<LA Times, 7/13/26: A glimpse of the future?>
I stumbled across the above clipping on Facebook, which certainly offers plenty of food for thought. Start with the stat on smartphone ownership. I'm not among the two-thirds who owned one by 2015, which makes me an outlier, on some level. The flipside? My longtime associate, The Squawker, does have one, and uses it regularly, for the usual boring reasons (i,.e., it makes certain mindless tasks easier). So if I want to scratch that particular itch, it's not difficult.
That being said, it's hard to argue with the author's assertion that our ongoing decline in literacy picked up steam the moment that smartphones became universal. The five and seven hours per day that adults and young spend, respectively, starting into their gadgets is also time that doesn't go into reading books.
Nor does it seem especially surprising to see the steepest declines logged among the usual suspects -- from men and boys, to rural residents, and those with lower education levels (translated: high school dropouts, presumably, and also those who never finished college). Unsurprisingly, declines in reading rates are less steeper among girls, and women.
Obviously, this is a complicated subject. If you're using a smartphone to make speech more understandable, then I'll say, "More power to you." I wouldn't tell you to junk it. Even if we somehow gained the capability of instantly vaporizing smartphones tomorrow, it wouldn't necessarily raise our declining literacy rates overnight. But the LA Times columnist, David Shelley, hits on an often-overlooked point in the Great Literacy Debate -- why it's so important, and not for the most commonly cited reason, of sweeping the sclerosis from the veins of our sagging democracy:
"Reading offers unique benefits and pleasure. Sometimes that pleasure can be hard-won -- it's not a simple, instant dopamine hit -- but it's enduring and long-lasting. We remember the books we loved as a child for the rest of our lives. Can we say the same for a meme we enjoyed, or a social media post?"
I know that feeling well. One of my strongest formative childhood experiences came from my mom, who would read to me -- and encourage me to do likewise, for her ( a habit that continued for entertainment, into her twilight years). But we didn't just bond over The Jungle Book.
She would buy me more advanced fare, like every book written by the French explorer, Jacques Cousteau -- who, along with his son, Phillippe, seemed to be everywhere on '70s TV screens -- and then quiz me on the vocabulary. Or it might be key concepts, or key details, whatever she'd pick out. And if I didn't hit the mark, we'd run down those items, again -- and again, and again -- until she felt I had them down.
My dad was a heavyweight reader himself, gliding from all the classics of literature, to more esoteric subject matter, like those classic Ballantine paperbacks on World War II -- which eventually filled an entire bookcase on their own -- and tomes on history, politics, sociology, you name it.
On top of all that, he read several news magazines regularly, week after week -- including Newsweek, TIME, US News & World Report -- which he'd then hand over to me, once he finished. Without TIME, that arch-establishment bastion, I'd never have learned about the Martin Beck mystery series, to which they devoted a two-page spread -- complete with images of the classic Pantheon hardcover editions -- on August 11, 1975.
The publication date is noteworthy, because it happened just over two months after the death of Per Wahloo -- who co-authored the books with his companion, Maj Sjowall, from 1965-75. Thankfully, the first of its major predictions proved wrong ("Unhappily, few of their works are likely to make their way to the screen?"), though not the second: "As time passes, the novels will probably be taken more seriously as literature because of their biting social comment and the shrewdness with which it animates the plots."
My curiosity piqued, I went down to one of our local libraries, which -- lo and behold! -- had practically the entire series, except for a book or two. I started reading them, and have never stopped. And they have aged well, whether you enjoy them purely as police procedurals, or social commentaries. I like both approaches, which suits me fine, if I ever start writing mysteries.
Still, when you consider that Wahloo and his other half remained largely unknown at the time, outside of their native Sweden -- and Europe, perhaps, once their books started getting translated into the relevant homegrown languages -- to see them covered in such depth felt impressive. TIME magazine was "on it!"
You can read the article for yourself (see below) and judge, though completists should track down the original -- because seeing those cover illustrations really grabbed me. And that's just one of many, many examples. I never would have learned about the British punk rock explosion without the August 11, 1977 roundup ("Anthems Of The Blank Generation"), whose leadoff paragraph is a classic blast of incomprehension:
"ITEM: In London, Singer Johnny Rotten spits at the audience and cries out, 'I hate you!' Sizing up Johnny’s four-letter words, tattered clothing and generally repugnant personal deportment, the British Establishment decides that it hates him. Johnny and his band, the Sex Pistols, are regularly banned from British radio, concert halls and clubs. Nonetheless, the Pistols’ latest single, a Jubilee diatribe against royalty called God Save the Queen, is currently a bestselling record in Britain."
Again, if you can track down the original article, it's well worth the effort, for the visuals alone. By the time I read the article -- which included quotes from "Blank Generation" (Richard Hell), and "Venus de Milo" (Television), along with grainy black and white shots of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and so on -- I wanted to get my hands on this music, and experience it myself.
My dad, God bless him, might finally forgive me for that one. Especially if I told him that these days, the man who was Rotten, who wrote that anti-monarchist classic, "God Save The Queen," -- plain old John Lydon -- loves the Queen. Can't get enough of her, in fact. Or so it seems, judging from whatever mood he's feeling that week. With him, it's hard to tell where the act ends, and the real person takes over again.
My other most important formative experience came from the Great Books Program, which I joined around fifth or sixth grade. An outside person -- or "coordinator," as they called it, I think -- came in two or three times a week, and we'd discuss whatever reading we'd been assigned (usually from an abridged version, if I recall correctly). The fare ranged from the esoteric likes of Bartleby The Scrivener (Herman Melville), to classics like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and milestone works from Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald -- I could go on forever, but you get the idea.
Without those experiences, it's hard to imagine what I would have become. I've always had a natural curiosity about the world around me, so the ingraining of reading may well have happened, anyway -- but might have taken a lot longer, without the input from my parents, or Great Books. And maybe I'd have hit a few speed bumps along the way, taste-wise, who knows?
Suffice to say, those experiences offer something tangible and meaningful, which I don't see happening as often in the virtual world. The bloom is well and truly off the rose from the wide-eyed, golly-gee-whiz vision that Rush's drummer/lyricist Neal Peart, expresses in a song like "Virtuality": "Net boy, net girl/Send your signal around the world/Let your fingers walk and talk/And set you free."
Who would write a song like that nowadays, especially after all the negative revelations about the tech bullies, and their nonstop efforts to manipulate, track, and enslave us -- hence, their pell-mell rush to throw up the data centers needed to build their surveillance state? Or the Facebook whistleblower scandal, or the UK tabloid phone hacking scandal, or the tsunami of cyberbullying reports (now gaining additional legs, after the Jason Arday story)?
If there's any justice at all -- and if the long arc truly bends toward it -- then that AI bubble will blow up in the edgelords' faces, with the data centers going bust as fast as they arrived. Because I don't know about you, but I'm way past tired of seeing a bunch of feral overgrown little boys make the world suffer, because they got cut from their dodgeball team.
Again, I recognize that it's a complicated subject. I know a lot of people with disabilities, and shut-ins, who would disagree with me, and that's fine. If you aren't able to get around easily, or it's too expensive to travel widely, the digital world might offer your only shot at learning about Japanese cooking, or the crown jewel of Uruguayan direct to video filmmaking (profiled in Straight To VHS).
So duly noted, seconded, and all that. But if we really want to push the literacy curve back in our direction, we not only need to take back our tech, but a more robust discussion about what we expect from it -- and what we can do differently, to avoid rehashing the errors of our past.
That call feels even more urgent, when I read the equally wide-eyed, golly-gee-whiz comments of Aaron Sorkin, writer-director of The Social Reckoning -- the sequel to The Social Network (2020), who finds it "dangerous" that a third of US adults now regularly get their news from it:
"And by the way, let me be clear: I don't think Mark Zuckerberg ever intended for it to have a corrosive effect. I think his intentions were good. He was somebody who, like a lot of people, had difficulty fitting into the social structure of college life and probably high school. He invented his own social structure, and he got to be the mayor of it and couldn't be excluded from it. His brilliance is undeniable, and that was a cool thing and it got way out of hand. It's gone completely out of control."
To which I can only respond with New Musical Express's withering summary of the blame it hung on the Clash's late lead singer, Joe Strummer, for producing the Clash's oft-mocked swan song, Cut The Crap: "Perhaps naively, I don't doubt Strummer's sincerity, but a big question mark has got to hang over his marbles, Ron."
And likewise, I'd ask the same question of Sorkin. How can someone who did the deep dive through the darkest corners of Big Tech's origin story ever emerge from it, waxing so naively about it? Is he really that simple-minded? Sadly, and evidently, yes.
Because if you read The Social Network's printed incarnation, before it hit the big screen, you'll find that "Zuck" -- as they called him, then and now -- wasn't trying to find the cure for cancer, or writing fanboy letters to Mother Teresa, or plotting how to grow a super-grain capable of feeding the starving millions for zero dollars. Nope, none of those things.
Instead, he spent much of his time drinking, partying, and chasing women, amid endless hours and hours and hours of coding, all in pursuit of an endless mountain of loot -- all the things that lead to the dreaded malady of "Billionaire Brain," just as his robber baron predecessors have done before him -- the only difference being, at least the Gilded Age bad boys pretended to feel grateful for all their ill-gotten gains.
Whether they pulled it off is an altogether different matter entirely. But, suffice to say, I don't think we can trust the Aaron Sorkins of the world to lead us to the promised land, anymore than the techno-robber barons he's spent his last half-decade or so chronicling.
And, more than ever, I'm convinced that the next counterculture will owe little or nothing to this insufferable Silicon Gulch that we find ourselves stuck inhabiting, if ever so unhappily. And reading, and improved literacy, will have to be part of that recipe, to reclaim ourselves from it. And if it's not?
Then I think the cartoon below tells us everything we need to know. Just imagine a Communist Bloc-style uber-culture, devoid of any spirit or spark, only backed up by a more wide-ranging and malign apparatus than the drearily bland tinhorn likes of Eric Honecker could ever have dreamed up, one that stands ready to snap its digital cage into place over you.
It's the kind of scenario that gives new meaning to the concept of a "captive audience," one that has the likes of David Ellison dreaming about a future with "everyone on their best behavior" -- as if people are merely dogs who can be trained by snapping the right leash into place, or dangling the biggest biscuit safely out of reach.
Maybe he, and all of his kind, find the only air-conditioned cells in Hell awaiting their arrival, once the local fire department has finally cleared away the vast puffs of sulfur they've left behind, once they've finally shuffled off.
Now, imagine how you might muddle along through a morass -- and you can take it mentally from there. We'll be revisiting this subject plenty more times, before the next turn of the wheel comes along. So let us gear up, and step up, before there is no margin for error anymore. And history will never forgive us, if we don't get the recipe right. Or, at least, a better sense of the balance. --The Reckoner
