If everything feels really dumb right now, that’s because it is. We are in the midst of a literacy crisis - and you can even see it on this platform, presumably created to combat illiteracy.
Literacy, in the fuller sense, has always threatened concentrated power. Historically, literacy movements were tied to labour organizing, abolition, anti-colonial struggle, feminist movements and political consciousness because genuine literacy allows people to interpret the world rather than merely consume it. Freedom Schools during the Civil Rights era were not simply about teaching people to read, but about teaching Black Americans how to understand and navigate the systems governing their lives. Slave codes criminalized literacy for a reason, colonial powers restricted education for a reason; Lenin himself, in What Is To Be Done, wrote that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” - his argument being that a sudden consciousness would not be enough to bring about revolution, but that education had to be a guide.
A literate public is harder to oppress because it is cognizant of its oppression - it can name its material experiences, conditions and solutions. And to be literate does not mean having to go through institutionalized education either.
What we are witnessing now is not just declining reading comprehension, but the erosion of media literacy, political literacy and cultural literacy more broadly. Tech companies - which govern every facet of our lives now - are accelerating this dismantling by prioritizing immediacy, endless consumption and emotional reaction over depth or reflection - for the sake of profit, increasing shareholder value. We are flooded with information while losing the ability to contextualize and interpret it, to actually look at something and say “this is what this means and what it can lead to”. The forced ubiquity of AI is probably the clearest example of this: increasingly we are seeing the replacement of critical thinking with instant gratification that encourages outsourcing thinking rather than take the time to sit with something and develop our thoughts around it, contextualize our thoughts around other things we know.
For these companies we are both the product and the consumer. Our data, habits, desires and behaviours are constantly mined, sold and fed back to us through algorithms designed to shape everything from what we buy to who we date to how we understand politics and the world around us - Steve Bannon understood this better than most and he successfully leaned into it much to the chagrin of all of us. The result is a population that lives with impulse and algorithmic suggestion rather than …just taking a breath and giving it a thought.
This is all, of course, by design.
In the U.S., the greatest predictor of your life’s trajectory is your zip code, which determines access to education, healthcare, environmental safety and economic opportunity itself - it literally determines your life expectancy. Race and class, of course, have baked into that design.
And so any society organized so explicitly around such inequality will continue to reproduce that inequality and work towards worsening it - because that is what a design does, it reproduces what it was meant to reproduce.
And the danger in this is that while literacy, in the total breadth of that word, cannot abolish any system of oppression and violence, it absolutely gives us the tools necessary to navigate it and begin dismantling it.
