The Dawn of Post-Literacy

In the early 2020s, FTX founder (and eventually convicted criminal) Sam Bankman-Fried remarked, "I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

A lot of folks in the "I write and read things" space reacted with incredulity and mocking. I did too. But I think Bankman-Fried's sentiment is important and worth taking seriously. It's more broadly pervasive than folks who have a stake in reading and writing might want it to be.

Recalling SBF's comments was a coda on a series of "noticings" in 2024, starting with a silly but terrifying and thought provoking article about Star Wars by Ryan Britt: "Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy Are Probably Illiterate".

Here's his take:

[F]inding a science fiction or fantasy universe richly populated with its own indigenous art—and more specifically, its own literature—is rare. As Lev Grossman has pointed out, “No one reads books in Narnia.” Harry Potter himself doesn’t really have a favorite novelist, and most of the stuff Tolkien’s Gandalf reads comes in the form of scrolls and prophecies…not exactly pleasure reading. Fantasy heroes don’t seem to read for pleasure very often, but usually you get the impression that they can read.

[But if] you simply stick to the Star Wars films, there is no news media of any kind. Despite the fact that we see cameras circling around Queen/Senator Amidala in the Senate, they don’t seem to be actually feeding this information anywhere. Are they security cameras, like the ones that recorded Anakin killing little tiny Jedi kiddies? This theory achieves a little more weight when you consider that the conversation in The Phantom Menace Senate scene is all about how Queen Amidala can’t verify the existence of a coming invasion. She’s got no pictures, and stranger still, no reputable news source has even written about the blockade of Naboo. Even if we put forth that cameras in Star Wars are only for security and not for news, that still leaves the question of why there are no journalists. A possible answer: it’s because most people don’t read, which means that over time most people in this universe don’t ever learn to read.

Britt continues to list off example after example of functional illiteracy, illustrating a culture where there are almost no books, buttons and interfaces are all pictograms, almost all communication and record keeping is through audio and video (hologram), and society has long fallen into a "highly functional illiteracy... Surely, for these cultures to progress and become spacefaring entities, they needed written language at some point. But now, the necessity to actually learn reading and writing is fading away. Those who know how to build and repair droids and computers probably have better jobs than those who can’t. This is why there seems to be so much poverty in Star Wars: widespread ignorance."

Here's the kicker:

Maybe the humans and aliens populating A Galaxy, Far, Far Away are totally boring people who simply used the written word for the purposes of getting their basic culture off the ground – for commerce only, rather than for reflection or pleasure.

The final nail in the coffin which proves widespread illiteracy is how fast stories of the Jedi mutate from a fact of everyday life into legend, seemingly overnight. This is because the average citizen of the galaxy in Star Wars receives his/her/its information orally, from stories told by spacers in bars, farmboys on arid planets, orphans in crime-ridden cities, etc. Without written documents, these stories easily become perverted and altered quickly. This is the same way Palpatine was able to take over in Revenge of the Sith. He simply said “the Jedi tried to kill me” and everyone was like, “okay.”

Britt wrote this in 2012 but it's too close to home in 2025. While you could read it as a satirical article poking fun at a made-up universe, I think there's a non-zero probability that it's describing what could be a realistic scenario for our society as well. For example, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber makes a not dissimilar argument that commerce and exchange (and more specifically, the element of debt/indebtedness) drove a lot of development language and culture. This matches some of the archeological record as being dominated by technical texts and record keeping logs (though love poems and records of rulers also exist).

That's ancient history, but it's a good starting starting point. It gets us from pre-literacy to literate culture, and a reason (however contested) for that transition. Getting from literate to post-literate isn't as straightforward but we're seeing the start of that trend. For example, consider the thesis in Samo Burja's "The Youtube Revolution in Skill Acquisition":

Yego [a olympic javelin thrower]’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it.

I love that framing: "tacit knowledge as an intellectual dark matter", underpinning most of our world but not documentable by text. Tying it back to illiteracy in Star Wars for a second, this describes a lot of that galaxy's operational knowledge: tacit knowledge in repair, manual work, trade, business, learned through apprenticeship or holograms. Tacit knowledge is foundational to expertise development and skill in business that CommonCog founder Cedric Chin wrote a whole series on tacit knowledge that has bled into business expertise, accelerated learning, case studies of asian conglomerates, decision making, and more. Tacit knowledge is the truth behind "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

Burja posits that Youtube's rise for skills acquisition is facilitated by (1) cheap, quality digital cameras with mass adoption, (2) mass broadband internet access with uploading/transmitting video at scale, (3) search engines to help surface those videos, and (4) the ubiquity of portable screens.

He also makes the case that this is a net good thing: it has allowed more knowledge transfer, faster skills development, more advanced skills development. It has been a net enabler in knowledge transfer, which is generally a good thing: more people, more learning, faster learning.

So that gives us the starting point (text-based literacy development led at least partially but critically in order to aid commerce and record keeping) and a potential jumping-into-the-future point (tacit knowledge, more pervasive and practical than written knowledge, is best distributed through non-text sources).

Now hold that thought for a second.

Aside from "video are being used for learning", there's been a whole lot of chatter over the last few years about how online information-seeking behaviors are changing. In 2022-23, it was all about how Youtube and TikTok are going to destroy Google's search monopoly. While people have been talking about a "pivot to video" for years (including from one blovious self-styled Ceasar) I've personally seen amongst both tech-literate and non-tech-literate friends steadily shifting their information seeking to Youtube/Tiktok-first approaches... and how even with text searches as a starting point, the ultimate destination is often video content.

The narrative shifted in 2024-25: it became about AI-first search with OpenAI and Perplexity leading the conversations (the TikTok ban didn't hurt), but vibe stayed consistent: it was no longer about text-based research (in the way that "ten blue links" isn't radically different from a pulling "ten books on a table" in a research library), but about being given the answers... something that Google had been trying to do with generative summaries for years (and been lambasted for on their various implementations). Kind of like the heart of the Jobs To Be Done framework: you're looking to hang up a picture, not to use a tool to make a hole in the wall. So with information-seeking behavior: you're looking for an answer, not a set of things to comb through.

There's a lot of folks who argue that generative text summaries are a poor substitute for research and shouldn't be trusted, but I want to wave those concerns away as theoretical. It's like the 2000s all over again, when teacher and professors would rally against wikipedia as a valid source. People will use AI answers without additional verification in the same way that people use Wikipedia without usually clicking through to the sources, unless the information is wildly and obviously incorrect. Even with advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that annotates text with source materials, the thesis holds – how often are you diving deep into those sources to verify that the text matches, when most questions have trivial stakes for accuracy? (Trivial being contextualized against, say, medical decision-making.)

Be honest: how often do you consider it, but only do the most superficial spot checking?

Be honest: how often is that spot checking just a glance to make sure the source URL looks reputable enough?

It doesn't even matter that LLMs are bad at summarization, their most common use case. It's doesn't matter that what they are doing is truncating and compressing information instead of summarization (which requires some understanding of implicit messaging and causal relationships in text), if what the user is looking for is a compressed answer to a query that meets the "good enough" bar.

So we have two trends in learning: answer-first interfaces, and video for skills acquisition and information transfer. Couple that with voice-first interfaces (Alexa, Google, Siri, and all the LLMs doing audio work), and you've got the recipe for post-literacy in the sense of a strong decreasing reliance on text (Terminal to GUI, anyone?) in favor of graphical and audio interfaces.

That gets us to "post-literacy" as a non-hypothetical evolutionary endpoint if trends persist. So the next logical question is, "Are those trends actually persisting (at least prevalent enough)?" Given that this is a blog post and not a formal paper for publication, I'll stake a "yes" in the ground. It's my opinion and particularly my vibes-based opinion (the word of late 2024, eh?).

Here are the receipts for my "yes":

• "Less Writing" in Coding
  The growth of legitimate AI-first coding (not just fancy auto-complete). As in, "tell an AI to build a program... and it will". Maybe we're not on full-on "rebuild SalesForce" yet, but we're getting there. For example: "How WikiTok Was Created":
  
  > Gemal started his project at 12:30 am, and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 am and posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTok on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where it topped the site’s list of daily news items. “The entire thing is only several hundred lines of code, and Claude wrote the vast majority of it,” Gemal told Ars. “AI helped me ship really really fast and just capitalize on the initial viral tweet asking for Wikipedia with scrolling.”
  
  That's 90 minutes from idea to full working MVP. Forget Notion and Airtable prototypes. My own experience matches this: I made a robust google chrome widget for extracting information from websites in ... 20 minutes. 60 minutes all together for troubleshooting, testing, and further customization.
• Less Writing, Period
  Non-tech fields are impacted by this as well as we see mass layoffs for content creators, starting primarily with text-based creators (sorry to all my copywriting friends out of jobs posting in LinkedIn).
• The Covid Dip
  Covid and school lockdowns led the way for accelerated transitions to video-based learning, which in turn have driven dips in literacy and reading skills. You can do a quick search on this and pull up 20 different articles highlighting it, but here's just one from the New York Times: "America's Children's Reading Skills Reach New Lows" (2025).
• The Reading Dip More Broadly
  And it's not just children: just a few months ago, the Atlantic published a viral and controversial article about "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books":
  
  > Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
  
  This couples nicely with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' survey on how adults spend their leasure time (20-30 minutes per day on reading, which holds true for gender, age, and education level compared to watching TV or partaking in phsical activity; the two outliers being people over 70 years old and people with advanced degrees) and with "Reading for pleasure is going down" from the Pew Research Center... in 2023:

• Alternatives to Reading For Pleasure
  In terms of reading for pleasure, adults are spending 2-10x the amount of time on alternatives such as videogames and watching television. TV has had a lot written about it – we're in a peak golden age of TV drama, or so I'm told – but I've also noticed a trend of "visual novels" and gaming as quality alternatives to the role fiction, epics, and mythologies may have filled in the past. I've come across an entire genre of narrative games / visual novels that are better than most novels/pleasure reading I've done in a decade. This has included Citizen Sleeper (1 & 2), Disco Elysium, and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim as the more visual-novel end of the spectrum. It also includes God of War (and sequel), Death Stranding, The Last of Us (Part 1, Part 2), Horizon Zero Dawn (and sequel), and Cyberpunk 2077 (go ahead and hate on it) as the more game-but-with-a-beefy-story end of the spectrum. I've been happily engrossed in many of these for 40-60 hours at a time, longer than I spend on books. (With some irony, Star Wars Outlaws comes to mind as a game with an embarrassingly cheap and lazy story, for all the richness of that world and its impetus for this whole post).
• Banning the Books!
  Meanwhile, we're also seeing an increase in book bannings across the country. The destruction of books and knowledge isn't anything new (I wave Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden and A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez as guideposts to that), but it is troubling when viewed alongside the decreasing literacy trends.
• Broad Attacks on Humanities and Post-Primary Education
  And need I remind any reader on the prolonged (decade-plus) attack on teaching arts and humanities in both K-12 and undergraduate levels, in favor of STEM or vocational subjects? And related, the current administration’s efforts to shut down the Department of Education, which will likely affect the support that exists for undergraduate and graduate education via student loan distributions?
• Do Books Even Work?
  Lastly, "Why Books Don't Work" makes a compelling case that the core concept of learning from books – that "people absorb knowledge by reading sentences" is also likely an inefficient axiom, especially in light of Burja's aforementioned article on skills acquisition. It's worth a full (and nuanced) read, because it makes the case that while books are an amazing store of information, they're very inefficient for learning, and lack of replicability (books as education work for some people, some of the time – which research backs up with studies on differences in people's learning styles).

Does this mean that we're all about to stop reading and switch to holograms and become an illiterate society? I don't think so. It's worth emphasizing a difference between illiterate and post-literate, though with a long enough time horizon they may end up in the same place. Text has been reinvented multiple times through history, and will probably continue to to be naturally reinvented as a low-tech communication and documentation fallback. So has centralization and control over access to education and subsequent diminishment of literacy as a political policy.

What’s different in this go-around is that there are environmental differences that trend a person who doesn't read from the illiterate (i.e., "unable to read or write/having little or no formal education/marked as inferior") to the post-literate (i.e., "educated and informed but lacking traditionally-measured text-based literacy skills"). That's Burja's identification of four trends for why Youtube is creating a revolution in learning tacit knowledge. So I don't want this to be read as "we're getting dumber" even if the original Star Wars reference alludes to the general poverty of the galaxy, and poverty and illiteracy have historical gone hand in hand.

I'd argue the opposite – the speed of development of skills and expertise and the range of basic knowledge available (and built upon) is tremendously faster/larger than anything that has come before us. I don't believe literacy-based intelligence assessments such as reading comprehension tests capture this well, and may in fact show a general decline, but that's because those tests aren't keeping up as an effective way of evaluating a post-literate society.

In that sense, lamenting a decrease in reading comprehension at the dawn of post-literacy is like lamenting the decline of oral culture at the dawn of mass literacy. Or, it's like professors and teachers complaining about wikipedia (or rather, the "Internet") being an unreliable source in the early 2000s and preventing it from being used. There's value in being able to write and read and research on your own without computer aid, just like there's value in handwriting and being able to compose your own essay on a topic. But we shouldn't conflate what's valuable about those activities with doing those activities for their own sake. Being able to compose (or understand) a well-reasoned and well-argued position on a topic is not the same as measuring your ability to write a 5-paragraph structured essay, even if the 5-paragraph essay may have been a good proxy template for evaluating your reasoning and arguing abilities. I'd even go so far as to argue that the ability to transformation and verify AI-generated raw content for an applied purpose is probably the "next step" comprehension assessment we should be moving towards; it requires the same critical thinking skills, even if you use more AI to accomplish it.

So my general argument – besides that we seem to be trending in a post-literate direction – is that the primacy of text-based literacy may be a historical aberration, given a long enough timeline of technology development. As in, the literacy that has underpinned most of our recorded knowledge and subsequently the grand measure of culture today might be just a stepping stone to a better version of what came before it. And that's... weird. At least for me.

So, it's an observation. It may also be in itself a compelling narrative with cherry-picked facts, rationalizing a neat opinion. But I’m taking it quite seriously, even if it isn't immediately useful (or possibly even correct - the factfulness of an idea does not always correlate with its usefulness).

That said, I'm still figuring out what to do with it as an observation.

One approach is in the vein of "is blogging/writing still useful in the age of AI/Video"? I think so. There's still business utility in it – creating a documented persona, building a following, facilitating asynchronous communications with low production costs, etc. It may not be the most effective way to do things, but it's still an avenue in the way that releasing music on vinyl is still an avenue.

Another answer is that yes, writing is useful for organizing and clarifying thoughts. I write to figure out what I think. Sometimes it's more typing than "writing", because the process of putting things down is the process of thinking. That's what results in "it's easier to write something long than to write something short," to paraphrase Mark Twain. Or as Joan Didion quipped, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means."

But if I was a speculative venture kind of guy, here are the threads I'd pull at and extrapolations I'd take a serious look at:

• Training and Education, Vocational
  Peering down the MasterClass/Khan Academy rabbit hole, but for vocational training and skills. I.e., "How TikTok is changing the Blue Collar Trades" and "Blue Collar Workers are the New Social Media Stars". I'd also take a second look at what private equity is doing in rolling up blue-collar businesses (something Matt Stoller had written a lot about in 2023-24) with an eye towards vocational education and staffing pipelines. Yes, Community's Greendale Air Conditioning Repair School comes to mind.
• Training and Education, Executive
  Peering down the Lia Dibello / ACSI Labs, FutureView rabbit hole to figure out how recreating physical environments and business loops virtually can help with building accelerating iterative loops with fast feedback and replicability for training, practice, expertise development at leadership levels. I'd love to see some commodification to more broadly apply some of the bespoke work they're doing.
• Hardware/Software, Commercialization and Commodification: I think in the next 5 years, we're going to see a lot more embedded AI models in hardware. This will be driven by faster cycle time to build and compress models that can run locally (Llama, DeepSeek), as well as increases in chip capacity and decreases in their cost and size (Apple Silicon is leading the way but I expect there to be Nvidia-quality Raspberry Pis at some point that can run local models without breaking a sweat. If not, someone should start get on that!), and the commodification of applied AI modules (i.e., machine vision/video processing, audio processing). I think Humane and Rabbit R1 were ahead of thier time (and an aberration on form), and that we'll see more things like actually-smart appliances (i.e., a fridge that can adjust cooling based on sensors and manage a real-time log of what's inside at any time?).
• Hardware/Software, Robotics: One of the biggest gaps in AI is their inability to interact with the world ("agentification" notwithstanding). The gap is that there's only so much that can be learned from text without engaging with the world (a thesis that makes a lot of sense considering all the stuff we just talked about re: tacit knowledge as intellectual dark matter). As an illustration, one recent research paper asks "How Large are Lions?" and posits that it takes an LLM/NLP system a massive quantity of information to create probabilistic estimates of the size of lions relative to other animals (i.e., wolves), but anyone with vision can just look at a lion relative to the environment and immediately understand their size (a tiny dataset). So this is where having AI process and react to real-world input is extremely interesting, and we're already seeing where this is going with things like Google's Gemini Robotics division. In the spirit of this post starting with Star Wars, I think recreating a fully functional C3P0 or R2D2 today is not just possible, but probable and likely even unimaginative.
• On Demand Media: This is the dumbest forecast, but I think we've only scratched the surface of what's possible with generative media (art, video, audio, text). If I were at Netflix (for their user data) or a broadcast station (with a massive media archive), I'd currently be over-investing in AI models to try to generate on-demand shows, episodes, news, and more. I'd be pitching the board on a vision of "Imagine sitting down on your couch and asking your TV, 'play me a scifi romcom in the style of nora ephron but with aliens and john-wick style fights, but it needs to be an hour and a half because I need to go to sleep early so skip the exposition and make the dialogue very clear' ... and getting exactly that." I've already tried this with folk tales and bedtime stories, and I've seen versions of this used by creative directors for exploratory work. I'm bullish on this because unlike the requirements for veracity and verifiability in non-fiction, generating fiction only requires quality and internal consistency.
• The Implications of Post-Literacy on LLM AI Models
  ... particularly in what happens with model collapse as AI slop floods the training data and people move to post-literacy. I'd spend a lot of cycles figuring out how to do for audio and video content what was already done for written content.

So those are some initial thoughts on how to carpe the post-literacy diem, but the internet is far and wide and smart and I'm sure someone will message me with better ideas as soon at this goes out into the world.

But in the meantime, luddite that I am, I'm going back to reading a book for pleasure.