippage in this discourse between mass literacy and elite cultural literacy, between the question of whether people were simply capable of using an almanac for farming or whether they could and would consume complex prose (something this article is guilty of too, perhaps). But it is largely due to the fact that most people who write about this are elitists themselves: Postman frames his book around the insights of Huxley, who believed mass education led to cultural stupidity.
It’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.
One-third of all newspapers in America closed between 2004 and 2025. When newspapers close, local businesses commit more legal violations, local government borrowing costs grow because of decreased public scrutiny of spending decisions, people vote less, and what is inaccurately referred to as “political polarization” increases as social isolation grows and feelings of community diminish. In the first episode of The Sopranos, Tony’s famous monologue about feeling like everything is in decline is overlaid with footage of him getting his daily newspaper, Newark’s Star-Ledger. The Star-Ledger ceased all print operations in February. In The Wire, stevedore and union secretary-treasurer Frank Sobotka mourns the loss of mid-century prosperity as he utters the famous line, “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” Sobotka is a subscriber to the Baltimore Sun, which barely hangs on today, with a fraction of the journalists and sections it used to have. Neither Tony nor Frank’s failsons are readers, and their futures turn out to be poorer and more quotidian, if not outright bleaker. It doesn’t make sense in those fictional universes, or in our real one, to understand the introduction of the newspaper as a backward step in literate culture—it was a form of literacy that appealed to non-elite readers and provided them with information as well as entertainment. In many ways, the current era of Trump results from the fact that it’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.
If the period from the 1880s into the early twentieth century was a golden age of reading, it was one by default: there was no other mass form of entertainment. With the rise of radio—which, being spoken from written scripts, was initially and forlornly hoped to be a literacy-enhancing medium—and then television, everything changed. The latter replaced print as, in the words of Postman, the “paradigm for our conception of public information.” That paradigm was very stupid. Reading and library usage immediately dipped as television spread widely in the 1950s. However, there was a countervailing cultural force: the Cold War and competition with the Soviets. The government invested in K–12 education and a vast expansion of higher education because after Sputnik, as the historian Lawrence Samuel explains in Literacy in America, “the news that college students read few books and even fewer after they graduate (confirmed by Gallup polls) was thus disturbing, leading to the arguable conclusion that young people weren’t as smart as they used to be (and not as smart as their Russian counterparts).” The next fifty years saw the government continually intervening in education, successfully or not, to counter perceived (and actual) American education deficiencies compared with the Russians, then the Europeans and the Japanese, and finally the Chinese. Reading held on despite the seductions of television (and then the internet 1.0), if eclipsed as the main medium. The number of daily newspapers in America plunged from the high of 2,500 in 1910 to 1,750 in 1945, but then a small decline stabilized as late as 1985, when there were 1,676. By 2000, there were 1,480. At the last count, in 2024, the number barely broke four digits: 1,033. Many newspapers are troubled for both finances and readership, and all depend on older readers.
Critics of television were right, and they were there almost from the beginning. President Kennedy’s FCC chair, Newton Minow, famously declared in 1961 that television was
a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, the summa of television critique published twenty-four years later, Postman argues that serious television is an impossibility and, to the extent places like PBS try, no one watches it. Unlike print, which “encourages rationality,” television can produce only entertainment with no intertextuality, whether they be sitcoms or “news” shows. Commercials were the modal form of the medium, and politics were reshaped in the soap ad’s image. For Postman, this led to the election of Ronald Reagan and the fact that “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” People who read the news were substantially more informed than those who spent the same amount of time watching it. If reading continually reteaches you how to think, television is a perpetual anesthetic. Philosophy, history, complex thought are all impossible on the tube: “Its form works against the content.”
Some of Postman’s views place the work very much in 1985. Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican from New York who supported civil rights, called for Medicare for all in 1970, and sponsored the War Powers Resolution, is now lamented as one of the few from a vanished species of smart, good politicians. For Postman, Javits was the apotheosis of the empty television-commercial politician with nothing to say. Things can always get worse.
With television firmly in place, and the internet rising in the 1990s, some began to perceive that the Gutenberg era of print was historically determined and that the conditions that caused it were coming to an end. Sven Birkerts’s 1994 The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age puts it thus:
Suddenly it feels like everything is poised for change; the slower world that many of us grew up with dwindles in the rearview mirror. The stable hierarchies of the printed page—one of the defining norms of that world—are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits.
Later, he continues:
Visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.
Some of Birkerts’s predictions, like that facts would supplant fiction, turned out to be wildly untrue. But he saw to the core of what was coming:
We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by Milton, a play by Shakespeare—one can hardly find the text among the explanatory notes nowadays. . . . As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes—which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present—our perception of history will inevitably alter.
Moving further from his present into our future, Birkerts predicted that
the isolated reader may remain, but the audience is gone and is not likely to reappear. And this loss impinges heavily, very heavily, on the quality of our cultural life. It assures that there will be a sharp split between extremes—between an academic elite and a mass population—with no mediating center.
Two decades after Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, I found Jim Paul’s neglected 1996 fiction, Medieval in LA, in the used section of Powell’s. Interspersing textual selections from and about the Middle Ages with accounts of a creative professional visiting Los Angeles, the book held that we were already reentering a medieval world of image mysteries. Around the same time, I noticed a cash register at a fast-food restaurant that used pictograms instead of text. As we entered the early Trump years, with the rise and rise of short-form video, I started hearing from virtually every academic I knew that their students’ ability to read anything longer than a few pages was disappearing.
“The isolated reader may remain, but the audience is gone and is not likely to reappear.”
Statistics have gotten only grimmer. Last year, the average American spent 0.28 hours per day reading, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is down slightly from 2016, along with socializing and TV watching. A 2023 survey says 54 percent of Americans read one or more books a year. Most are genre books, romantasy being the only source of growth in reading. “Video now accounts for 58.8% of average time spent per day with social networks, up from 48.0% in 2021,” writes Audrey Schomer in Variety. TikTok users spend the most time with their app, with an average of 2.48 hours day in 2024; Instagram users manage 2.46. For The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch notes, “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Ong was wrong that secondary orality would remain yoked to literacy. While literacy remains a mass phenomenon, the number of readers and the quality of what they read are declining. At the same time, while memory is traditionally the organizing principle of orality, those immersed in its second coming have seen their faculties of recall replaced by data centers, leaving them bereft of meaningful culture of either the print or oral variety.
中国第一
In 2007, I was in Shanghai at a dinner party arranged by a relative. Many of the attendees were the American heads of their U.S. companies’ Chinese operations. It was a moment of nearly euphoric optimism. A huge new market had opened, money was flowing in a torrent, and there was no need to worry about Chinese competition. The executives were unanimous: China’s system of rote education produced extremely technically competent workers, but the intellectual and scientific creativity nurtured by our free-inquiry system of education meant we would always dominate the locals. Today, China is home to eight of the top-ten institutions on Nature’s list of rankings of research universities (the United States just defunded the first on the list, Harvard) and has overtaken America in every industry, from electric cars to agricultural machinery. In ten key industrial sectors, China leads in seven and America in three. What happened?
So many factors are beyond the scope of this essay, ranging from population changes to the successful Chinese bet on “producerism” against our financialized economy, but one is that China believes in education and literacy more than we do. This is clear just in basic literacy, where it has achieved a 97 percent rate; recently, the U.S. equivalent has been estimated at as low as 79 percent. While U.S. higher education has been slowly strangled by declining state subsidies and increasing reliance on tuition loans, China poured money into education. The racist assumption that the Chinese could not be creative turned out to be very, very wrong.
The racist assumption that the Chinese could not be creative turned out to be very, very wrong.
And because China is ruled by an ostensibly Marxist cadre, the country has an ability to restrict electronic opiates far beyond anything an American could imagine. In 2019, China limited under-eighteen-year-olds to ninety minutes of video games a day. In 2021, this was limited to one hour on Fridays, weekends, and holidays, between 8 and 9 p.m. Similar restrictions time-limit youngsters from spending more than 2.48 hours a day on scrolling video. While evasion is widespread, the positive effects of restriction compared with the uncontrolled American system are incalculable. The addictive nature of smartphones is a very serious problem contributing to the decline of literacy, but the phones exist in a social context and not the other way around. In global polling, the United States is among the most pessimistic countries about the effects of AI. The 2025 AI Index Report states that only 34 percent of Americans are excited for the AI future. China is the most excited, with 80 percent. The lived experience of Chinese people is that the government will restrain the harmful effects of technology and living standards will rise, so they are not afraid. Americans who have watched as Silicon Valley runs rampant and good jobs disappear are rightly afraid. While Chinese schools are teaching students about AI’s impact on society—risks and biases in addition to basic learning—American schools are rushing headlong into serving AI slop as the only version of education children receive. Astonishingly, in 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English declared, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” AI huckster-cum-revolutionary and ChatGPT front man Sam Altman says, “A kid born today will never be smarter than AI, ever.” His intention is to attract more investment into his company by the illusory promise of “PhD-level” AI, but he may be right despite himself: it is not that AI is reaching “general intelligence” but that children are not attaining it.
For it is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated. For the first time in centuries, the elite no longer feel they need educated workers and soldiers to uphold and reproduce the system. National-security strategies, from Biden to Trump, are increasingly based on the idea that we can achieve the (unachievable) goal of “artificial general intelligence” in a short number of years and thus dominate China going forward. To tech-credulous military elites (and the Silicon Valley companies profiting off them), it will not matter if the junior-officer class can’t understand Clausewitz; battlefield AI will tell them which commands to give a platoon. As for the economy, in the words of fat cat Elijah Clark, “As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise.” As billboards recently spotted in San Francisco and New York City say: stop hiring humans.
American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking. The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought; with the unemployed illiterate and addicted to screens, they are unlikely to be politicized and join a socialist campaign. Theodor Adorno noted in the 1940s that when bourgeois liberalism is replaced by fascism, so, too, is literate culture. Some of the American elite are embracing idiocy themselves. Students at Columbia say they don’t know anyone who doesn’t use AI to cheat. A college student in Utah told Intelligencer, “I spend so much time on TikTok, hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes twelve.” Why go to college when you don’t benefit from any of your courses? To find the two helpmeets you need as a modern man: “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” We used to make shit in this country.
Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest. Poor kids spend an extra two hours on the black mirror every day, while rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed, as Mary Harrington recently explained in the New York Times. Controlling the media effect is possible even in America; we have simply reduced it to a class privilege. I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.
Americans are back in Eco’s “symbolic forest peopled with mysterious presences,” where we struggle to distinguish reality from fiction in the images put in front of us. (Per the subhead of a New York Times article from this year about ChatGPT driving people into madness: “Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems.”) Oral culture is, again, aggregative instead of analytical, dispositionally traditionalist, and homeostatic, with no objective distance. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential. “Let’s Go Brandon” is a modern, stupider, and less verbally intelligent form of Cockney rhyming slang. The audio of a black American father crying “My Shayla” about his daughter during a custody dispute becomes the background to fan edits of Barron Trump as a hot, fuckable heir to his father. The NPR headline “Please don’t cook chicken in NyQuil, the FDA asks TikTok users” speaks eloquently to the new mysterious presences in our social life. We are not only a long way from the rationality of print but pretty damn far from the Homeric epithet. This is the world Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg want you to live in, so that their power cannot be resisted.
Meanwhile, have you seen this TikTok video about Andor?