THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating. I remember two examples in particular: Socrates, who had taken against writing in the Phaedrus, only to have his arguments committed to papyrus and circulated by eager students; and Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, who in 1492 wrote a fiery treatise defending and exalting the scribal tradition, only to bypass the scribes himself (De Laude Scriptorum, ‘In Praise of Scribes’, was printed in 1494). The implication was that thinkers in this mould are almost always on the wrong side of history – fulminating in the face of technological progress even as it renders them irrelevant.  

The gotcha, of course, is a plonking non sequitur. Specifically, it’s a version of the tu quoque (‘you too’) fallacy, which intends to discredit an individual’s case by attacking their personal behaviour or circumstances. Yes, it’s amusing to imagine young Plato committing his mentor’s reservations about writing to his little wax tablet, but such a scenario does nothing to undermine Socrates’ argument that writing may weaken memory. Nevertheless, and especially where critics of the ‘It’s all going to pot’ variety are concerned, it doesn’t hurt – indeed, it’s essential – to ask whether they’ve mistaken the state of the world for the state of their own pension fund. Especially when it comes to techno-critical types (among whom I’m eager to be counted), a certain scepticism is always advisable, lest simple reaction creep back in.  

ONE RECENT INTERVENTION seems to me to highlight this danger. In ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’, British columnist James Marriott argues that the recent decline in literacy – and book-reading in particular – amounts to a civilisational crisis. That he does so on Substack, in X-friendly paragraphs that unfurl beneath headings such as ‘World without mind’, ‘The end of creativity’ and ‘The death of democracy’, is not in itself (per Socrates) a reason to dismiss his argument. But nor is it an irrelevant detail. On the contrary, I think this may be one case where a bit of tu quoque may be appropriate or, at any rate, forgivable.  

There’s no doubt the article has struck a chord. In the weeks after its publication, Marriott was invited to rehearse his case on both the BBC and NPR, and even popped up in an extended interview – a rather soft one, I have to say – on my beloved Novara Media, the progressive media organisation that keeps me apprised of politics in the UK. Here and elsewhere, it appears that Marriott is pushing against an open door and that his argument is part of a broader ‘vibe-shift’ against social media in particular. Well, I’m all in favour of that, especially given the fatalism that tends to characterise the conversation about new and emerging technologies in general. But by pushing back in the way he does against the ‘instrumental’ tendency to see this or that technology as ‘just a tool’ (still the hegemonic position in Silicon Valley), Marriott threatens to erect in its place a simpleminded determinism that obscures as much as it illuminates.    

Marriott is surely right to argue that both human culture and psychology are substantively shaped through communication technologies, and that the printing revolution generated a certain kind of reasoning. ‘The world of print is orderly, logical and rational’, he writes; ‘In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place.’ Wittgenstein could not have spoken his book Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, and I could not have understood it if he had. Channelling Neil Postman and Walter Ong (and, by extension, Marshall McLuhan), Marriott recalls us to the link between the medium and the message – to the ways in which particular communication technologies influence human interaction. ‘[I]t is no accident,’ he suggests, ‘that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science.’ He continues: ‘Other historians have linked the eighteenth-century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of [liberal] democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.’  

Clearly, there’s an element of truth in this argument; none of these developments would have taken place in the absence of widespread literacy. But Marriott’s characterisation of the relationship between printing and progress, and of progress itself, is so simplistic as to be actively misleading. The problem is evident from the essay’s first paragraph. The invention and expansion of printing, he writes, ‘was one of the most important revolutions in modern history – and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded’. Well, that’s obviously true in one sense – in the sense that the printing revolution was not an organised insurrection aimed at overthrowing a political system. But in another sense it’s not true at all. For in facilitating communication between people who are not physically present to one another, the printing revolution led to plenty of upheaval, bloody and otherwise, and not a few beheadings. The creation of what Benedict Anderson called, in his book of the same name, ‘imagined communities’ would play a crucial role in the long emergence of the nation state and nationalism, with results that cannot be tidily sorted into positive and negative. The Tractatus may be unthinkable without print. But so is scientific racism.  

One consequence of the printing revolution Marriott doesn’t mention in his essay is the emergence of the public sphere (sometimes ‘the bourgeois public sphere’) – that virtual space in which people like him (and yours truly) ply their trade. The omission is significant, for without some sense of what we might call ‘the political economy of ideas’ – of the ways in which our existence as commentators has a basis in social and material reality – we are apt to miss or underplay our own role in this historical development. The print revolution was a catalytic moment in a process of increasing abstraction that began with the invention of writing itself. In liberating intellectuality, it engendered many of the benefits Marriott is keen to celebrate, but it also engendered forms of power – political, economic, scientific – that have violently remade the world and may have doomed our species in the long run. In short, it was both an advance and a tragedy: an advance in that it has opened up opportunities for greater knowledge, and thus for forms of progress and liberation, and a tragedy in that the ‘progress’ made has often been at the expense of cultures whose knowledges are now lost forever, and whose more ‘grounded’ (i.e. less abstract) sense of our relation to the natural world – to the nonhuman nature that surrounds and sustains us – is today conspicuous by its absence. I have books of my own to shift, so I don’t want to overdo the masochism. But seriously, the idea that this single technology, and the technique it necessitates (literacy), is identical with human flourishing is a silly and offensive position. 

THE MEDIUM IS the message, and le style c’est l’homme… I have no desire to be rude about Marriott, who is currently expanding his ideas into a book that may eliminate some of these shortcomings, though I’ll admit that my lip began to curl a number oftimes while reading his essay. To defend the faculties of logic and reason against the ‘mob thinking’ and ‘superstition’ that are overrunning the public sphere is a perfectly honourable thing to do, but to do it in such a muddled way is to make a mockery of your own position. Talk about argumentative fallacies: ‘The dawn of the post-literate society’ is replete with overgeneralisations, cherry picking and appeals to authority. Indeed, one could make a reasonable case that its entire argument is circular, that of course if one takes literacy as the cornerstone of civilisation then any drop-off in literacy is going to look like civilisational decline. Nor can I see any in-principle difference between the hyperventilating political discourse that Marriott deplores in the digital space and the bombast on display in his own writing. A glimpse at his Substack, Cultural Capital, reveals a cruising apocalypticism, with posts announcing, among other things, ‘the end of history’, ‘the age of stupid’ and ‘the fall of homo sapiens’. The entire project borders on self-parody. It is a hybrid intellectualism, born of an unholy marriage between an essentially conservative view of culture and habituation to its digital turn. 

I am in no way saying that Marriott is overstating the case; I am saying that he’s barely stating it at all, and that his failure to locate himself in the history of communication technology is part of a broader misconstruction of both that history and the challenges now facing us. Rather than the ‘substantive’ view of technology recommended by Langdon Winner, which recognises the deep complexity of how it and culture shape one another, he takes the deterministic line that the spread of literacy led to progress and that its decline will therefore lead to regress. Having noted in passing the moral panic that met ‘the reading revolution’, as well as the real source of that panic – the fear that power was changing hands – Marriott nevertheless remains oblivious to the possibility that his own anxieties derive from the ‘cultural capital’ he has accrued as a member of the commentariat. The upshot is a pretty conspicuous outbreak of what has been called ‘Gutenbergian thinking’ – the assumption that nothing especially meaningful was said before the German inventor converted his winepress into a printing press, and that nothing of much worth will survive its disappearance.  

For the techno-utopians of yesteryear, the idea of someone taking to the internet to lament the decline of literary reading would have been dismissed as self-evidently ridiculous. It isn’t; but to do so in these terms and tones lends superficial credibility to their case. What are needed now are not belletristic defences of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ or Whiggish celebrations of progress but serious attempts to think through the ways in which the information environment is changing. With digital capitalism and authoritarian populism fusing into a single system, the situation is far too serious to be giving the tech-heads easy gotchas.  

_{^{Image credit: Vida Huang via Unsplash}}