Celina101 (link Below), channels Huxley perfectly: we didn't need book-burners because we've built a world where fewer and fewer people want to read one. The printing press didn't just spread knowledge — it rewired brains for linear thought, sustained attention, complex syntax, and building civilisations on fixed facts. Now the algorithm has reverse-engineered us back toward emotional, fragmentary, dopamine-driven "secondary orality." Skimming wins. Depth loses. And the stats in the piece are grim: plummeting pleasure reading, college kids bewildered by full books, vocabulary collapse even among the educated.
The Fragile Scaffold
Modernity rode the Gutenberg wave: standardised texts enabled the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, democracy's messy deliberations, long novels that train empathy, and laws that outlast rulers. Deep reading isn't natural — it's a high-maintenance neurological upgrade. Lose the practice, and the upgrade decays. We're trading the "typographic man" (McLuhan) for the scrolling primate. Professors at elite schools report students who aced high school without finishing a single book cover-to-cover. That's not adaptation; that's atrophy.
One Carrington event and it's midnight. A massive solar storm like 1859's could fry satellites, grids, and the entire digital edifice. No more cloud backups, no TikTok lifelines, no AI summarising everything. Suddenly we'd need paper, memory, and the ability to sit with a text for hours. But if generations have trained their brains on 15-second clips and keyword skims? The libraries become mausoleums. Oral culture might surge — tribal, mnemonic, emotionally charged — but without the literate backbone, complex institutions falter. History preserved in epic poetry is rich, but try encoding particle physics or constitutional nuance that way at scale.
Not Quite Doomsday (Yet)
Counterpoints exist. Global literacy rates are historically high; some read more nonfiction or long-form online. AI could become a bridge — summarizing, then tempting deeper dives. Visual/multimedia intelligence has upsides (pattern recognition, rapid synthesis). Yet the core warning holds: when the default mode is fragmented and reactive, we lose the patience for truth-seeking over vibes, evidence over narrative, subtlety over virality. The chattering class from your last link, snatching wine amid chaos, embodies the vibe, opportunistic, surface-level, performative even in crisis.
This pairs darkly with Wine-Gate: elites who can't (or won't) sustain attention lecture the rest of us while their own cognitive habits erode. A post-literate world doesn't ban ideas, it drowns them in irrelevance, exactly as Huxley feared. We adore the distractions undoing us.
What Now?
Reclaim the technology that built us. Read physical books. Assign whole ones to kids. Protect attention like the scarce resource it is. Teach deep reading as deliberate practice, not optional hobby. If (when) the grid blinks out, the prepared mind — the one that can sit with complexity — will be the real power source.
One solar hiccup shouldn't reset us to pre-modern midnight. But if we've already uninstalled the software of civilisation... well, pass the (liberated) wine and a dog-eared copy of Brave New World. At least some of us will still know how to finish reading it.
https://celina101.substack.com/p/are-we-in-a-post-literate-society