The millennial midlife piece got a response I didn’t expect, which was fun. I still owe a lot of those comments a reply, and it probably deserves a follow up in a year or so. It also kicked loose a whole litany of things we’ve been circling at ADIN that I never had the will to write out in my own voice, but I think I’ll start now!
I’ve been thinking about this James Marriott piece, “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” which was published over a year ago. It’s definitely worth a read, and it’s a fair framing of what is happening around us. He basically notes that three centuries after a reading boom lit up the Enlightenment, science, capitalism, and mass democracy, the smartphone is quietly unwinding it.
I feel like his diagnosis is correct and I want to drag it further back into history and then walk it forward. The thing I can’t stop thinking about is the fact that the oral world isn’t quiet, it’s louder than anything print ever produced. It is worth noting AI drops the cost of producing that flood to zero. You can already see it in politics with posting strategy (the Spencer Pratt videos, etc.) and the politics of memeing through video (this always reminds me of this classic book).
If you read the millennial piece, this piece is related. That one was about what happens to the body when the feed dies and appetite gets medicated. This one is about what happens to cognition when the feed dies and reading gets delegated. Drew Austin‘s line about the internet eating the city’s text, and now AI eating the internet’s text until the page becomes wallpaper leans into both.
Pre-printing press days
I went down a GPT rabbit hole on life before the printing press. Before mass knowledge transfer from reading, the world was probably pretty weird.
It’s hard to imagine but literally, for most of human history the average person couldn’t read, and it barely mattered, because there was almost nothing to read. Knowledge lived in people’s heads and mouths. Marriott leans on Walter Ong, who wrote the book on how that world thought (Orality and Literacy), and once you see how an oral culture handles truth, you can’t unsee it in the social feed. People trusted people, because there was nothing to check against. A rumor and a fact were indistinguishable (nothing was sourced, nothing was timestamped) so you verified socially (do I trust this guy?) and through reputation. Your name was your credit score, because there were no records (China is running the modern version of this right now, just with a database). Ong calls oral memory “homeostatic” meaning that it keeps what’s useful and drops the rest.
In an oral world, truth has to be catchy or it dies, and the way you win is repetition and volume. It reminds me of Trump’s nickname tactics: “Sleepy Joe,” “Pocahontas,” the list goes on. My dad used to say something like it takes three repetitions to convince a dumb person and ten to convince a thinker, the smarter the mind, the longer it resists, but even so it eventually sticks.
You can feel it in what history preserved, like proverbs, rhymes, songs. Accuracy was optional, memorability was the whole game. Persuasion is rhetoric and delivery, which means saying it louder and more often than the other guy was winning.
What the printing press actually did
The printing press showed up and inverted our world. Anyone could read scripture, so the Church lost its interpretation monopoly (the Reformation). Findings could be printed identically, stacked, and checked, so knowledge got cumulative (modern science). The silent solo reader grew an interior self (McLuhan). Print in your own language let strangers feel like one people (Anderson’s imagined communities).
The speed flip was violent too. I was listening to the Dwarkesh pod with Ada Palmer (the Renaissance historian, really really good nuggets in there - I would listen) and it had me thinking about how fast this actually moved. Her detail that stuck with me: Luther’s 95 Theses were in print in London seventeen days after Wittenberg, while people still alive remembered expert scribes taking six months to make a single book. The same people, holding both memories, the way we (elder millenials) may remember dial up.
Reading didn’t just spread information, it changed how people could process it. You could pin a claim down and reread it at your own pace. You could stack two findings and notice they contradict (this is triggering me from my law school days lol). For 500 years we’ve lived inside a civilization built on reading, literal legal contracts and social contracts, all via text. Accountability is a record technology, though it only works if someone reads the record.
Back to law school (property law, specifically), M.T. Clanchy, a medievalist, wrote a whole book about England between 1066 and roughly 1300 called From Memory to Written Record, tracking the shift where trust migrated off the living person and onto the document. Before it, a land claim was settled by a man’s sworn oath and the memory of elders who had walked the boundary as boys. After it, you needed the charter, the seal, the dated parchment. That migration is the foundation under everything we call “modern” and my feeling now is the migration that’s now running in reverse.
So the world you think of as “just normal,” evidence beats authority, you can check, the past is fixed, you can hold people to their word, is not the human baseline.
Post-literate is just pre-literate
Everyone is writing about literacy rates right now… these are ones I came across recently (I think via Axios?). American adults’ literacy scores dropped 12 points between 2017 and 2023. The share at the bottom (people who can read the words on a benefits form and still can’t tell you what to do with it) went from 19% to 28%. The top readers held up, but the bottom fell out and middle hollowed. The kids’ numbers say the same thing. I feel like you could argue there is a “K shape” reading curve too.
Marriott reads this as decline (rightfully so) as a result of attention span collapsing. I agree in large part, but I don’t think it’s mostly decline, I think it’s substitution. We got a button that reads for us, and we’re mashing it. The tell isn’t kids skipping the reading, it’s kids feeding the reading to a model and asking what it said.
You can watch the substitution happen in the format data. The share of US adults reading print fell from 72% in 2011 to 64% in late 2025, while audiobooks more than doubled over the same stretch (11% to 26%) and ebooks climbed from 17% to 31% (all Pew). People didn’t stop consuming books, they just listen to them now.
We’re not landing in some novel future, we’re falling back into the oldest setting there is, the world made of mouths, and the rules of truth are reverting with it. Marriott notes this too, that the world after print starts to resemble the world before print. I just want to take that literally.
Ong called radio and TV “secondary orality,” a return to the spoken and communal, but resting on a literate substrate, everyone still a reader underneath. What we have now is orality with the literate floor dissolving out from under it. The funny thing though now is that people are probably reading more raw text per day than any humans in history (I feel like all I do is read). But the reading is tweets, captions, chats, headlines (the social feed). What’s collapsing is deep reading, the slow, sequential, checkable kind, and what’s replacing it is a torrent of shallow text that behaves exactly like speech. Fast, catchy, unsearchable in practice, trusted because of who posted it rather than because anyone checked. We’re not sliding out of text. We’re sliding out of the discipline text made possible, and importing the oral ruleset to fill the gap.
And the medium makes it inevitable, which is why I keep saying verbal and not just audio. The new formats, the podcast, the clip, the voice note, the livestream, aren’t argument mediums, they’re message hammering mediums. Volume and repetition are the format. I feel like TBPN actually did a good job with this.
A person speaks around 150 words a minute and reads two to three times that. A society taking its inputs by ear and by video is moving maybe half the information per hour, with worse compression of anything abstract. The medium rewards exactly what oral culture always rewarded and literate culture suppressed. “Flood the zone with shit.” Bannon said it to Michael Lewis in 2016 like it was an invention, but it’s the oldest persuasion technology on earth. Produce so much that no one can check anything, and once no one can check, you’re back in the oral world, where the loudest, most repeated, most emotionally pitched claim is simply what’s true.
AI is an accelerant. It was sold to us as the ultimate literacy machine, since it reads everything, reasons, summarizes. Its actual effect is to make producing the flood free. There’s a name for the imbalance, Brandolini’s law, the bullshit asymmetry principle:
That ratio was survivable when producing nonsense still cost something. If you drive the production cost to zero, the asymmetry goes vertical. To be clear, this future is not Idiocracy (best movie ever). Idiocracy is quiet and dumb. This is loud and the Dark Ages on speed, with authority back in people (meaning back in a few gatekeepers), information emotional and repetitive and infinite, and a widening gap between the few who own the medium and the many who depend on it.
Counter: People are actually reading though!!!!
There are plenty of stats that say reading is “so back,” and for the benefit of everyone reading this, here they are. Barnes & Noble opened 67 stores in 2025, its best year in over a decade, and may IPO apparently. Independent bookstores are multiplying, ABA membership is climbing. A callback to the millennial piece: Bible sales just hit a 21 year high. BookTok is minting bestsellers. (Thanks Shawn for sharing a lot of these stats with me.)
Pew has asked Americans the same question since 2011, and the share who’ve read a book in any format has barely moved.
What is booming is romance, romantasy, Bible, the celebrity book club, discovery routed through TikTok and a trusted face, the bookstore reborn as a “third space” you visit to belong.
That’s not deep reading reasserting itself as how a society thinks.
That’s reading becoming an identity, premium, communal, aesthetic. My partner, Daniel Keller, at ADIN sent a chart that captured it perfectly: books are becoming vinyl.
Also side bar, but the bookstore is thriving for the same reason the run club and the supper club are thriving in the other piece. It’s somewhere to belong after the feed went ambient.
What happens next…
I can’t help running up the chain: first, second, third, fourth order effects. I was obsessed with this when GLP-1s first hit (the downstream effects like divorce rates dipping, for example are always the fascinating part to me). So… what happens when shallow reading wins and oral rules dominate?
Obviously, people read less and delegate more. The second order, which we’ve been watching manifest a lot lately, is that authority deinstitutionalizes and deexpertizes (I made that word up). The point is, you don’t trust the Times, you trust a podcaster you’ve grown to respect and get to know. This trend isn’t new, we know this.
More interesting though is that the falsifiable claim dies. When nobody reads the record, contradiction stops costing anything. The confident performer beats the correct expert every single time. The midwit still annotating the PDF by hand loses to the guy with better delivery and a louder feed and he loses even when he’s right, which he can no longer demonstrate, because demonstrating required a reader. I made the below (I think I need one of these for every piece now).
The other thing, which is related: accountability doesn’t break because the receipts get destroyed. It breaks because nobody reads them (Aldous Huxley warned us against this). A contract no one opens, a disclosure no one parses, a 47 page agreement an agent skims and accepts on your behalf. The whole apparatus of modern law runs on the premise that you can be put on notice in writing, the disclosure, the terms of service, the clause you “agree” to. When people can’t or won’t read the paragraph, notice is fiction. The past is editable again, and not only because of deepfakes, but because no one’s holding the original to compare against. We will have more archive than any civilization in history and it will constrain us less than any of them, because an archive nobody opens is just cosplaying.
In a literate world, expertise was mastery of a body of text. In an oral world, it’s the ability to perform authority out loud, and those aren’t the same people. The quiet ones who know lose the room to the loud ones who sound like they do. Once the rules are too dense to read and an agent handles compliance for you, the quiet endpoint is law tuned to you personally, priced by algorithm to your risk score the way insurance and credit and content moderation already are. Run that out and “the same law for everyone, knowable by everyone” stops being a coherent thing to even ask for.
Another thing I see coming is that the polity reorganizes around the new physics, and a new “clerical class” (or elite) quietly forms. A population that runs the world through agents and clips is not the electorate that print built. You can’t partially trust a source by spot-checking it (you either trust the person or you don’t) so you get hard epistemic tribes, total allegiance, no shared text to argue over. Under that, a small group that can still operate the record becomes a new priesthood. Ironically, they are the ones who kept reading. They’ll sit between the unreading many and the institutional text, trusted the way the medieval clerk was trusted: completely, and uncheckably. I feel like this sounds like psycho conspiracy, so it’s not neccsiarily intended to be leading or suggest manipulation, more that the K shape of those who read and those who do not will sharpen with those that do dictating to those who do not. See the below…
What to look for in the new world
The new scribe. Every text based unreadable system (think: insurance, benefits, taxes, healthcare paperwork, legal intake, loan terms, government forms) becomes a market for software that says I’ll handle this for you. Everyone will need a vertical agent that reads the institutional text and produces an action. The reason this is the biggest category isn’t the summarizing. It’s the trust transfer. The winner doesn’t just read the document, it inherits the priest’s chair. It becomes the thing you believe instead of reading. That’s a far deeper moat than “good summaries,” and a far scarier one. To be honest, after six months of wedding planning with the LLM, I was giving so much trust to contract negotiations.
Proof. The more the source goes unread, the more someone has to vouch for the summary, the clip, the avatar, the agent’s action. Questions that people will ask are “did this person actually say this?” “did the agent act within policy?” “is this summary faithful?” I think this is bigger than it looks, precisely because the flood of information makes it structurally necessary.
Literacy as a positional “good.” The second reading stops being universal, it becomes a sorting mechanism, and anxious parents will pay anything to keep their kid on the right side of it. This isn’t nostalgia publishing. It’s AI-powered remediation, the reading coach, the tutor — reading as a luxury skill, closer to Latin than to a subject. It already exists too, Mentava charges $500 a month to get two to four year olds reading. Waitlisted, tutor-priced, marketed to exactly the cohort from my millennial piece. It’s the same optimization instinct that built the protein/Hyrox economy, aimed at the kid’s cognition instead of the millennials deadlift. Same willingness to pay for proof-of-work that’s getting scarce.
Which means literacy barbells, the same way everything in the millennial piece did. One end is loud optimization: remediation apps, reading coaches, tutoring priced like a longevity protocol, proteinmaxxing for the kid’s brain. The other end is quiet and premium. Deep reading doesn’t die it goes the way vinyl did. Vinyl never beat streaming on convenience or scale… it survived by becoming identity coded, collector wrapped, the format you buy because it’s effortful. I’ve seen books follow here… BookTok turning reading into an aesthetic, invite-only book clubs, reading retreats (sad). The exact quiet-end playbook, pointed at the page. Not “books die.” Books become vinyl.
And notice what the barbell does to the class line. It stops being mostly about income and starts being about attention: who can still sit with a hard page for an hour and who can’t. The new underclass is defined as much by attention capture as by money, and that’s a harder gap to close.
Flood tooling and flood armor. The tools that let you flood the zone (creator infrastructure, repetition machines, the apparatus of hammering one point across every channel at once), and the tools that protect you from being flooded (filters, provenance, the agent that reads the other agents).
I owe the other side more thought, because the best version of it comes from Palmer, the same Dwarkesh episode from earlier sent me to her essay “We are an information revolution species”, and between the two she basically prosecutes the case against this entire piece. Her argument is that we’ve been living inside an information revolution for twenty generations. Paper, woodblocks, movable type, pamphlets, telegraph, radio, TV. None of them arrived all at once. On the pod she walks through how print took forty years to even be economically sustainable (Gutenberg went broke, so did the bank that foreclosed on him), and then kept hitting Europe with successive bangs for 150 years, pamphlets were print’s social media, the newspaper was another app on the same platform. Her point is that the digital revolution is moving on roughly the same timescale, which means we’re judging it from somewhere around the 1490s of it, which is pretty early.
Applied to everything I wrote above, her case goes something like this. Every one of those revolutions produced this exact panic. Every new tool made fake news more plausible, and every time, people learned to arm themselves against it. The pamphlet wars of the 1520s were a flood too (disorienting, unfalsifiable) and what came out the other side wasn’t a dark age, it was footnotes, citations, journalism, peer review. The armor showed up, usually a generation or so behind the weapon. She’d also say across twenty generations of info revolutions, the gatekeepers lost every time. For example, print broke the Church and radio broke print, the internet broke broadcast. On her reading, AI is the democratization of making, soon a movie or a game is no harder to produce than a college essay, and mourning the old methods is what scribes did about the printing press, right before the world got better books.
I want to steelman this because twenty generations of pattern is genuinely hard to argue with, and she knows the print revolution better than I ever will and to be honest, I actually think she is right. The pamphlet flood was survivable because it minted readers faster than it minted lies, every pamphlet war produced people who could read the counter-pamphlet. Palmer’s pattern assumes the threat and the defense ride the same trendline, and for five hundred years they did. This time, I’m not fully sure they do. The flood doesn’t create readers anymore, it replaces them. This is the first information revolution where the armor and the thing dissolving are the same thing, and nobody has ever run that experiment before.
Open tabs
The electorate nobody has modeled. A population that runs the world through agents and clips instead of text is a different kind of polity, and I don’t think anyone has sat down and modeled what that does to elections.
Does the interior self thin out? McLuhan’s claim was that silent solitary reading grew the introspective individual. If that collapses, does the inward self go with it? Does selfhood reexternalize (more performed, more crowd-shaped)? Our new clergy is the influencer and the model. (I still half-think the endgame there is some kind of AI god)
Religion comes back as infrastructure, not residue. Sola Scriptura (the whole Protestant move) is downstream of literacy. Pull literacy back out and you revert to the older pattern: liturgy, icon, embodied repetition, the community as the unit of meaning instead of the solitary reader. You can already see the early shape of it in the trad-Catholic and Orthodox pull among young men, and in how ritualized fandom and politics have gotten. Oral cultures don’t just talk differently, they bind differently.
The school system inverts. Mass literacy was the entire ideological core of modern schooling. If reading stops being the universal output, school quietly stops being a leveling machine and becomes a sorting one. Push that out a few decades and you get the pre 1900 setup, a small classical humanist track training the people who will still read, and a large vocational and therapeutic track training everyone else for an economy where reading is delegated.
If the agents get good enough, the reason to ever climb back up the ladder weakens for everyone, including the 90th percentile. The positional good erodes from the top, not just the bottom. The last group still operating in text decides it isn’t worth it either. And if that happens, the window I’m describing (the literate elite quietly running things) isn’t a phase, it becomes the floor.
A real shame. Reading was humanity's superpower, enabling iterative progress by transmitting knowledge and wisdom across generations. Oral storytelling and AI are much more temporal.
I'm long “predictable human folly” over the coming decades.
In China, 1,000 years, but yes