I think the main problem with his core argument as presented is that it is crudely deterministic. The problems said to be associated with forms of technology such as TV or smartphones are presented as intrinsic when, in actual fact, it depends, in large part, on how they are used. You can watch thought-provoking, well-made documentaries on your TV, or you can watch endless/mindless quiz shows. Likewise, you can ‘doomscroll’ or you can enlighten yourself via accessing a treasure trove of valuable information on your smartphone.
Exactly. Apart from making phone calls or sending emails I mainly use my phone for reading Kindle books and newspaper and substack articles. I occasionally watch things on YouTube and have never come across "an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: ‘I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos’ or ‘I cemented a microwave to my head’." There's plenty of interesting and informative stuff on that platform. I don't bother with social media or short-form video. But then I was in my late-thirties when the internet became ubiquitous and feel sorry for the kids brought up in the TikTok era.
That was the point Keith Woods made recently i.e. to say that AI is making us lazier and stupider is far too broad a brush. Closer to the truth is that it is making the lazy and stupid lazier and stupider while it is a godsend to the intellectually voracious.
And though clearly well intentioned this argument is based on the unshakable middle class assumption that books are good for you - therefore everyone must read them. My dad only read the paper, my daughter only reads her phone - but so what? A good analogy is with music - yes, it’s great to sing, play an instrument, whatever - but it doesn’t necessarily make you a better person (see Wagner etc).
Watching my daughter learn to read was instructive - she enjoyed stories but felt no inclination to plough through two hundred pages of text. And no loss as far as I am concerned - just isn’t her thing. That - whisper it - is the majority position. So by all means provide every opportunity but no rending of garments if they are politely declined.
I have to have a smartphone for a few things, but everything else is turned off. No browser. No social apps. And it's locked down with only my wife having the password to unlock it. And I stopped watching TV and movies years ago. My problem is reading Substack essays!
I allow myself one hour (occasionally more) of TV per night, and maybe a movie on Saturday evening when I generally stay home since church is the next day. On nights I don't go out for social reasons I generally take an hour or a more to read in bed before lights out.
Obviously I participate on this blog, and a couple of others (Ed West's and Aaron Renn's mainly). I am on Facebook which I use mainly to keep up with old friends and family in parts distant.
Social life turned inward, and television had a zombifying effect on many; Marriott notes that ‘in 1956 when a technical error delayed the broadcast of ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a third of the audience had simply continued staring blankly at their empty sets until programming resumed’.
My great-grandma, born in 1874, lived with us when I was a small child in the early 1960s. She used to get dressed for bed in front of the gas fire when the ten o'clock news came on, but my mum told me they would have to switch the TV off during this procedure as great-gran would say, 'I'm not getting undressed in front of him.'
These days, she might have a point. If Yakov Smirnov were in the smart tv age, he might say “ In your country, you watch television. In my country, television watches you.”
'...the Arts Council warned against the use of “terms like excellence” which may promote “unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued”.’
I think I might be able to stand the stupid aversion to hierarchies if the word 'unhelpful' wasn't often used to support it. That soppy word always makes me want to shove a cream pie in someone's face.
Re Truman, someone once told me (so I can't verify it or attribute it accurately but it fits in with your description of the man) that when he retired from politics he was asked what he was going to do to fill the time and he responded along the lines of "I've got a lot of books to read."
I've often reflected upon that line when I've considered the post-political careers of many US politicians and that most American of our politicians Tony Blair. How I wished some of them had just done what Roman generals did and simply retire from public life and tend to their farms in the countryside.
Re Marriott. I'm not a Times subscriber so I rarely read his material but when I do I'm consistently impressed by its quality, breadth and soundness - especially given his youth. I recall him talking about his re-reading of many classics and I'm thinking "This lad is about 25 and re-reading stuff I've never read once in 50+ years..."
In short, the two things that I would say about Marriott is that (1) I will definitely read this book at some point and (2) his parents are outstanding.
In fairness to "the phones": they make listening to audiobooks much easier. I probably get through more audiobooks than paper books these days, often in situations (getting dressed, washing the dishes, walking to the bus stop) where reading a paper book would be impossible. (Plus the wife can't complain that I'm cluttering the living room.)
"As literacy has declined, politics has become stupider. Reading Hansard from the 1970s, and comparing it to the level of Parliamentary debate today, is a painful exercise. Classical allusions are gone; metaphor is treated literally, often provoking dim-witted outrage; speaking times continue to shrink as MPs compete in the attention economy."
Richard Hanania made an article this year on how the cult classic "Idiocracy" from 20 years before was in many ways OPTIMISTIC about the direction our species was going!
I love finding magazines from the 50s and 60s in second hand shops. My latest find is a children’s weekly magazine called “Look and Learn” from 1963. It contains a smorgasbord of learning topics such as ‘ Our friend the Horse’, ‘Focus on the Atom’, ‘Caradoc the Ancient King of Britain’, a ‘Quick Quiz’ and some fun stuff (Billy Bunter and Pets Corner). The quiz was intriguing: 8 sections covering People, Music, Geography, Legend, History, Art, Natural History, Geography. I have to admit I failed miserably. For example one of the art questions: ‘Pieter Brueghel The Elder had two famous sons. What were their names?’ Another Natural History question: ‘The onion belongs to the same family as a well known flower. Which flower? It’s not just the breadth of knowledge but the depth! I can’t help thinking reading this magazine weekly would have taken children considerable time and concentration.
I feel this so much now I have joined a (non-fiction) book club with friends I have a lot in common with, meaning we exclusively pick books we all find interesting. And yet my 'did not finish' books pile up as I simply no longer have the mental stamina.
James Donaldson has just written a novel with James Patterson, which he promoted with the following horrific tweet "Growing up I thought books were boring, in reality I just didn’t read anything that actually interested me. Which is why I teamed up with James Patterson to write The Most Dangerous Games! For many people this might be the first book they actually read (and hopefully enjoy haha) give it a read and tell me what you think :D"
Re: Donald Trump, meanwhile, is so averse to reading that aides recall that he cannot even make it through one-page memos
Trump is also 80 years old-- he is definitely no product of the Digital Age. His aversion to reading does not stem from the online world. Many of us in the pre-Internet days probably knew people who never opened book after their school days.
I dont think we will have a dark age. We are too far technologically advanced, with mass printing and digitisation meaning most lost knowledge can be recovered by relatively few people. The previous dark ages came about because knowledge could only be stored at considerable expense.
I think another scenario hinted at in the post is more likely: the elite will break away from wider society, which will become practically unendurable to people of taste and genuine intelligence (indeed, already often is).
This will become accelerated by AI, which in addition to feeding the masses a diet of addictive, cheap slop will concentrate wealth further in the hands of the elite.
Liberal democracy may continue nominally for a while, but in reality societies will become more hierarchical and authoritarian, in part out of necessity to control the culturally degraded and discordant masses, in part because it suits the elite anyway. We may see the further cementation of a “managed democracy” where anything important is decided privately behind the scenes by elite factions, public politics is a theatre and the media is relegated to the role of dim-witted lapdog.
High culture and knowledge may become essentially esoteric, excluding the masses entirely. We see signs of this already in dubious elite claims regarding “disinformation”, ie truth forbidden to the masses and midwit interfacing layer.
Interesting. And the Dark Ages is one of those eras where the range slides around wildly. It really IMO only applies to Britannia/England between 450AD (when the Roman elite evaporates) and 597AD (when St Augustine arrives in Canterbury on a mission to(re)convert the heathens to Christianity). Roman records and traditions carried on in Constantinople and even in places like Gaul.
Short of something truly catastrophic that leaves too many bodies for the survivors to bury we will not have a dark age. The term does mean more than just "civilizational era I dislike".
Having recently re-read Postman I was amazed at how prophetic he was despite that fact that he was referring to television. Re-engaging with Christopher Lasch is much the same.
I’m constantly amazed at how little supposedly educated know.
My favourite moment of stupidity was the Canadian parliament applauding a Ukrainian who had fought against the Russians in WW2. I remember hearing about it and thinking “what the &@$¥, does anyone know history in Canada?!”
The Soviets were tacit allies of the Nazis for a while. They cared nothing for the west, only for spreading Bolshevism.
Communist parties all over the world sabotaged the war effort, calling it an ‘imperialist war’. Soviet oil was shipped to Germany, and used to bomb London. Official Party propaganda started hinting that a lot of international bankers had stated the war for profit, many of whom were ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ (do a little search on that phrase, if you like). Due to the Nazi-Soviet pact, Churchill encouraged volunteers to fight for Finland, and regretted the geography made it too hard to ship supplies.
Even after his country was attacked, Stalin seriously thought about signing a seperate peace, twice, leaving the Allies in the lurch, and the Nazis to continue their social improvement programs.
No one owes the Soviets anything. They would have let the Nazis conquer Europe, if not for the double cross. Expecting world revolution to then break out - what a hope.
That’s who they were. Some nationalists, in the lands the Bolsheviks ruled, thought they could play that game too, remembering the relatively benign actions of the Kaisers troops. They had been warned about the nature of the Nazi regime of course, but thought it was more of the Party’s lies. After they learned better, they turned against the invaders, who I think jailed their leader.
Quite a lot there I agree with, although Stalin clearly didn’t “let the Nazis conquer Europe” since Moscow and Stalingrad were themselves in Europe. The Communists didn’t sabotage the war effort after Barbarossa (the French Resistance within France was 99% driven from Moscow, as were most partisan groups) although the Left in Britain for example had indeed tied itself in knots in the late 1930s over “imperialist” defence spending increases and then the pact to split Poland, which of course as you say was a green light for Hitler to go west, as well as being a land grab for Stalin. A little known aspect is that the Soviets pinned down Japanese troops in Manchuria who would otherwise have been deployed against the US in the Pacific - I suspect that was Stalin’s main lever to use with the US government.
Reading this, I somehow felt a pleasant, almost perverse sense of satisfaction that Europeans are finally realizing what it means to live in a collapsing culture and a self-destructive literary milieu. (I’m referring, of course, to the modern Arab world.)
I think the main problem with his core argument as presented is that it is crudely deterministic. The problems said to be associated with forms of technology such as TV or smartphones are presented as intrinsic when, in actual fact, it depends, in large part, on how they are used. You can watch thought-provoking, well-made documentaries on your TV, or you can watch endless/mindless quiz shows. Likewise, you can ‘doomscroll’ or you can enlighten yourself via accessing a treasure trove of valuable information on your smartphone.
Exactly. Apart from making phone calls or sending emails I mainly use my phone for reading Kindle books and newspaper and substack articles. I occasionally watch things on YouTube and have never come across "an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: ‘I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos’ or ‘I cemented a microwave to my head’." There's plenty of interesting and informative stuff on that platform. I don't bother with social media or short-form video. But then I was in my late-thirties when the internet became ubiquitous and feel sorry for the kids brought up in the TikTok era.
That was the point Keith Woods made recently i.e. to say that AI is making us lazier and stupider is far too broad a brush. Closer to the truth is that it is making the lazy and stupid lazier and stupider while it is a godsend to the intellectually voracious.
Analogous to “Guns don’t kill - people do.”
And though clearly well intentioned this argument is based on the unshakable middle class assumption that books are good for you - therefore everyone must read them. My dad only read the paper, my daughter only reads her phone - but so what? A good analogy is with music - yes, it’s great to sing, play an instrument, whatever - but it doesn’t necessarily make you a better person (see Wagner etc).
Watching my daughter learn to read was instructive - she enjoyed stories but felt no inclination to plough through two hundred pages of text. And no loss as far as I am concerned - just isn’t her thing. That - whisper it - is the majority position. So by all means provide every opportunity but no rending of garments if they are politely declined.
You don't think it is quite important for your daughter to read?
I have to have a smartphone for a few things, but everything else is turned off. No browser. No social apps. And it's locked down with only my wife having the password to unlock it. And I stopped watching TV and movies years ago. My problem is reading Substack essays!
I allow myself one hour (occasionally more) of TV per night, and maybe a movie on Saturday evening when I generally stay home since church is the next day. On nights I don't go out for social reasons I generally take an hour or a more to read in bed before lights out.
Sounds reasonable. Do you have a smartphone, any social media?
Obviously I participate on this blog, and a couple of others (Ed West's and Aaron Renn's mainly). I am on Facebook which I use mainly to keep up with old friends and family in parts distant.
Social life turned inward, and television had a zombifying effect on many; Marriott notes that ‘in 1956 when a technical error delayed the broadcast of ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a third of the audience had simply continued staring blankly at their empty sets until programming resumed’.
My great-grandma, born in 1874, lived with us when I was a small child in the early 1960s. She used to get dressed for bed in front of the gas fire when the ten o'clock news came on, but my mum told me they would have to switch the TV off during this procedure as great-gran would say, 'I'm not getting undressed in front of him.'
These days, she might have a point. If Yakov Smirnov were in the smart tv age, he might say “ In your country, you watch television. In my country, television watches you.”
'...the Arts Council warned against the use of “terms like excellence” which may promote “unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued”.’
I think I might be able to stand the stupid aversion to hierarchies if the word 'unhelpful' wasn't often used to support it. That soppy word always makes me want to shove a cream pie in someone's face.
Lol
Re Truman, someone once told me (so I can't verify it or attribute it accurately but it fits in with your description of the man) that when he retired from politics he was asked what he was going to do to fill the time and he responded along the lines of "I've got a lot of books to read."
I've often reflected upon that line when I've considered the post-political careers of many US politicians and that most American of our politicians Tony Blair. How I wished some of them had just done what Roman generals did and simply retire from public life and tend to their farms in the countryside.
Re Marriott. I'm not a Times subscriber so I rarely read his material but when I do I'm consistently impressed by its quality, breadth and soundness - especially given his youth. I recall him talking about his re-reading of many classics and I'm thinking "This lad is about 25 and re-reading stuff I've never read once in 50+ years..."
In short, the two things that I would say about Marriott is that (1) I will definitely read this book at some point and (2) his parents are outstanding.
In fairness to "the phones": they make listening to audiobooks much easier. I probably get through more audiobooks than paper books these days, often in situations (getting dressed, washing the dishes, walking to the bus stop) where reading a paper book would be impossible. (Plus the wife can't complain that I'm cluttering the living room.)
"As literacy has declined, politics has become stupider. Reading Hansard from the 1970s, and comparing it to the level of Parliamentary debate today, is a painful exercise. Classical allusions are gone; metaphor is treated literally, often provoking dim-witted outrage; speaking times continue to shrink as MPs compete in the attention economy."
Richard Hanania made an article this year on how the cult classic "Idiocracy" from 20 years before was in many ways OPTIMISTIC about the direction our species was going!
https://unherd.com/2026/03/the-great-stupidization/
I love finding magazines from the 50s and 60s in second hand shops. My latest find is a children’s weekly magazine called “Look and Learn” from 1963. It contains a smorgasbord of learning topics such as ‘ Our friend the Horse’, ‘Focus on the Atom’, ‘Caradoc the Ancient King of Britain’, a ‘Quick Quiz’ and some fun stuff (Billy Bunter and Pets Corner). The quiz was intriguing: 8 sections covering People, Music, Geography, Legend, History, Art, Natural History, Geography. I have to admit I failed miserably. For example one of the art questions: ‘Pieter Brueghel The Elder had two famous sons. What were their names?’ Another Natural History question: ‘The onion belongs to the same family as a well known flower. Which flower? It’s not just the breadth of knowledge but the depth! I can’t help thinking reading this magazine weekly would have taken children considerable time and concentration.
I feel this so much now I have joined a (non-fiction) book club with friends I have a lot in common with, meaning we exclusively pick books we all find interesting. And yet my 'did not finish' books pile up as I simply no longer have the mental stamina.
James Donaldson has just written a novel with James Patterson, which he promoted with the following horrific tweet "Growing up I thought books were boring, in reality I just didn’t read anything that actually interested me. Which is why I teamed up with James Patterson to write The Most Dangerous Games! For many people this might be the first book they actually read (and hopefully enjoy haha) give it a read and tell me what you think :D"
Re: Donald Trump, meanwhile, is so averse to reading that aides recall that he cannot even make it through one-page memos
Trump is also 80 years old-- he is definitely no product of the Digital Age. His aversion to reading does not stem from the online world. Many of us in the pre-Internet days probably knew people who never opened book after their school days.
I dont think we will have a dark age. We are too far technologically advanced, with mass printing and digitisation meaning most lost knowledge can be recovered by relatively few people. The previous dark ages came about because knowledge could only be stored at considerable expense.
I think another scenario hinted at in the post is more likely: the elite will break away from wider society, which will become practically unendurable to people of taste and genuine intelligence (indeed, already often is).
This will become accelerated by AI, which in addition to feeding the masses a diet of addictive, cheap slop will concentrate wealth further in the hands of the elite.
Liberal democracy may continue nominally for a while, but in reality societies will become more hierarchical and authoritarian, in part out of necessity to control the culturally degraded and discordant masses, in part because it suits the elite anyway. We may see the further cementation of a “managed democracy” where anything important is decided privately behind the scenes by elite factions, public politics is a theatre and the media is relegated to the role of dim-witted lapdog.
High culture and knowledge may become essentially esoteric, excluding the masses entirely. We see signs of this already in dubious elite claims regarding “disinformation”, ie truth forbidden to the masses and midwit interfacing layer.
Interesting. And the Dark Ages is one of those eras where the range slides around wildly. It really IMO only applies to Britannia/England between 450AD (when the Roman elite evaporates) and 597AD (when St Augustine arrives in Canterbury on a mission to(re)convert the heathens to Christianity). Roman records and traditions carried on in Constantinople and even in places like Gaul.
Short of something truly catastrophic that leaves too many bodies for the survivors to bury we will not have a dark age. The term does mean more than just "civilizational era I dislike".
Having recently re-read Postman I was amazed at how prophetic he was despite that fact that he was referring to television. Re-engaging with Christopher Lasch is much the same.
Postman Pat?
I’m constantly amazed at how little supposedly educated know.
My favourite moment of stupidity was the Canadian parliament applauding a Ukrainian who had fought against the Russians in WW2. I remember hearing about it and thinking “what the &@$¥, does anyone know history in Canada?!”
Apparently not.
Canada’s brightest and best. Good grief!
The Soviets were tacit allies of the Nazis for a while. They cared nothing for the west, only for spreading Bolshevism.
Communist parties all over the world sabotaged the war effort, calling it an ‘imperialist war’. Soviet oil was shipped to Germany, and used to bomb London. Official Party propaganda started hinting that a lot of international bankers had stated the war for profit, many of whom were ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ (do a little search on that phrase, if you like). Due to the Nazi-Soviet pact, Churchill encouraged volunteers to fight for Finland, and regretted the geography made it too hard to ship supplies.
Even after his country was attacked, Stalin seriously thought about signing a seperate peace, twice, leaving the Allies in the lurch, and the Nazis to continue their social improvement programs.
No one owes the Soviets anything. They would have let the Nazis conquer Europe, if not for the double cross. Expecting world revolution to then break out - what a hope.
That’s who they were. Some nationalists, in the lands the Bolsheviks ruled, thought they could play that game too, remembering the relatively benign actions of the Kaisers troops. They had been warned about the nature of the Nazi regime of course, but thought it was more of the Party’s lies. After they learned better, they turned against the invaders, who I think jailed their leader.
Quite a lot there I agree with, although Stalin clearly didn’t “let the Nazis conquer Europe” since Moscow and Stalingrad were themselves in Europe. The Communists didn’t sabotage the war effort after Barbarossa (the French Resistance within France was 99% driven from Moscow, as were most partisan groups) although the Left in Britain for example had indeed tied itself in knots in the late 1930s over “imperialist” defence spending increases and then the pact to split Poland, which of course as you say was a green light for Hitler to go west, as well as being a land grab for Stalin. A little known aspect is that the Soviets pinned down Japanese troops in Manchuria who would otherwise have been deployed against the US in the Pacific - I suspect that was Stalin’s main lever to use with the US government.
That’s the point - sabotage the allies till _ after_ the double cross. Then,pretend they were for the allies all along. Orwell satirized it.
Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
And Moscow and Leningrad could have fallen. That was the possibility referred to.
It was a fascinating and dreadful conflict. As you say, much switching of allegiances as time went on.
It was a three sided war. There were also volunteers for Finland who fought the Russians in 1940.
But they weren’t joining the Nazis to do it, like the Ukrainians were.
If the Nazis had played their cards better they could have waltzed right over the USSR by claiming to liberators and treating the people decently.
Then they would not have been Nazis.
Then they would not have been Nazis.
And unfortunately, the reading/TV watching gap seems to have become more pronounced among conservatives:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1938092561715105892
Reading this, I somehow felt a pleasant, almost perverse sense of satisfaction that Europeans are finally realizing what it means to live in a collapsing culture and a self-destructive literary milieu. (I’m referring, of course, to the modern Arab world.)