I. Post-Literacy
“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person.” — Epictetus
While frying on a beach in Italy, I read Maryanne Wolf’s The Proust and the Squid. In it, she argues that humans were never meant to read.
Reading is dying
In a study of 236,000 American adults, only 2% read to a child on a given day. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8% to 29%.
And yet, paradoxically, everyone is reading more words than ever before. Between emails, texts, LinkedIn posts, and Reddit comments, the average person consumes ~100,000 words of information per day.
But the kind of reading we’re doing is eroding our ability to devote sustained attention to longer written works. Nearly 30% of American adults cannot make inferences from a multipage text. In a national test only 35% of high school seniors were proficient at core reading skills like evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.
The decline of reading is even hitting elite universities. As one professor put it, “Most of our students are functionally illiterate, unable to read and comprehend adult novels.”
The National Endowment for the Arts found that less than half of all adults read a book in the last year. A separate study by the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.
Even the books people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than a century ago. That’s why I wrote this essay with short sentences.
This widespread shift is being called a literacy crisis. It was prophesied half a century ago by Walter Ong, and is finally coming to fruition.
Reading first emerged 6,000 years ago when the ancient Mesopotamians repurposed regions of their brain reserved for speech and object recognition. They used pictorial symbols that resembled familiar objects — like animals, grain, or tools. Readers processed those using the brain’s existing object-recognition system.
If this is confusing, imagine you get plucked out of your desk job in 2026 A.D. and plopped into 3,500 B.C.E.
The same part of the brain responsible for knowing the difference between a gazelle and a lion was also responsible for identifying pictorial symbols.
Over time the brain strengthened connections between the visual mark, known object, and spoken word. When that became automatic, it freed up the human brain to think deeply about more abstract ideas.
Unlike the oral tradition, writing outlives the person who conveyed that knowledge. You can return to a text and read it deeply to achieve new intellectual breakthroughs.
This made writing a great mental scaffolding to free up brain space to develop new ideas. (It’s no coincidence that Aristotle was a master of the Greek alphabet and prolific writer.)
As literacy spread, it contributed to political revolution, including the formation of the United States. The Founding Fathers published opinion pieces to stoke anti-British sentiment among the colonists.1 Thomas Jefferson was selected to write the Declaration of Independence because, in John Adams’ words: “You can write ten times better than I can.” The pen was indeed mightier than the sword. But is it still?
We’re living in a post-literate society
In 1962, Marshall McLuhan had the prescient prediction that we’d become what he called “post-literate.” Coined in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan used the term to describe a cultural shift where visual media replaces the print word.
When he made this prediction, 90% of homes had a television compared to 9% a decade earlier. Rather than gathering around a radio, nearly every American living room couch faces the TV — today most attention is captured by mobile devices.
When the television came onto the scene in the 1950s, a wave of new media had entered American culture, hijacking our attention in the process. Thankfully, there was a healthy amount of friction with early TV. Television programs aired at specific times, limiting how much people could watch.
High-speed internet enabled unlimited consumption with virtually zero friction. Short-form video further accelerated that trend. We spend more time behind screens than ever, with goldfish attention spans. Any moment of free time got gobbled up by screen time. Leisure time became synonymous with screen time and one TikTok cycled into the next in a carousel of unlimited content.
Reading is a mental workout
Reading is a workout for the attention span. If you fill your time with short-form videos instead of books, your ability to focus atrophies. According to Gloria Mark, a psychologist at UC Irvine, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes in 2004. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds. Five years ago, it fell to about 47 seconds. Raw dogging a 7-hour flight is the ultimate act of asceticism.
The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new ideas. Like weightlifting, eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging as your skill rises to the challenge. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.
When people do read, they’re doing so less deeply and absorbing less information — especially because of the tantalizing glowing allure of your smartphone. Due to attention residue, it takes 20+ minutes to fully regain your focus after shifting to something else. Even though it’s hard to do, devoting single-minded focus to read deeply is what helps you fully absorb what you’re reading.
The mere presence of your smartphone reduces your available cognitive capacity.
Video is passive consumption
Your brain has an incredible ability to adapt to the stimulus it receives. When you do anything, your brain rewires neural connections in a phenomenon called neuroplasticity. This changing of the brain expands your ability to become better at what you were practicing. What happens when you replace reading with scrolling?
When watching animated videos, children used the region of the brain associated with imagination half as much as they did when looking at static illustrations while listening to an audio recording. Children also used their cerebellum — part of the brain associated with learning—less when watching a video.
Although video contains more information than text, it doesn’t stimulate deeper thinking quite the same way reading does. Video thrusts so much information upon you at once, making it hard to focus deeply on any one thing — a key component of critical thinking. It’s rare to find someone willing to pause, rewind, and deeply understand a single video versus just watching it play through in its entirety.
Critical thinking is declining
Critical thinking ability in adults is declining too.
American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, reason effectively, and analyze patterns declined from 2006 to 2018. American adults also tend to have a smaller vocabulary than those with an equivalent level of education did half a century ago. Recent studies suggest that the Flynn effect — the steady rise in IQ between generations since the 1930s — has reversed over the past two decades coinciding with the start of the social media era.
Consider, for example, a recent paper published in the journal Intelligence that studied IQ scores over time in an American population. It found a steady decline in almost every intelligence metric studied as part of a 35-item assessment.
Here’s a chart that shows these declines broken out by education level:
Erik J Larson, a Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project at Discovery Institute, finds that:
“…as we construct a world that increasingly rewards computational thinking, we risk further diminishing the very aspects of intelligence that make us uniquely human. The Reverse Flynn Effect may have started as an academic curiosity, but I think it’s more of a modern warning. If we continue down this path, we may create a world that thinks in categories and abstractions while steadily losing the ability to truly understand. How we stop this slide must be one of the defining challenges of our time.”
Just because IQ rates are dropping doesn’t mean we’re cooked. It’s possible that new kinds of intelligence, like solving novel problems from understanding, are becoming more valuable. Even Plato wrongly thought that writing was the end of critical thinking, arguing that it’d “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Hindsight is 20/20, but we now know that the Greek alphabet was only the beginning of critical thinking through writing.
The shift to the post-literate society is even infiltrating corporate America. Being able to respond on Slack with technical details about a product used to be a signal of expertise. Now anybody can write responses written by AI. This is why the in-person interview is returning to hiring processes. And why tech startups are betting big on leveraging AI to create the appearance of knowledge in an oral culture.
II. Literacy
“Good writing is actually good thinking.” — Paul Graham
Generative AI is threatening the continued existence of writing. The truth is that writing is hard. I relate to Ernest Hemingway on a spiritual level when he said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” AI promises low friction writing just like social media promises low friction content. The challenge of writing is the whole point.
Would you rather hike a mountain yourself or watch someone else hike that mountain through a virtual reality headset? Hopefully the former. By enduring the struggle the summit means more. To quote Brad Stulberg:
“Using AI to write an essay is like taking a gondola to the top of a mountain. You don’t really know the mountain. You don’t get the satisfaction of having exerted yourself on the mountain. You aren’t shaped by the mountain. And in the case of AI, the mountaintop itself is less interesting than had you climbed it yourself.”
I can relate to this because even though I could’ve written this essay with AI, I didn’t. The process of writing a sloppy first draft, discussing my arguments with others, and killing unconvincing ideas is all part of the game. The struggle of writing without AI is what stimulates learning.
Writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, forcing the author to slow down and reflect — hence why writers like Paul Graham rightly say that “writing is thinking”. AI makes writing easier because it takes learning out of the equation.
And, to paraphrase Barry Ritholz, the thinking, rather than actual book itself, is the finished product of writing.
AI is stunting learning
It’s still early, but some studies are revealing the early effects of AI. Using 30 months of panel data on 26,000 Chinese students, Strömberg, Lei, and Wu studied how generative AI affected learning. They observed that AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowered exam scores by 20% in six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fell by 18% and 24%, with the full penalty emerging after about two years.
The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for high-achieving students and boys. The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of AI users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, indicated by extraordinarily short homework completion time and high homework scores. AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experienced small learning losses.
Young people have never experienced a world without short-form video. Young people hardly spend their leisure time reading because there’s an endless tap of short form video content available at their fingertips through infinitely scrolling feeds.
A phenomenon known as “cognitive stunting” is spreading like a flu virus among students who are using artificial intelligence to aid their learning. By using AI, young students are offloading their critical thinking skills to AI. “If you don’t use it, you lose it” applies to critical thinking as much as it does your muscles.
Fear of cognitive decline is why I started writing this blog. I was a Chat GPT fan boy in 2022. Eventually I developed this brain foggy feeling that it was melting my brain. Writing these essays without AI is my attempt to preserve (and grow) my brain power in the age of AI.
The skill of deep thinking will become artisanal in a world where people are increasingly using AI to avoid writing. It will also become more important because AI is creating an abundance of text.
AI is capable of producing crisp, professional looking writing. When presented with human- and AI-produced text side by side, even M.F.A. candidates prefer AI-generated writing. On the surface, AI writing looks convincing, but is frequently unoriginal, inaccurate, or both. Judgment is needed more now than ever, making primary source literacy a highly valuable skill. By becoming over-reliant on AI to write, you could lose your capacity to develop your own views or make judgement calls about the views of others.
Written culture is thriving by some measures
Audiobooks are rising in popularity. Substack is popping off. Barnes & Noble and independent book stores are making a comeback. But reading is thriving among an increasingly small subset of the population. The 10% of readers who read 25 or more books last year account for roughly half of all the books read in the country. Today’s readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. And they’re more passionate than generations past. But we’re now part of a subculture. The fact that you’re reading my essay right now tells me you’re part of this countercultural revolution.
![OC] 40% of Americans read zero books last year. The top 10% account for half of all the books read in the country. : r/dataisbeautiful](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NbGz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb5bca78-765a-41fd-aab8-40d0de378dee_2420x1364.png "OC] 40% of Americans read zero books last year. The top 10% account for half of all the books read in the country. : r/dataisbeautiful")
In a video-first culture, reading can serve as an identity marker. At best, you can make friends this way by serendipitously seeking others with similar taste as you. Someone at my apartment was reading The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. So I struck up a conversation and we had overlapping taste in books. At worst, reading can be performative.
Fewer people are reading, but I have no doubt that reading is lindy given that it’s been around for 6,000+ years. The practical application of scaffolding your ideas mean it’s unlikely that it’ll never completely disappear. It’s more likely that writing will become an artisanal technology, solely used among intellects who value original thought.
Written culture is dying by other measures
When society transitioned from an oral to a literate culture, only a small minority with access to education could read. Once again, reading is clustered among a small minority. These days writing is a dead end job. Even Byrne Hobart, who made a career writing a tech newsletter has called writing a good career move, but a terrible career. But it didn’t always used to be that way.
During Charles Dickens’ 1842 and 1867 tours in America and Britain, fans mobbed him in the streets. People even tried to cut locks of his hair as souvenirs. The notion of a literary figure with this much popularity nowadays seems absurd.
Cultural influence has fully shifted to those able to use today’s most popular mediums for media. Streamers, podcasters, and influencers command the audience that journalists could never in this day and age. Books used to be the primary source for knowledge, memory, and wisdom. Now online influencers are the catalyst for the transmission of culture.
I was raised in the post literate era
Even though I grew up in a post-literate society, I had the advantage of growing up in a reading family. My mom read to my sisters and me almost every night all the way through middle school. In high school, I had a knack for reading and writing — my favorite assignments gave me intellectual freedom to explore topics like an essay I wrote about The History of Barbecue in America.
I’ve stayed consistent, but once in a while I feel the habit slipping. It’s accompanied by a mindless malaise of stumbling through life on autopilot. I’ve replaced scrolling with writing. Achieving flow state through that medium is a more joyful feeling than the brain fog I get from social media.
III. Bi-Literacy
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murakami
So where do things go from here? By now hopefully it’s abundantly clear:
Reading is declining. Writing is becoming an artisanal craft. Bi-literacy is the skill of the future.
In Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf defines bi-literacy as the capacity to switch between two distinct reading modes: deep reading (physical books) and shallow reading (digital text).
The Socratic method is proof of thinking too
In my day job at Salesforce, it feels like there’s a new sales play every day we have to learn. As a guy who learns by writing, this can be a challenge because there’s frequently not the time in the day to write it all out before presenting. One evening, before a big demo, an old friend from Ohio was visiting Chicago. I transparently told him on the phone, “I’m down to hang out as long as I can talk a bit about this presentation. We can treat it like a dry run.” He’s a Solution Architect for another tech company.
As I’m describing my presentation, he’s getting into the weeds. Why do you sell it this way? What makes Agentforce better than Claude? How quickly are other customers getting value from this?
The mock dry run quickly turned into a Socratic dialogue about the presentation I was about to give.
The following morning I was a bit groggy from the previous night. But when I flipped open my laptop to demo to the customer, it turned out to be one of my best demos ever. And it didn’t even require me to write out a script.
A recent opinion piece in the NY Times echoes the argument that writing isn’t the only proof of thinking. Taking a page out of Socrates’ playbook (both on the benefits of non-writing and educational style), the author, a college professor, arguing that Socratic discourse is the path.
“Instead, I engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another.”
He goes on to say:
“What if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.”
I work in tech sales. I’ve found that a great way to improve your skill in the labor market is by combining the best elements of the literate- and post-literate society.
Here’s a specific example. My job requires me to be an AI product expert. So I’m constantly scouring the web and company Slack channels for what's the latest. But in order to deliver that message to customers, I need to deeply think about the product, how we’re going to market, the customer, and a whole lot more. The best way to combine these is by:
First, deeply thinking about all the above. Writing it all down and working through the ideas.
Second, practice delivering that message to others. And it can be anybody — though it’s best when they’re also in the tech industry because you can riff on that idea with them.
Good writing is scarce (and valuable)
Today’s job market is completely comprised of AI-generated resumes submitted into AI-generated evaluators to earn an AI-facilitated first round interview. Standing out on the job market is harder than ever. One way to stand out is by having quirky hobbies. Something simple like writing your own blog can be enough to make you stand out among the pile of resumes.
And it makes sense. The modern knowledge worker requires a unique blend of literate (deep work) and post-literate (presentation) skills.
In AI is bad at writing — removing em dashes won’t fix it, Jon Steinback describes why AI writing has actually gotten worse over time and why human writing is the next oil.
We’re running out of good ideas to train on. Each large language model needs new data to train on, but (1) we’re hitting the data wall, where there’s no more data available on the internet to train on, (2) most of the ‘new’ things on the internet are now slop, which creates wild model training challenges of its own. That’s why human writing is often called the new oil.
Most of writing is revision. Training data for writing, contrary to areas like coding and mathematics, only have ‘finished’ pieces and lacks the ‘process’ data — the drafting and editing and revision steps that lead to a compelling piece of writing. As a result, large language models struggle with the strategic elements of writing, leading to tasteless writing.
Writing isn’t binary. Because it’s not verifiable like math or coding. Training LLMs is like training a pet — they get a reward when they do something good. At the post-training stage, thousands of people are employed to rate sample output from new models. This is used to sharpen or correct the models before you use them. Some things are easy to grade, like factuality. Writing is not. If you’re one of the thousands of post-trainers judging the output of a model one paragraph at a time, how do you assess that? How do you balance the models’ bias for clarity and conformity against the vibrant and varied needs of writing outputs for a variety of contexts?
To quote Daniel Frank:
“Writing is a form of scaffolding. Once you write about something, you can finally stop ruminating on the idea, let it go, and free up your bandwidth for other things. Everyone knows writing forces clarity in your thoughts. But the value of writing is much greater than that—most of the time, you don’t even know what your thoughts actually are until you turn on your ‘writing brain’. Being in the habit of writing makes you much more attuned to the world, forcing you to actually notice your own interesting observations and reflections as they happen. When you start taking notes, you finally have somewhere to put your random thoughts that would otherwise get lost to the wind. Slowly, without any real plan or intention, you start noticing how much these ideas relate to each other, and broader connections form in front of you that never would have happened otherwise. This also happens on a bigger scale the more you write: your posts, over time, will slowly reveal who you are and what your values are.”
— not not Talmud, I was wrong to hate Substack - and why I think YOU should start a Substack
The evidence is compelling: reading is becoming more concentrated. So what am I doing writing? I think it’ll become a rare skill.
“In the future, I suspect writing will become a practice more like a workout than part of regular work. Physical fitness as a conscious discipline was unnecessary until relatively recently because human life and work were intensely physical. Go back only to, say, 1870, and you will find that more than three-quarters of American workers were in professions requiring strenuous labor, such as farming, forestry, fishing, mining, manufacturing, and mechanical trades. Today, that proportion of the workforce is less than 15 percent…
Who knows, perhaps a subculture of writing enthusiasts will develop? Let’s call them Library Rats, who make feats of writing their hobby and trade illicit nootropic drugs to facilitate supraphysiological levels of writing.“
Arthur Brooks, Letting AI Write for You Will Make You Unhappy
For another point, writing is a selfless act. You pour your soul out to intellectually enrich others.
The central theme of Ben Franklin’s life was progress: humanity improves based on a steady increase of collective knowledge. I share this opinion. I’m responsible to share my knowledge to make my small sphere of influence a better place.
That, in a nutshell, is why I write. Now, does that necessarily require me to write? Not really. But selfishly, writing helps me uncover truths within myself that hadn’t been crystallized until putting it down on paper.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
The new oral tradition could be the next renaissance. It builds on the written tradition that came before it. YouTube creators spend hours producing a script before recording one sound bite.
The delivery is oral, but the ideas were developing in writing. The medium is the message.
Rather than an admission of defeat, I’m considering this a new chapter. For many years I was resistant to the prospect of video because I was too pretentious to even consider subjecting myself to the oral tradition.
That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on writing. In order to push society forward, I don’t have the luxury of being able to memorize The Odyssey or The Iliad, like the storytelling bards of old. The oral culture needs writers willing to wrestle with challenging ideas before verbalizing them — I’d like to be one of them. You should be one of them too.
As always… thanks for reading!
— Grant Varner
I saw this in The American Experiment. I recognize the irony of citing a video documentary series in an essay about the death of writing. I just happened to watch it during the 4th of July this year and loved it. Check out the book if you want!