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| Made in Copilot AI following the original prompt above |
James Marriott’s recent argument, discussed by Mary Harrington in The New York Times, is not simply that people have stopped being able to read. It is that long-form reading is becoming less central to public life, while the moving image—especially short-form video—becomes the dominant medium through which many people encounter politics, history and reality. “Post-literate,” in this sense, does not mean illiterate: text is everywhere, but sustained reading is losing its cultural authority. [1]
1. Tribal memory: knowledge carried by voices
In small-scale, pre-literate societies, memory lived in people: in songs, genealogies, place-names, ritual, proverb, story and performance. Knowledge had to be memorable because it could not be cheaply externalised in archives. A community’s past was therefore inseparable from its elders, its ceremonies and its shared landscape.
This did not make such societies primitive or incapable of complex thought. It meant that thought was organised differently: through repetition, rhythm, embodied performance and face-to-face authority. Walter Ong’s classic account of orality and literacy is central to Marriott’s argument: writing does not merely store information; it changes what kinds of abstraction, argument and historical consciousness become possible. [1]
The political form of oral society tends to be local, personal and relational. Power is mediated through kinship, reputation, custom and presence. There may be councils, chiefs, assemblies or religious authorities, but the public sphere is not yet a realm of anonymous citizens debating documents.
2. Restricted literacy: the medieval archive
With writing, and later with manuscript culture, knowledge could outlive its speaker. Yet in much of medieval Europe, literacy remained limited. Reading and writing were concentrated among clerics, administrators, lawyers, merchants and some aristocratic households. The majority encountered authoritative texts through recitation, preaching, image, drama and ritual rather than private silent reading.
This produced a layered information order. Sacred texts, legal records, chronicles and administrative documents existed, but access to them was uneven. The written word could preserve law and doctrine across generations; it could also make power more durable, because decrees, titles, charters and accounts could be copied, checked and enforced beyond the memory of one ruler.
Medieval society was therefore neither purely oral nor fully literate. It was a mixed regime: manuscript culture supported bureaucracy, theology and historical memory, while most everyday political and religious communication remained spoken, visual and communal. Marriott’s point is not that we are returning to this world exactly, but that a society in which few people habitually engage with extended text may recover some of its features. [1]
3. Print, enlightenment and mass literacy
The printing press, expanding schooling, cheap paper, newspapers, pamphlets and eventually public libraries changed the balance. Literacy became less exclusive. More importantly, it became socially useful: to read was increasingly to participate in commerce, administration, religion, science and politics.
Print encouraged forms of thought that are difficult to sustain without stable text: citation, comparison, revision, systematic argument, bureaucratic record-keeping and the idea of a public that can examine the same evidence. The Enlightenment’s faith in reason, the scientific revolution’s culture of publication and criticism, and modern constitutional politics all depended on an expanding literate infrastructure.
This is the high point of the arc: not because everyone became a philosopher, but because the written document became a normal instrument of public life. Newspapers, petitions, parliamentary reports, novels, scientific journals and schoolbooks created a shared, though always contested, textual public sphere.
4. Industry, democracy and the reading citizen
The industrial revolution intensified this order. Urbanisation, mass education, railways, cheap print and expanding state administration made literacy a practical necessity. The citizen imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century democracy was, ideally, a reading citizen: someone who could follow an argument, compare programmes, scrutinise a record and vote with some grasp of consequences.
This was never a golden age of universal deep reading. Much nineteenth- and twentieth-century print was sensational, partisan and shallow. Yet the prevailing public ideal was still textual: the informed voter, the reasoned debate, the accountable official, the documented claim.
Industrial modernity also created the conditions for its own media rivals. Cinema, radio and television began to shift public attention from the page to the screen. As Marriott notes, television already absorbed much of the free time once available for reading; the smartphone then made screen culture portable, continuous and personalised. [1]
5. The post-literate turn: scrolling, video and algorithmic authority
The current shift is not a simple return to pre-literate tribalism. We remain surrounded by text: signs, messages, interfaces, code, forms, captions and notifications. But for many people, especially younger users, the primary way of encountering the world is no longer a sustained written argument. It is the feed: a sequence of images, clips, captions, reactions and recommendations. [1]
This produces a new kind of public sphere. It is visually immediate, emotionally rapid, personalised and continuously refreshed. Authority migrates from the documented argument to the compelling clip, the recognisable face, the viral framing and the algorithmic ranking system. The scroll replaces the page; the recommendation replaces the bibliography.
Marriott’s worry is political as much as cultural. Democratic deliberation assumes a capacity to hold an issue in mind long enough to weigh evidence, distinguish assertion from demonstration and accept that complicated questions may not resolve in ninety seconds. If the “400-word wall” becomes a normal limit of public attention, the habits required for self-government weaken. [1]
6. Visual autocracy, not oral democracy
It would be too neat to call the result a return to oral democracy. Pre-literate oral cultures were not automatically democratic, and modern visual culture is not automatically authoritarian. But the combination of short video, surveillance advertising, recommendation systems and concentrated platform power can favour a politics of spectacle over a politics of deliberation.
In such an environment, the ruler or movement does not need to suppress all text. It can simply make text feel effortful, slow, elitist or irrelevant. The image becomes the instrument of mobilisation; the algorithm becomes the invisible editor; the endless feed becomes a mechanism for occupying attention without requiring sustained judgement.
That is the “visual autocracy” risk: not necessarily a single tyrant banning books, but an attention regime in which complexity is filtered out before citizens ever encounter it. Power need not forbid reading if it can make scrolling more rewarding than thinking.
7. The historical arc in brief
| Phase | Dominant medium | Where knowledge lives | Political tendency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-literate tribal | Speech, song, ritual, memory | Minds, bodies, communities, places | Local, personal, customary authority |
| Medieval limited literacy | Manuscript plus speech and image | Archives, churches, courts, elites | Hierarchical but increasingly documented rule |
| Print and Enlightenment | Books, pamphlets, newspapers | Libraries, presses, public records | Public reason, reform, constitutional politics |
| Industrial mass literacy | Mass print, schooling, bureaucracy | State archives, schools, newspapers, parties | Mass democracy and administrative modernity |
| Post-literate present | Short video, feeds, images, notifications | Platforms, clouds, personalised recommendation | Spectacle, fragmentation, algorithmic mediation |
8. A necessary qualification
This arc is a useful map, not an iron law. Literacy has always coexisted with image, performance and rumour; oral cultures have preserved sophisticated knowledge; and digital media can also widen access to texts, archives and education. The question is not whether text disappears—it will not—but whether the capacity and social prestige to read long, difficult, consequential material survives as a common civic practice. [1]
The deeper issue may be attention. A society can possess more written information than any before it and still become post-literate if its members no longer have the time, training, confidence or desire to read beyond the next swipe.
Source: Mary Harrington, “That Daily Brain Rot Break Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages,” The New York Times, 8 October 2026, an interview with James Marriott on his book The New Dark Ages. Read the original. [1]
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