There was a curious detail in a September 2022 profile of Sam Bankman-Fried — the now-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, recently convicted of money-laundering and fraud — that began doing the rounds shortly after the stunning collapse of his house of crypto-cards in November 2022. At one point, Bankman-Fried said to its author, Adam Fisher:
“I would never read a book … 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 f***d up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
It is a fascinating admission, not least because of the insight it provides onto the world envisioned, and inhabited, by the tech titans, data engineers, and platform capitalists that now hold sway over so much of our common life. Books, Bankman-Fried seems to feel, are little more than bearers of information, which is best gleaned as quickly as possible. So why read a book when a blog post will do? Why labour through a narrative or tarry with the seductions of painstaking argument, when other media permit us to skip straight to the point?
This is a view of the world characterised by (mere) utility; it is a world of ends, not means. Which is not to say it is a view of the world that is devoid of ethics (after all, Bankman-Fried has been a vocal proponent of “effective altruism”, to which he donated sizable portions of his allegedly ill-gotten gains), but it is a world lacking any sense of the value of the moral faculties of imagination, empathy, insight — faculties which can only be cultivated through certain practices of disciplined attentiveness. It is little wonder, then, that the techno-utopias engineered by the lords of Silicon Valley seem to understand so little about the realities of human communication, longing, and limits — a trait diagnosed with particular acuity by Dave Eggers in his novels The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021).
Increasing numbers of us, it seems, have little time for books. We have little patience for the rigours of reading, preferring instead the frictionless activities of scanning, skimming, scrolling, swiping. We have little appetite for blocks of text that demand a certain quality of attention, and would rather bite-size collections of words — usually interspersed with images, pull-quotes, promos, and other distractions designed to break up the tedium of even so meagre a body of writing — that offer up their meaning at a glance. In other words, we prefer words we simply have to look at, rather than read. Even the popularity of audiobooks and podcasts may well point to the onset of a post-literate age in which written words are reduced to the status of emojis, pictographs bearing a kind of emotional charge. It is a crushing irony that the era of ubiquitous screens, which have saturated our lives with words to a degree that is heretofore unimaginable, should be characterised by what we could call widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that make up the habit of deep reading.
When he was trying to make sense of the peculiar process involved in reading-with-understanding, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it this way: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling [mit Empfindung], surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines [die Zeilen … überfliege] for information.” The “something” to which Wittgenstein refers here is, inescapably, a moral process which involves opening ourselves up to encounter, to surprise, to transformation — and this is what stands to be lost in our screen-saturated culture. The technologies we use are making us after their image. For all that is gained, have we truly reckoned with what stands to be lost as we move into a post-literate age? As Maryanne Wolf puts it:
“The most important issue in the transition from a literacy-based culture to a digital one is whether the time- and cognitive-resource-demanding requirements of the deep reading processes will be lost or atrophied in a culture whose principals mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and the continuous processing of the ever-present next piece of information.”
This episode was first broadcast on 05 February 2023.
Guest: Maryanne Wolf is the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the University of California in Los Angeles. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century, and, most recently, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.
You can read more from Professor Wolf on the reading brain and cultivating deep reading processes on ABC Religion & Ethics.