This morning I published an article on Slate about the decline of reading comprehension and resilience among college-age students. In the piece, I try to defuse the knee-jerk reaction that I must be indulging in a typical “kids these days” criticism before assessing the most commonly-discussed potential causes of this phenomenon (smartphones and covid lockdowns) and concluding that changes in reading pedagogy are the primary culprit. Even within just a few hours, the response has been gratifyingly positive — meaning that I have been basking in the repeated social media dopamine hits rather than doing what I intended to do once the article was published: follow up with a broader reflection on my concerns about the degredation of people’s ability to understand and engage with the world around them in a realistic way.
Cory Doctorow’s enshittification thesis has been getting a lot of attention lately, and rightly so. As Google in particular cannibalizes its own flagship product, simple access to information has declined precipitously. But beyond the asset-stripping enshittification Doctorow identifies, we need to acknowledge that there was another, broader enshittification of our relationship with information already implicit in the shift to the “information age.” A key canary in the coal mine for me here is Google Books, on which I rely very heavily as the translator of a philosopher who cites 20 million random things in every one of his books. One persistent annoyance is that when I search for a book’s title and then click on the book, Google Books initially displays search results for the book’s title, within the book itself. We could dismiss this as a dumb glitch, but I think it’s symptomatic, because it shows the designers of the product don’t understand that people would use a database of every book that ever existed to search for books, nor do they understand how people use and interact with books (for instance, by scanning the table of contents or index).
In short, Google Books assumes that what one wants out of their huge pile of books is not books, but isolated strings of information. That’s the same assumption that stands behind their disastrous attempt to revamp their search engine so that it doesn’t take you primarily to a website, but instead tries to directly present you with the answer. And arguably the culmination of that is ChatGPT, which promises to give you exactly the information you’re looking for in an unobtrusive “neutral” prose style. Much as I hate ChatGPT — and I do hate it with all my heart, unconditionally, unchangeably, eternally — I do get why that fantasy is attractive. But it is a fantasy, because as the man says, there is nothing outside the text. There is no such thing as the raw information devoid of presentation and context. We can’t get at that raw information, and we certainly can’t program computers to do so, because it does not exist. It is a fantasy, and it is increasingly a willful lie.
Our interaction with information has also been enshittified in more visceral ways. The internet may have given us access to the sum of human knowledge, but it gave it to us in an actively user-hostile form. Reading on the screen sucks. It actively injures our eyes. And there is no one alive who doesn’t realize that their screen reading is much less attentive and rigorous than their print reading. There are studies that show this, but I won’t insult your intelligence by linking them (if I could even find them on Google anyway). We all know it. Screen reading is inferior to print reading, even before we add in the distraction factor. We don’t remember what we read, and we have no tactile memory of where to find specific bits (“I know it’s on the lower left-hand page….”).
Print was a perfected technology, an unsurpassable way of sharing information and ideas and stories — and we are all in the process of throwing it away for something we know is worse, out of inertia and laziness and cheapness and convenience. Think, for instance, of the difference between a printed newspaper page and a website. Even before we factor in the annoying pop-ups, etc., the printed paper is a much more dynamic and flexible format. You don’t have to click through to each article — at least the beginning is right there, and it has been carefully structured so that the amount of time you spend reading will broadly reward your particular level of interest. If you just want the overall scenario, read a couple paragraphs. If you’re deeply invested, stick with it to the bitter end. We complain so much about people only reading the headlines rather than the article, but the reason that occurs is that you need to make a firm, specific commitment to that article, which may festoon your screen with popovers and demands to sign up for a newsletter and solicitation of donations before you even read one word. With the newspaper, it was all right there. If you had any interest in the article’s content, you would naturally keep reading, it didn’t take some extra choice or effort.
I could say the same for the simple act of flipping through a magazine (an unparalleled browsing experience that is not replicable through the ill-named web “browser”) or even paging through a book to get a sense of what’s in it. All those affordances of the printed text — together with the pleasure of its distinctive heft in your hand, the precisely calibrated tint of the paper, that new book smell, even the sound of opening a book for the first time — are sacrificed in favor of a format that assaults our senses without making a durable impression. It’s a pure lose-lose. That screen format gives rise naturally, even necessarily to the decontextualized tweet or the brief video — because that’s all our small screens can accomodate, and it’s all we can stand to focus on at any given time.
The near-total context collapse we are now experiencing was already baked into the workings of the Mosaic web browser and the dream of the “information age” that it encapsulates. Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way. The Dewey Decimal System and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature gave us access to information in a much more authentic way than any means commonly available now — and indeed, even library databases are being cannibalized from within by the informatization of search (so that reviews of a book come up, sometimes in the dozens, before the book itself, for instance).
Computers cannot give us the information because they cannot, and likely never will, understand meaning and context. Only we can — though we must take the time to learn and cultivate the skills necessary, the habits of mind and body that allow us to engage with the marvellous and unsurpassable human technology known as the printed word.