Literacy is declining sharply across the West. In the era of vertical video, who has the time or concentration to read a long article — let alone a whole book?
As we lose the ability to read long-form text, we might also be losing the capacity for democratic deliberation and self-governance. That’s the argument this week’s guest, the Times of London columnist James Marriott, makes in his recent book, “The New Dark Ages.” He sits down with guest host Mary Harrington to discuss our return to oral culture, the political consequences and what we can learn from the medieval era about storing information in a digital world.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mary Harrington: James Marriott, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
James Marriott: Thank you very much for having me.
Harrington: You say that the world is becoming postliterate. But everything is covered in text everywhere. I rode through New York City on the way to come speak to you today. As I looked out of the window, I could see shop signs, I could see street signs, I could see everybody scrolling on their phones.
Most of them were looking at text. Some of them were texting with their thumbs while they’re walking along, trying not to bump into each other. Literally everything is covered in writing. So what exactly do you mean when you say the world is becoming postliterate?
Marriott: I think that’s such a good point, and I think it is one of the remarkable and weird things about the modern world, that we are obsessed with text, and text covers absolutely everything, more now than probably at any point in history.
I guess it’s important to say, and this is always the confusion that sometimes needs clearing up, that postliterate doesn’t mean illiterate. I guess a lot of the reason we’re talking about this is that there have been these big reports in the news about the decline of reading, decline of reading proficiency, and we seem to be entering a world in which long-form text, at least, is a much less important part of people’s lives and something people are spending much less time with.
We’re reading it less, we’re becoming less proficient in interpreting it, and we’re becoming less at home with it.
Harrington: Can you give us some numbers? How bad is it? Can we quantify the decline?
Marriott: Yes, we definitely can. This is something that I think probably a lot of people have been sensing atmospherically for a while. And in recent months and years, there has been some really good data on this.
The most stark piece of data is the American Time Use survey of almost a quarter of a million Americans, which found that over the last two decades leisure reading fell by 40 percent.
Harrington: Reading what? Is this specifically one particular thing or reading anything at all?
Marriott: This is defined as reading quite widely, according to this survey. It includes not only books, but magazines. I think it also includes audiobooks.
Harrington: Oh.
Marriott: So this is quite a wide and generous interpretation of reading, and that’s declined really quite starkly.
There are similar figures in the U.K. A report found that a third of U.K. adults said that they had given up reading for pleasure. I suspect that figure is probably actually worse, because we know that when you ask people about a socially prestigious activity like reading, they tend to be a bit optimistic about how much time they’re spending reading. So I would say that figure is probably more stark.
Another thing that made headlines was the report from the O.E.C.D. [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] at the end of 2024, which found that literacy was declining or stagnating in most developed countries. This is another really stark data point that we seem to be moving out of this culture of the written word into one that I think is more defined by the image and especially the moving image.
So postliteracy isn’t illiteracy. I guess it’s more about the dominant medium of our culture.
The other important thing to say about these statistics is that people have been writing about this trajectory in our society for a long time. The famous book that made an enormous impact on me when I first read it was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” about the move of America from a textual print culture to a TV culture.
In that book, I don’t think he cites a single statistic about the decline of literacy, and I think if you’re skeptical of those statistics, all you need to be persuaded of is this idea that we’re moving from a culture in which our predominant way of interpreting our politics and our reality is mediated by text, to one in which our interpretation of politics and reality is mediated by the image.
That, I think, is the crucial shift that we’re talking about.
Harrington: I did a thought experiment a couple of years ago. I was on a plane between Los Angeles and Boston, and I thought: I’m never going to get a better random organic sample of coastal Americans than this.
So I thought: I need to walk to the bathroom at the front of the plane. I’m going to count how many of the other passengers on the plane are reading long form.
I interpreted that fairly expansively. It was anybody who was looking at anything on an e-reader or, even, I think I counted magazines.
Marriott: Very generous.
Harrington: So an expansive definition. And by my reckoning, it was roughly 10 percent. Everybody else was scrolling or watching movies. Or asleep — I can’t really fault people for that.
Does that track with your assessment of the statistics?
Marriott: Yes, totally. And I share your nosiness about the media consumption habits of my fellow transport passengers. I do it on the Tube all the time, and it really is stark.
The other important shift that we’re both noticing is that if you were to do that survey a bit longer ago — 15 years, 10 years ago, perhaps — of the kind of surveys I’m constantly doing on the bus and on the train in my nosy way, people would have been staring at their devices, but they might still have been reading. They might have been scrolling through The New York Times or The Guardian or the BBC website.
I think one of the reasons that this topic is so fervently in the air at the moment is that people — other than us — are noticing that when you’re doing that walk down the train or down the bus, that people aren’t even reading on their phones anymore.
They’re watching videos. Frankly, you don’t even have to look over their shoulders because you can hear them watching videos — infuriatingly.
Harrington: You can see the thumb going … [mimics swiping on the phone screen].
Marriott: Yeah. And you can hear them playing them out loud, which is what happened to me on my train here to Leeds this morning.
This is really striking. And I think people are really noticing that video just seems to have taken over our world.
Harrington: Short-form video has eaten everybody’s capacity to concentrate. I avoid short-form video for that reason. I find it does something very brain-rotting.
Actually, you and I both studied English literature at Oxford, I believe. I’m a little older than you, but not much, and I imagine you were frog-marched through much the same canon as I was. I recounted an anecdote to somebody the other day about how — because, like everybody else, I hadn’t finished the reading list over the summer because nobody ever really does — I had to speed-read “Bleak House” and “Middlemarch” in a week to write an essay in my first week of the first year.
And the person I told this story to said: “That’s a thing?” And seemed flabbergasted that that was even possible. But is that just something which people are losing the ability to do?
Marriott: Yes, I think it is.
Harrington: I think I am, to be honest. I’m not sure I could do it now.
Marriott: One of my great hubristic moments at university was trying to speed-read “Paradise Lost,” which is an even more mad thing to try to do.
Harrington: [Laughs.] How long did you give yourself to do it?
Marriott: Not long enough. I have since read it properly. That was even more hubristic than trying to speed-read “Bleak House” or “Middlemarch,” I think.
Yes, I think academics are finding that, for instance, they’ve spent their whole career assigning books like “Middlemarch” and “Ulysses,” and they’re having to stop because the kids just can’t get through them anymore.
There’s something you increasingly hear in these educational circles. It’s the phrase “the 400-word wall,” which seems to be that 400 words is often the limit that students struggle to get past. That’s apparently how long it takes to read for 90 seconds — you get through about 400 words. And that seems to be the point at which people begin to feel fidgety or need distraction or need to look at something else.
I know all this stuff — and whenever I say “I know all this stuff” about how university students can’t read, it sounds so, “Old man shouts at cloud.” It’s the kind of thing people have been complaining about forever. But I think it’s a serious thing, and I think it’s happening, and I think it is pretty unprecedented, and I think the statistics that we’re talking about bear that out.
Harrington: It would be ironic, but maybe appropriate, to cite a meme here. It’s one that gets posted online in response to what people greet as a wall of text that they refuse to engage with. And the standard meme that gets posted in response to that is:
i ain’t reading all that i’m happy for u tho or sorry that happened
Marriott: Yes. The modern response to an English literature degree. Sorry, Dickens.
Harrington: [Laughs.] “I ain’t reading all that. Or sorry that happened” — whatever.
So if literacy is declining in this radical way, what does that do? What is the impact of that?
And perhaps before we get to that, how and why is it happening now?
Marriott: I think it’s happening now because of the phenomenon we’re talking about, about smartphones and short video. I think it’s also part of a longer-term story. When you get into this, the declines in literacy and reading that are measured and that people begin to talk about are in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s, with the arrival of television.
Television just swallows up human free time. There’s a remarkable statistic quoted by Robert Putnam in his book, “Bowling Alone,” about how, between the ’60s and the ’90s, the average American gained hours of free time, and they spent virtually all of it watching television.
When you measure how people are using their free time after the arrival of television, reading just drops off a cliff and the screen just swallows things up.
I think there’s a fundamental and quite comprehensible cognitive mechanism there, which is that reading is hard work. It’s a cognitively taxing activity. It requires a bit of brain effort. And watching a screen is passive. It’s easy to do. It comes much more naturally to us.
Absorbing images through our eyes is something we’ve evolved to do. Absorbing language through our eyes via text is a weird and difficult thing to do. If given the option, we tend to opt for the screen, not the text.
I think the decline of deep reading is really accelerated by the arrival of the smartphone in the early 2000s. That’s a major revolution, and so much has been said about that.
The point we’re at now is almost a revolution within a revolution. It’s become possible to watch video everywhere. And I think that has really, for a lot of people, meant that long-form text — or I increasingly think if you’re young, any text, any real reading — is just beginning to drain out your life.
Harrington: In your work, you cite the influential Jesuit literary scholar Walter Ong, who wrote a book that really impacted me enormously when I was an undergraduate, about the difference between oral and literate cultures, which is to say, cultures that run on the spoken word and cultures which turn on literacy.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the difference between oral and literate cultures, and how that can help us make sense of what’s happening today?
Marriott: Yes, totally. That book, “Orality and Literacy,” is brilliant. I think it blows the mind of almost everybody who reads it.
The exciting and fundamental thing that Walter Ong says, which is the same point made by Marshall McLuhan, is that we forget to realize how unusual our literate world is. All our ways of thinking and understanding the world, which we view as natural aspects of being human beings, are very often the artificial creations of our interactions with text.
Walter Ong says there are whole spheres of human knowledge that can’t exist without text. Things like philosophy, history as we know it, certainly logic and mathematics. These things don’t spring naturally out of human minds. They’re the product of the human mind’s interaction with the page.
We move from an oral world, in which people are communicating face-to-face. In oral, preliterate societies, information isn’t stored in words and on paper or on papyrus or on shards of pottery, but in our minds.
And for Walter Ong, this is not just about the way we store information or the way we communicate. It shapes the entire society and culture and politics of a preliterate society
Literacy comes along and, in Walter Ong’s account, transforms our world intellectually, politically, and socially.
And as literacy declines, or as the written word declines in importance in our culture, I guess his argument — and certainly my argument — would be that we’re not returning to a time before mass literacy. It’s not like we’re going to go back to oral poems and “Beowulf” and “The Iliad” and strumming our lyres and singing our epic songs and all those things that were such important features of oral culture.
We’re going to go into a kind of hybrid culture where the written word exists and it’s not like people are going to stop reading — I mean, it’s simply difficult to make an iPhone without text. Emails must be sent, instruction manuals must be read. Text underpins our world, but for a lot of people it becomes radically less important.
Some of the conclusions that Walter Ong drew, and I think people have gone further looking at that book in hindsight, is that this postliterate or secondary oral world may in some ways have some of the characteristics of the preliterate world that existed before text.
This idea of reversal, that postliteracy looks like preliteracy, is sort of threaded all the way through these media theorists we’re talking about. Marshall McLuhan ——
Harrington: It’s very Marshall McLuhan,
Marriott: Yes. Marshall McLuhan is in some ways, in my view, a bit bonkers, but in other ways, just astonishingly prescient. And some of the connections he draws between what a preliterate and a postliterate world look like are really remarkable.
I think the idea can certainly be taken too far. People online get carried away and do get very excited about the idea that we’re going to have the Homer of TikTok, which I’m skeptical about. But I think looking at the world before literacy can be a way to understand what the world after peak literacy might look like.
Harrington: You’ve suggested that this is a world that will be more mystical, more tribal, and more autocratic. Why?
Marriott: There are a few things that literacy does in organizing our minds and organizing our politics. Almost the most important, or to me, the most striking thing about these media theoretical arguments about what literacy does to us is, again, has to do with that unnaturalness of the written word and how strange it is to live in a literate culture, something that fails to strike us all the time.
Marshall McLuhan talks about how eerie life in a literate culture, in which all our information comes via text, might seem to someone from a preliterate tribe. If you live in a preliterate world, every single piece of information and your whole experience of the world is mediated through other people. It’s face-to-face, it’s emotional. You’re talking and you’re grabbing each other by the shoulder. Every piece of information is mediated via a human being, and that makes communication more emotional, perhaps more angry, more raucous, more warm. It has this very warm, emotional atmosphere.
A world in which all information is mediated via print and text, I think, feels emotionally desaturated and would feel weirdly cold and alien to those people, McLuhan argues. When all your political information comes not from your friend or your chief telling you what’s going on in your world, but via a newspaper on a blank page covered in text, it’s a much less emotional experience.
I can hear this seeping back into me, to my great irritation, on the train down here to come to this studio. The raucousness of a TikTok feed — you’re back in this emotional world where all information is mediated via a human being, but it has refilled our world with feelings and passions and anger and rage. And I think it’s also one of the roots of this more tribal feeling that our world has now. And I think although that literate world was in many ways kind of weird in its emotional desaturation, that emotional desaturation was very useful for democratic politics. It relies on people being able to have not perfectly rational arguments, but arguments that are informed more by logic, reason and evidence than by the kinds of forms of emotional persuasion that come more naturally when you can persuade someone not with your, not with evidence or with an argument, but by charming them around to your point of view, crying at them or shouting at them.
All these kinds of irrational modes of persuasion that were very common in preliterate political cultures were banished by print. Because you can’t shout at someone through print. You can’t charm someone through print. This stuff, I think, is rushing back into our world. These passions that were banished by print are returning to us.
Harrington: Let’s go back a little bit further to the beginning of the print story. We’ve explored some of the implications of the transition away from print culture, into a more participatory, more agonistic, more oral era.
Your argument is that really, the modern world was born out of, or inextricably from, the printing press, as I understand you. You’re speaking specifically about the end of mass long-form print culture as bringing about all of these, in your view, very undesirable transitions.
But I want to hear a little bit more about your story of how it all began. What does the other end of the story look like? Why the printing press? What does that do?
Marriott: Yes. There are various places at which you could begin the story of the spread of literacy. One obviously is with the invention of the Gutenberg press. That multiplies the production of books, and that lays the groundwork for mass literacy.
The story as I tell it in my book, I think all starting places are somewhat arbitrary. It’s attractive to me, this phenomenon in the middle and the end of the 18th century that is sometimes known to historians as the reading revolution.
This isn’t the arrival of mass literacy as we know it today and as we experienced it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it’s not the very beginning of the story with Gutenberg. But there does seem to have been an acceleration of literacy and book reading in the middle of the 18th century.
A few factors combined. You had the printing press, you had the increasing production of cheaper books, circulating libraries. The important pressure of Protestantism, a version of Christianity very strongly based on reading texts, was an important force in driving literacy beyond social elites.
And there was this point in the middle and the end of the 18th century when journalists and authors began to look at the world around them and say: Oh my God, it looks like everybody is reading!
And allowing for journalistic exaggeration, which has always existed in history, the accounts are very attractive. A gentleman saying: I wondered where my serving girl was, and I went to the kitchen, and she was in there reading the newspaper rather than paying attention to me.
People saying that they’re walking down the street and a guy will be walking past them reading a novel. This strikes them as deeply weird because literacy has been, for pretty much all of human history up until this point, a minority habit of social and clerical elites, and not spread through the population.
The appearance of the written word in ordinary life causes a flurry of comment and excitement and curiosity. It’s this phenomenon that, in hindsight, we call the reading revolution.
To be very broad brush about it, from the perspective of the modernity I cherish, I think there are a number of beneficial results from this. The spread of literacy is inextricably tied up with the Enlightenment as knowledge proliferates, as more people get access — not only to the information that’s stored in books, but to the critical, analytic, and abstract forms of thinking that we know are associated with literacy. And you get this swell of natural philosophy, people questioning the world and how it works, and the natural world.
It would be too simplistic to say that if you press the literacy button, you get the Enlightenment. But I think these phenomena are very connected. This creates this culture of more complex and more cumulative thought. As people can correspond more in print, they can talk to each other more, they can build on each other’s ideas.
It’s not just me arguing this. It’s the argument famously made by the economist Joel Mokyr, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on this, that the Republic of Letters and the exchange of information through this network of journals and letters in Europe in the 18th century was the major cause behind the scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the beginnings of, really, the whole of modernity as we know it.
Harrington: What’s the mechanism then, whereby all these distinctively modern phenomena bring us to democracy? This has been a central theme in your thesis, that there’s an incredibly central link between democracy and long-form literacy. Can you talk me through what that link is?
Marriott: I think there’s a link. Again, I think the directness of the link can be overemphasized. I think there’s a quote — or maybe a misquotation — from the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, who said: Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.
I wouldn’t go quite that far. I think as literacy spread down through society, people began to access information about their political leaders and their laws. And I think it’s worth emphasizing how, again, how strange this was.
Most people, for most of history, had lived far from urban centers and had very little idea about what was going on in the politics above them. And if they tried to comment on it or if they found out about it, they were often punished.
But as people began to find out more about their leaders, and as they began to think critically about them, because I think critical thinking is associated with literacy, they began to be able to understand and advocate for their own political rights.
I’m not saying this situation is by any means a straightforward connection, but you begin to see that the spread of literacy gives a voice to people who would not have been able to influence politics at all in the age before mass literacy.
People who were advocating more democratic or republican forms of politics — like, the examples in my book, Rousseau or Thomas Paine — come from backgrounds in which, a hundred years before, they would not have been literate, and their voices and their political ideas would have had absolutely no influence because they would have had no way of getting their ideas out. Nobody could have listened to Thomas Paine’s great-great-great-grandfather because he wouldn’t have been able to write his ideas down, and nobody would have heard them.
So when you spread literacy through society, you also get more people joining the conversation. It’s not just that more people have more information, but more different kinds of people from different social backgrounds can join that great democratic conversation and advocate for their rights.
All this, I think, is building up through history until the beginning of the 20th century, and I think it’s no accident that the great age of mass literacy in the early 20th century is also the great age of mass democracy. This is when you get votes for women.
And I think these things are completely tied up with the spread of information, criticism and debate all the way through society. So political information and argument is not just the privilege of a small elite around a royal court or around an aristocratic court. It is something that everybody has access to.
That is, I think, a fundamental force for democracy in history.
Harrington: OK. Just to recap, if I understand you right, you’re saying that broadly, from the deep distant past, culture was predominantly oral, predominantly spoken word. The vast majority of people didn’t read because they didn’t need to.
And these cultures were more agonistic, more participatory, more religious faith, and magic and eeriness and uncanniness was much more prevalent and treated as a normal feature of reality.
Then the printing press came along, and then some stuff happened, and then we got to the 18th century, and we get to the Enlightenment, and everything suddenly starts getting better in a distinctively modern way.
I want to go back a little bit before the 18th century, because it seems to me as though you’re skipping over something. Didn’t quite a lot happen between “Beowulf” and the 18th century?
But you’ve treated the middle bit — the medieval era, the era before the Enlightenment — briefly, and really only in terms of how scarcity oppressed people, and then the much greater prevalence of printed materials following the printing press as having a liberatory and a rationalizing effect.
How did scarcity affect the culture? And can you say a little bit more about these changes?
Marriott: Yes, absolutely. Part of the reason that I don’t write about the Middle Ages is that I don’t profess to be an expert in them. I think the scarcity of books is interesting, and certainly one of the other features of this so-called “reading revolution” at the end of the 18th century wasn’t just the growth of literacy. It was the proliferation of texts.
One of the important things that was happening to people in that world was not just that they were able to read, it was that they had a huge wealth of things to read. But the case that people like Elizabeth Eisenstein would make is that in a world in which there are very few texts, you are much more respectful of the authority of texts.
So if you have access to only a couple of books — and that was probably the case for most people in this world that you’re describing, unless you had access to a great monastic or royal library — if you wanted to find out about the natural world or theology or science or law or medicine, you might have only one book you could go to on that subject, and your respect for that book is hugely increased.
Another thing that is hard for us to get our heads around as people who live in this incredibly rich, incredibly diverse information environment is: What is it like to have a single source of authority?
This scribal culture that you talk about, this medieval culture, was inheriting a few texts passed down from antiquity. It wasn’t possible to produce lots of copies of them. Each one had to be copied out by hand, and they were treated with great reverence. This was quite a hierarchical knowledge environment. There were few texts, and they were revered.
Not to caricature the Middle Ages, but we know that people picked up strange ideas from Aristotle. [To himself.] Oh, what are the good Aristotle things? There’s a great thing that I always love about how beavers castrate themselves and discard their testicles when pursued. I can’t remember if that’s Aristotle who says that or another classical thinker.
What happens when texts begin to proliferate — and I think this probably does to some degree precede the printing press — is that you begin to be able to look at two different texts and say: Hang on, these things contradict each other.
It’s this environment that allows you to begin to ask questions about what you know.
Harrington: While we’re on the subject of the Middle Ages, my big “a-ha” moment in trying to understand the other end of the shift, at the beginning of the print revolution, was learning a little bit more about the practice of medieval scholarship and discovering a missing piece — which I hadn’t been aware of when I read Walter Ong — about medieval memory practices, which is to say, the scribal culture, which involved physical texts, was the tip of an iceberg, most of which existed in the minds of medieval scholars.
The practice of medieval scholarship required deep study of a much smaller corpus of literature and the storage of the ideas of that through a practice of trained memory — which is very difficult to get your head around now because we just don’t do it. We have bookshelves. But it’s a practice of meditation, really, a highly visual meditation.
And all of those little illustrations and ornate marginalia you see in a medieval text are aids to memory. They’re not just there because people like doodling in the margins. They’re components of a memory technology. They’re visual cues to help somebody remember the passage next to them in this very meditative, very visualizing practice of study.
So memorizing the Book of Psalms was kid stuff, which just seems unfathomable to people now. Like learning your times tables, you know?
Marriott: Yes, I know. One of the phenomena of literate modernity is a tendency to see the entire past in terms of literacy, because it’s what comes down to us from the past.
We see the literate top percentage of the past, and we miss, as you say, this whole world of memory and songs that are passed on and gossip and rumor, and 90 percent of the information environment of the past is lost to us.
It’s the point that Robert Darnton makes about the French Revolution. We can view that moment in history too easily as an entirely literate one because what survives for us is the text. We don’t see the gossip and the songs and the memory.
Harrington: This is something that I found myself mulling over: Do you think there’s anything that we can draw on from this missing medieval world, and particularly from their practices of trained memory, in order to help us reassemble some kind of a functioning hybrid culture in the aftermath of mass long-form literacy as we transition, or so it would seem, to a more postliterate culture?
Marriott: That’s such an interesting thought. I’m always a little bit skeptical about the extent of the lessons that we can learn from the past. Postindustrial modernity is incredibly weird in the context of the whole of human history, and the lessons that we can take away from the preindustrial past can be interesting, but are sort of limited.
I guess the crucial difference that we’re talking about here is this difference between a world in which you can remember nothing, and the art of memory as an obsession for society and shapes the society in ways that are enormous but now invisible to us.
In the 21st century, we remember everything. Even in our postliterate age, everything is recorded. Videos are stored, texts are stored. The internet is basically a huge archive.
Harrington: Just to nuance that point a minute: We don’t remember this, the computers do.
Marriott: Yes.
Harrington: So there’s this enormous, overwhelming kind of … we’re drowning in memory, but none of it’s in our heads.
Marriott: No. And it’s so hard to imagine what that will do to us in the way we interact. The writer Katherine Dee made this point — I think I saw her writing about it on Substack — that in some ways, the state of remembering everything and remembering nothing are more similar than we imagine.
Harrington: Hmm. Yes.
Marriott: One of the features of oral discourse that Walter Ong points out is that everything you say has to be intensely memorable, otherwise it will be lost. The thing that everybody cites now — and this has almost turned into a meme — is that oral poetry, for instance, is full of epithets: “The swift-footed Achilles.” “Shining-helmeted Athena.” You have these little verbal tags that tag people in your memory so that you can come back to them and think about them. And if you’re a speaker, you have to make your speech memorable, otherwise it will be lost.
There’s a preference in oral poetry, according to Walter Ong — and I think it was also Eric Havelock who says this — for heavy characters: Highly memorable, distinctive characters who stand out.
“The Iliad,” for instance, is full of larger than life heroes, and Greek myths are full of monsters, things that stand out in our minds because in a world in which everything can so easily be forgotten, the memorable is incredibly important.
There’s an analogy to be made with the world in which you remember everything, which is that because we remember literally everything, it’s just as important to try and seize things and make them stand out.
The analogy that people have made is that Trump is a heavy character in the same way that Cerberus, the kind of monster of antiquity, is highly memorable because he’s so absurd. Or Achilles is highly memorable because he has these extraordinary superhuman faculties and is a natural character in epic poetry, which requires memorable characters to work.
Modern culture, in which we remember everything, requires highly memorable things to stick in our minds because we’re so unused to remembering things.
Harrington: I remember a brilliant impressionist once reading out the beginning of “The Iliad” in the voice of Donald Trump. And I was listening to it thinking: That’s it! That’s exactly it. That’s astonishing. [Laughs.]
Marriott: That’s amazing. You’re now making me think I would listen to this too. Where can I get it?
Harrington: I wish I could tell you where I found it. But it was just absolutely staggering.
Marriott: An unexpected retirement project. I doubt he could be persuaded to do the whole thing, even a little bit of it.
Harrington: I think it’d be a bit much. It was a great joke. But I’m not sure I’d want to listen to the whole thing.
So you think where the postliterate culture is retrieving some of these larger than life dynamics, some of these heavy characters — you cite Donald Trump as the everybody’s favorite controversial example — if your thesis is right, and I find it persuasive, the end of mass, long-form literacy is going to make us less rational, more visually oriented, perhaps more participatory, more enchanted, if you like, in our relation to each other and to the world and also to politics.
And you’ve cited, again, I think very persuasively, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, as perhaps a sign of things to come — a postmodern autocrat in the sense of operating in a much more visual register, very skillfully through social media, whilst also doing a fairly unembarrassed end run around some of the more textual and deliberative aspects, I think you might say, of democracy as we consider it today.
I found that persuasive because I remember being really struck a year or so ago when I came across a post by Bukele on his social media feed, which is just an extraordinary artifact. His social media game is off the charts. It’s incredibly good. He posted a photo of himself in a crowd, surrounded by his heavies, but also surrounded by clearly adoring supporters. And he’s facing a man who’s got, I assume, his little son on his shoulder, a little boy, maybe 7 or 8, 5, 6 years old, who’s reaching down toward Bukele, who’s reaching up to sort of high-five him.
And there’s a light shining just behind where the two hands are touching. The whole visual image is incredibly painterly. And I looked at it and I thought: That’s the visual register of the premodern world. That’s the iconography of kingship redone in photography in a postmodern key.
I was thinking, this is an astonishing artifact. And it really speaks to the kind of phenomena that you’re describing here, wouldn’t you say?
Marriott: Yes, totally. You make me think of that online phenomenon of modern photo on Instagram versus Renaissance painting. Those two visual worlds have more in common than we sometimes remember.
Harrington: Yes. That’s right. Isn’t there somebody whose bit is football players as classic works of art? [Chuckles.]
Marriott: Yes, exactly. [Chuckles.]
Harrington: And they’re always really good.
Marriott: Yeah. And it’s always persuasive, and I think it’s partly because the point that you make exactly there is that this visual language of power was understood and comprehended in Europe before mass literacy changed our politics and was used effectively by kings. And people are rediscovering the same incredibly persuasive aspects of this visual language of power, almost down to the hand gestures and to the aspect of light, as you mention.
Bukele is an often cited example of what a postliterate politics might look like, because he is famously one of the most followed world leaders on TikTok. And as you say, his TikTok feed, to a sort of woolly liberal, is quite terrifying. This, to me, is a really dramatic way of bringing home the difference between literate and postliterate politics.
If, as I argue in my book, one of the distinctive features of a literate politics is long-form argument, reasoned debate, evidence — a sort of cooler and more rational environment in which politics can take place — then the Bukele TikTok feed almost seems to provide the kind of nightmare counterpoint toward what a visual politics looks like.
Harrington: OK, but I just want to push you on a little bit there.
Marriott: Yes, go on, push me.
Harrington: You write, in the context of Bukele and postmodern autocracy in a visual culture: “There are political systems that prefer their citizens not to think, and they’re called dictatorships.” But I just wanted to submit to you that there’s a difference in kind between political systems where their leaders prefer them not to think or actively obstruct their efforts to think.
You write very movingly about slave owners punishing their slaves physically for trying to learn to read, which is a clear illustration of this sort of tyrannical authority. But surely there’s something different in kind between that and a polity where citizens are not prevented from thinking, but they just don’t want to.
If you have a situation where it’s not that people are being stopped from thinking, but they just don’t want to because they’re too busy scrolling, what if under those circumstances, the least worst option is some kind of a monarch who at least has the best interests of his subjects at heart?
Marriott: To me, that’s very hard to swallow. I’m very pessimistic about the future of democracy.
Harrington: I share your pessimism. But what if the least worst option under the circumstances is in fact a king? I don’t know that I’d want a Bukele in England, but in the context of El Salvador, where the whole country was run by gangs until he came along and shot them all away, if I was a Salvadoran granny, I’d probably see Bukele as on my side.
Marriott: Yes. And I think he’s still pretty popular in El Salvador when it’s polled. I guess the important transformation here is that this visual culture is much more receptive to personality than print culture. It’s hard to be an influencer via a newspaper.
When you are communicating visually and through TikTok and through images, people have much more access to your personality, and I think it supercharges the ability of charismatic personalities and charismatic autocrats to dominate politics.
I would say this is the fundamental theme of democratic decline around the world. The great threat to democracy in the 21st century is not an ideology — I think ideology is perhaps rather print and text-based — but the threat from charismatic personalities.
I am much more pessimistic about autocracy, perhaps. I think all political systems have their problems. Democracy certainly has its problems. I don’t deny that. I think autocracies are full of even worse problems. If you can’t remove someone from power, if there are no checks and balances on that power, you create all kinds of difficulties that are vastly worse than the ones you’d encounter in a democracy.
I also think the idea of a monarch in a modern state is just unworkable. That is no way to run a complex modern state, and I think it will fail.
We live in these unimaginably complex societies, bigger than any of us could get our heads around. For that whole system to depend on one charismatic leader who is running things in this monarchical fashion, as people often say, people refer to repatrimonialization, this idea that modern leaders are behaving like monarchs and everything is based not on an impersonal civil service and appointing people on merit, but through networks of loyalty and kinship and appointing your friends and your family to diplomatic postings and all these themes of autocracy around the world. That is no way to run a complex modern state, and I think it will fail.
Harrington: So we’ve spoken a bit about Bukele as an example of a postmodern autocrat in this much more audiovisual key. Who else is doing this? Can you give me other examples of leaders who are embracing the new postliterate political register?
Marriott: Yeah, I think there are, I wouldn’t quite say ten a penny, but I think this is the main threat to democracy, and you can find them anywhere in the world.
The really obvious example, which one almost shies away from mentioning because it’s so obvious, is Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I think, basically owes his presidency to his complete mastery of television and social media. And talking about someone who can participate with brilliant effectiveness in a visual environment, Trump is just the undisputed master of this.
Other people you could look at: Modi in India. He’s suffered a setback recently, obviously, but he had a real personality cult, and that was really supercharged by social media. I think Modi has his own app through which he communicates to his followers.
Erdogan in Turkey. Orban, obviously now voted out in Hungary, which shows that this trend isn’t completely linear everywhere. All of these people, I think, were drawing on social media and this culture of the image to impose their charisma and authority on the country’s politics and dominate it that way.
One other obvious example would be Putin, who is kind of the pioneer of this, who used TV and photography to ——
Harrington: But you’re making it sound as though this is just a right-wing phenomenon. Is that right? Or can you think of anybody on the left who expresses this trend?
The one that springs to mind for me is the current mayor of New York City, who seems to have a very competent social media game.
Marriott: I think that’s a really good point. One of the things that I mildly regretted looking back on the book, having finished it, was that a lot of the people I’m bashing in the book are 20th- and 21st-century right-wing populists. I have a go at Newt Gingrich. I obviously have a go at Donald Trump.
The argument is not that postliteracy is a political phenomenon. It’s not that it only belongs on the right. I think it’s probably been pioneered on the right, and I think there are more right-wing examples of this because we know, looking around the world, that one of the major divisions in almost every Western country in its democratic politics is education.
And the conservative part of the political spectrum has increasingly become the party of the less well educated, and the liberal party will be the party of the more well educated. And I think it’s kind of for that reason that, because liberals have been historically more tied to literate institutions like universities and newspapers, they have slightly lagged conservatives in moving into this postliterate form of politics, which was pioneered by, you might say, Fox News, conservative talk radio, Twitter as we know it today.
That said, I do not think that this is at all a partisan phenomenon. The example you cited of Mamdani is very relevant. There’s one obviously going on in the United Kingdom. We have a prime minister, Andy Burnham, who is really quite astonishingly good, as everybody says, at TikTok — a first for a Labour leader.
I think postliterate politics is coming for the left and is coming for the liberal left. Although it’s probably pioneered on the right, I think we’re going to see more and more examples, and I think everybody will be doing politics this way in 20 years’ time.
Harrington: This is sounding pretty bleak. You think tyranny is an inevitable end product of our current direction of travel, and it sounds as though your fear is that with an increasingly postliterate population, we may not be able to avert this.
What do you think we can do? What’s the best-case scenario for the future that we’re looking at? Is there a best-case scenario? What do you think we can do, either individually or collectively, to avert some of these nightmare scenarios?
Marriott: Good question. Like you, I’m pessimistic about it. I’ve read this media history, and I’ve thought about the history of where we are through this media theoretical lens, and I think one of the great and perhaps alarming lessons is that I don’t think communications revolutions get reversed.
I don’t think there was any point in history at which you could uninvent the printing press. There may have been Catholic priests in the midst of the Reformation thinking: Let’s just uninvent the printing press and go back to a world in which the Catholic Church and the Catholic hierarchy is undisturbed.
That’s simply not plausible. And I think it’s not plausible to uninvent the iPhone. It’s not plausible to uninvent TV. That can’t happen, and I think it won’t happen. And I think a lot of the political trends away from a literate, deliberative, argumentative, evidenced political discourse, toward one that is dominated by charismatic personalities, is baked into our culture now. We’re pretty far into that story now across the world, and it’s going to continue to play out.
As to what we can do, I’m interested in your view on this. The thing that I think can probably be done as an individual is that people are waking up to the dangers of this postliterate society. I think people are worried about the effects of excessive screen time on their cognitive health.
Individually, some people will probably look at this, our slop-ridden, brain-rotting environment, and think: I’m going to make a conscious effort to read more. I’m going to sit down and make a really tough effort — which is hard when you’ve got a smartphone — to spend an hour reading in the evening.
The analogy that’s often made is the flooding of our nutrition environment in the ’60s and ’70s with junk food. It made a lot of people very fat. It also gave us marathon runners, gym bunnies, and a culture of people who are actively resisting it. And I think there will probably be a culture of active cognitive resistance.
Harrington: It strikes me that, again, the picture that you’re painting here is not dissimilar in some ways to the medieval one, inasmuch as if you have the equivalent of intellectually super fit scholars, and then a very much larger cohort of people who are mostly scrolling.
That perhaps replicates something not unlike the pre-Gutenberg world, where you had a small elite of highly literate scholars and then a vast majority who lived in a much more oral world.
Marriott: Absolutely. Definitely. And if people are going to make this effort to enrich their cognitive environments, I think that’s going to be basically a middle-class phenomenon. It’s going to be relatively well off, relatively well-educated people who are doing that.
Harrington: So you think we just need to build an ark and save as many people as we can?
Marriott: I you’re looking for points of optimism, history takes a long time to unfold. Stagnation is always a possibility. If you’re looking at a point of pessimism, I wonder if the scenario we’re outlining in which we return to this bifurcated information environment — in which you have middle-class people subscribing to newspapers, and participating in this more literate culture — how true that’s even going to be.
I think when you look at what’s going on at universities, universities are rapidly becoming postliterate.
We know that with the advent of generative A.I., you can pretty much get through a degree without writing an essay. We’ve been talking about how you can seem to get through a degree without reading a book, and I wonder if these literate institutions will decay as well, and actually we’ll all be postliterate.
These are the things that we mention when we talk about this literate culture that outlasts this supposed bifurcation of information environments — between your New York Times readers and your people who are getting their news on TikTok. Increasingly, newspapers are full of video.
You open the homepage of a newspaper and you’re looking at video, not at text. And I wonder if perhaps it’s not the case there’ll be a bifurcation, but the educated, well-off people have just simply been lagging a trend, and we might be looking at, we might be, we might see the same story unfold for those people as well.
I think that maybe to me feels more likely now.
Harrington: The flood of slop is coming, and very few will make it onto the ark! Save yourself if you can, and James is here to warn you.
[Marriott chuckles.]
James Marriott, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been fascinating and daunting and concerning.
Marriott: I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you very much for having me.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Muniz, Charlotte Gartenberg and Raina Raskin. It was edited by Victoria Chamberlin. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker and Efim Shapiro. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Dani Dillon, Julian Hackney, Arpita Aneja and Steph Khoury. The supervising editor is Jan Kobal. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, Julie Beer and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Kristin Lin and Andrea Betanzos. The executive producer is Jordana Hochman. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. The head of Opinion is Kathleen Kingsbury.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post TikTok Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages appeared first on New York Times.
