saved
Doomscrolling ourselves to death
Hraness cites a source capture. The source author remains the source.
gist
Ed West reviews James Marriott's The New Dark Ages, which argues literacy peaked mid-century and then eroded first under television and later under smartphones. Drawing on Postman, cable-TV natural experiments, and the contrast from Truman's autodidact library to Trump's one-page memos, Marriott frames a post-literate public sphere where attention collapses, culture simplifies, and democracy loses the analytical habits reading trained. West's sharpest worry is that even elites now abandon cultural hierarchy while remaining poorly read.
ideas
- TV, not phones, started the slide. Marriott follows Postman in treating television's bias toward personality and triviality as the first blow to literate public reason; smartphones intensified an already underway collapse.
- Natural experiments implicate commercial TV. Norway's staggered cable rollout lets Hernæs map IQ declines of about 0.08 points per year of full coverage, a clean regional shock against military conscript scores.
- Literacy trained egalitarian empathy. Novels and slave narratives once forced readers to inhabit other minds; Marriott treats reactionary fears of reading as partly correct about hierarchy's vulnerability.
- Politics reverts toward oral norms. Parliamentary debate and presidential speech grow simpler, repetitive, and braggadocious as attention shrinks—Trump as an almost Homeric post-literate figure.
- Elites abandon the hierarchy while losing the library. Peak democracy tracked peak literacy; today college graduates and cultural funders distrust "excellence" even as the powerful grow historically and classically thin.
quotes
“The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.”
“for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”
“He is an almost Homeric figure, perhaps the first post-literate western leader.”
“The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.”