… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade.Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that TheJikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Gutenberg Bible on display at the U.S. Library of Congress (source)
Over the past two decades, we’ve been reallocating our time away from offices, malls, and classrooms… and toward home and solitude. Hyunsoo Rim illustrates…
With our Covid-induced lockdowns now a moderately foggy memory for most, the last few years have turned out to be a continued normalization for many of the habits that defined the pandemic era.
Peloton bikes are now doubling as coat racks; the banana bread craze has cooled; Zoom’s share price is almost back to where it started; millions of people have gone back to clothes shopping in person; and companies like Del Monte are stuck with mountains of unsold canned fruit that’s no longer flying off the shelves.
But one seismic lifestyle change has proven far more permanent than any fitness fad or panic-buying spree — and it turns out to be part of a much longer trend that’s been building for decades: Americans are spending more time at home, and alone. And not everyone has the means to break that growing trend…
[Rim uses infographics to chart American’s use of time…]
… According to the annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS) — a self-reporting survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — an average American’s typical day still breaks down pretty much the same as it did 20 years ago. Roughly a third still goes to sleep, a fifth to leisure and sports, and, perhaps most surprising to anyone feeling burned out, just one-sixth to work. The rest goes to household chores, meals, and everything else. The survey does, of course, represent the average, with many retirees likely skewing the work figures down.
But if you look closer, the routines underneath tell a different story about how the collective American experience has changed.
Over the past two decades, Americans have gained about 30 minutesof sleep per day — now averaging over nine hours, more than ever — and spend roughly 11 more minuteson household activities such as cooking, cleaning, and pet care.
Where did those extra hours come from? It seems like we’ve carved them out of work commutes, mall trips, and in-person classes… activities that usually have us interacting with others out in public in some way.
Some of this shift can certainly be explained by demographic factors — America is an older country than it was in 2003, as birth rates have dropped. Nevertheless, on aggregate, the figures are pretty staggering for a nation of 340+ million people — and the sharp rise in the pandemic era suggests at least a decent amount of the shift is behavioral.
Indeed, in 2003, the average American spent 7.7 hours per day at home, according to the ATUS data compiled by IPUMS. By 2024, that rose to 9.1 hours, with the pandemic only accelerating the climb…
… what’s more striking is how time once spent outside or with others has steadily moved in the opposite direction…
… As more of our daily lives have moved home and online, the same shift is reshaping how we unwind. Since 2003, time spent socializing and communicating — from hanging out with family and friends to hosting events — has fallen 24%, while travel time is down 26%…
… But not everyone is experiencing the shift in the same way. As evidence for the K-shaped economy — where some groups thrive while others struggle — becomes harder to ignore, income is proving to be a strong differentiator.
In fact, households earning under $35,000 now spend about 10 hours a day at home, almost an hour and a half longer than those earning $150,000 or more. The pattern holds for time spent alone, too, with a two-hour daily gap between the lowest- and highest-income groups…
… wealthier Americans aren’t just spending less time at home; they’re more likely to pay their way out of it, with restaurant meals instead of cooking, pilates classes instead of home workouts, or washer-dryer combos instead of hours tied up in chores.
For the very wealthiest, that logic even goes further: according to a recent survey by Long Angle, nearly two-thirds of multimillionaires now outsource housekeeping, while about half pay for gardening services and two-fifths employ nannies.
Of course, time at home and alone isn’t inherently negative — as researchers note that, for many, solitude can be valued as a way to rest, think, or create. But when more of your day is taken up by unpaid chores and low-cost, home-bound leisure, that retreat indoors starts to look less like a choice…
Americans are spending more time at home and alone — and money determines who can opt out. Eminently worth reading in full: “Home. Alone.” from @sherwood.news.
* Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (August 28, 1988)
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As we contemplate our calendars, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that kids across America could “go out” even as they stayed in: they were invited for the first time into Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, as the series premiered on NET (which later became PBS). The show had had earlier local incarnations in Canada, then in Pittsburgh, where the national show was birthed and produced. Michael Keaton, who worked for the Pittsburgh public television station WQED at the time, often helped out with Roger’s show. And future horror director George A. Romero worked on the show shooting short films.
As we head into the weekend, some food for thought…
A decade ago, the world was, at once, both the seed of today and a very different place: In what was considered one of the biggest political upsets in American political history (and the fifth and most recent presidential election in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote), Donald Trump was elected to his first term. The U.K. chose Brexit. The stock market finished strong, with the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq reaching new highs. (In the 10 years that have followed, the Dow has risen about 150%; the S&P 500, roughly 400%; and the NASDAQ has roughly sextupled.)
It was a big year for pop culture, marked by Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the massive Pokémon Go craze, and the rise of Netflix with Stranger Things, the Rio Olympics, and the loss of icons like David Bowie and Prince.
It was also a big year in tech: Russian hacking and disinfo (especially on Facebook) was a huge story– as was Apple’s elimination of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. Theranos collapsed; and Wells fargo opened millions of accounts for customers without those customers’ permission (for which they were sunsequently fined $3 Billion). And Virtual Reality was everywhere (in the promises/offers from tech companies), but nowhere in the market. TikTok was launched in 2016, but hadn’t yet become the phenomenon (and avatar of algorithmly-driven feeds) that it has become. And in the course of 2016, artificial intelligence made the leap from “science fiction concept” to “almost meaningless buzzword” (though in fairness, 2016 was the year that Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program triumphed against South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol).
Back in 2016, the estimable Alan Jacobs was pondering the road ahead. In a piece for The New Atlantis, he coined and discussed a series of aphorisms relevant to the future as then he saw it. He begins…
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The apho- rist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers. – W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, The Viking Book of Aphorisms
Author’s Note: I hope that the statement above is wrong, believing that certain adjustments can be made to the aphoristic procedure that will rescue the following collection from arrogance. The trick is to do this in a way that does not sacrifice the provocative character that makes the aphorism, at its best, such a powerful form of utterance.
Here I employ two strategies to enable me to walk this tightrope. The first is to characterize the aphorisms as “theses for disputation,” à la Martin Luther — that is, I invite response, especially response in the form of disagreement or correction. The second is to create a kind of textual conversation, both on the page and beyond it, by adding commentary (often in the form of quotation) that elucidates each thesis, perhaps even increases its provocativeness, but never descends into coarsely explanatory pedantry…
[There follows a series of provocations and discussions that feel as relevant– and important– today as they were a decade ago. He concludes…]
… Precisely because of this mystery, we need to evaluate our technologies according to the criteria established by our need for “conviviality.”
I use the term with the particular meaning that Ivan Illich gives it in Tools for Conviviality [here]:
I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among per- sons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I con- sider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal inter- dependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.
In my judgment, nothing is more needful in our present technological moment than the rehabilitation and exploration of Illich’s notion of conviviality, and the use of it, first, to apprehend the tools we habitually employ and, second, to alter or replace them. For the point of any truly valuable critique of technology is not merely to understand our tools but to change them — and us…
As we think about tech, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that an ancestor of today’s social networks, streaming services, and AIs, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), was first demonstrated in operation. (It was announced to the public the following day.) The first general-purpose computer (Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being programmed and re-programmed to solve different problems), ENIAC was begun in 1943, as part of the U.S’s war effort (as a classified military project known as “Project PX“); it was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, where it was built. The finished machine, composed of 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints, weighed more than 27 tons and occupied a 30 x 50 foot room– in its time the largest single electronic apparatus in the world. ENIAC’s basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second (or Hertz). Today’s home computers have clock speeds of 3,500,000,000 cycles per second or more.
Tech billionaires are building a post-democratic America. Francesca Bria and a team of researchers supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES, the oldest political foundation in Germany) warn that Europe is next…
In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty.
A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies—one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history—was framed as a move toward “efficiency.”
It consolidated seventy-five procurement agreements into a single contract: a strategic handover of core military functions to a private company whose founder, Peter Thiel, has declared that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.”…
… J.D. Vance, propelled to the vice-presidency by $15 million from Peter Thiel, became the face of tech-right governance. Behind him, Thiel’s network moved into the machinery of the state.
Under the banner of “patriotic tech“, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.
Our investigation shows how these firms now operate as state-like powers—writing the rules, winning the tenders, and exporting their model to Europe, where it poses a direct challenge to democratic governance…
[Bria an the team use elegant interactive infographics to map and explain the what’s happened so far in the U.S, then turns to Europe…]
… By mid-2025, its reverberations were already felt across Europe. In Rome, Italian defense officials moved to integrate Elon Musk’s Starlink into military communications. In Berlin, Rheinmetall and Anduril expanded their joint venture to deploy autonomous drone swarms for NATO. The German variants of its drones still run on Californian code. Musk livestreams with the AfD’s Alice Weidel, endorsing the German far-right while supplying NATO infrastructure.
In London, the NHS scaled Palantir’s £330 million Federated Data Platform across tens of millions of patient records, By May 2025, the government had to pay KPMG £8 million just to encourage hospital adoption. Meanwhile, a £1.5 billion defense partnership binds Britain to Palantir’s AI systems.
None of these decisions provoked real debate. Few reached front pages. Together, they reveal the systematic outsourcing of European sovereignty to American oligarchs whose ideology openly undermines democracy.
It is a paradox with devastating implications: pursuing digital sovereignty while ceding control through every signed contract.
Each new contract deepens the trap. Once Palantir becomes indispensable, once Anduril’s drones are NATO standard, once nuclear facilities power AI that runs everything else— the transformation is irreversible. Europe faces an existential choice: build genuine technological sovereignty now, or accept governance by platforms whose architects view democracy as an obsolete operating system.
Silicon Valley’s Authoritarian Tech Right is not theorizing this world. They are already building it. The pipelines are operational. The feedback loops are functioning. The sovereignty transfers are completing.
Democracy persists as a legacy interface— maintained for stability, while being systematically hollowed out and replaced.
The question now is whether democratic societies can recognize this formation for what it is—and build alternatives before the infrastructure of control becomes too deeply embedded to dislodge…
As we reclaim the rudiments of our republic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that The Magic Christian premiered in the U.S. (having premiered in London two months earlier). Starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr (with appearances by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski), it was a scathing farce/satire of capitalism, greed, and human vanities, based on Terry Southern‘s 1959 novel of the same name.
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
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As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
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