Politics After Literacy

Reading changes your brain. Reading may also be—at least according to Lenin during the rise of socialism—a precursor to revolutionary politics. But what happens when a society moves beyond reading? What happens when streaming video becomes the default mode through which ideas are disseminated? In this essay for the spring issue of Jacobin, Sam Kriss follows that terrifying but seemingly inevitable thought experiment all the way to its slop-infested end.

* Subscription required, but Sam recently shared the piece on his Substack, so you can read it there for free.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate on the same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, “the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. . . .  Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track.” It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t truly vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is “in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.” Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. “Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.” There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Postliterate culture is deeply incurious.