Marginalium

How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools:

We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately. Thoughtful essays keep appearing—in TheGuardian, TheAtlantic, and across this platform—all asking why reading now feels so difficult, for ourselves or for our students
…
[writing] was an instrument of control. It allowed a small managerial class to fix reality in symbols, make society legible from above, and reorganize daily life around the production of surplus
…
Mass literacy required centuries of redesign and struggle …
The reading brain is an “unnatural,” fragile achievement. …
AI is enabling a new mode of social organization, directed by a new kind of elite. Its economic form has been named—“surveillance capitalism”—but its political structure remains undefined. What is clear is its purpose: the production of a new, extractable surplus.

Where Sumerian tablets helped generate predictable grain yields, today’s machine intelligence structures the world to produce predictable data, attention, and behavior. Through continuous modeling and subtle feedback, human action is rendered legible and brought under algorithmic management. This marks a second enclosure—not of land, but of the cognitive commons itself.

Interesting argument—perhaps it’s not inherently a problem that reading is worsening. The bigger problem might be what AI means as it takes over:

our society selects for the affordances of a medium—speed, ease, efficiency—not for its effects. And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized. They rarely register on the dashboards that guide decision-making.

So, what effects are we losing with literacy, and how do we get them elsewhere, and:

machine intelligence is externalizing attention … The ways we notice, recall, and orient our will may be increasingly governed by systems we do not see and cannot easily interrogate.