• I’ve spent a couple of years now circling around my concerns, trying to discern what I ought to focus on. I’ve disagreed with myself a bunch, but eventually the feeling of “I’ve got to do something” became stronger than everything else, and the general consensus amongst my bickering selves is that we’ve got to talk about literacy.
• !!!! To a lot of people, the word ‘literacy’ means “being able to read and write”. But that’s actually a very low bar. I’m not just talking about words, either. I’m talking about everything. So maybe we might say “media literacy” more broadly. Ideally I’d like to go even broader than that, but we have to start somewhere.
• Where do we start? I once wrote a tweet which I’ll paraphrase: “don’t assume that someone is saying something that they didn’t actually say. that’s it, that’s like 80% of good reading comprehension and good listening skills.” Right away you may notice that the problem isn’t actually in the words, but in the person making sense of those words. The impulse to make assumptions is strong, especially in a turbulent, high-volume media environment.
• Footnote? Yes there’s a lot of scholarship about media literacy already, but I find most of it really tedious. There’s a tendency for scholars to use intimidating words like “semiotics” and “intertextuality”. I want to write something simple and accessible, that parents can share with their teenagers. Just as how I came up with “psychofauna” as a simplified alternative to “egragore”, I’m looking for a way to talk about literacy.
• Tangent? There’s an essay I’ve been wanting to write, tentatively titled “I wrote my way out / men of letters”, where I talk about Hamilton (2015), Wozniak, Feynman… the job of a man of letters, or a public intellectual, is to make sense of things, to argue and explain and to think out loud.
• !!!! There’s a big question of “willing” vs “able”. I saw a tweet recently that said something like, “having smartphones and/or social media seems to lowers your IQ by X points”. The thing I’d want to note here is that it’s not a change to a person’s enduring abilities… social media is like being drunk or sleep deprived. Why? It’s because you’re bombarded with all kinds of information from all kinds of contexts.
  • Hm, in a way, social media gives ordinary people the experience of what it’s like to be a celebrity, or someone with money or power, in that entities are now competing for your attention. Your attention is valuable currency in the marketplace because people can sell shit to you, and they can sell ads to people who want to sell shit to you. (And then there are people who don’t even really want your money, they just want you to look at them. I have a separate essay to write here titled Attention Whores.) Lots of people have observed that celebrities and hot girls are quite curt. There’s a great John Mulaney bit where he talks about what Mick Jagger is like, and how he just blurts out whatever’s on his mind, saying “Yes!” “No!” “Not funny!” to everything with no filter. When you have a large enough audience of people who are interested in you, you don’t really need to be courteous, or at least it will seem like you don’t.
• There is a long history of arguments about the challenges of literacy. Many thoughtful people over the centuries have said things like, it’s more dangerous to be a literate man who incorrectly thinks he knows something because he read about it, than an illiterate man who knows that he doesn’t. Many of the best writers have bemoaned the limitations of writing.
  • Then came the printing press, and the radio, and television, and the internet, and social media– and with each new innovation, we find ourselves thrust into a turbulent new world of confusion. My favorite essay of all time was written by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker …
• I’m tempted to go look up vgr’s essays about literacy, where he’s probably covered most of what I want to say, but I want to write out my own thoughts before I do that.
• The word “illiterate” is a class-based insult in many places. You might see other phrases lumped together with it, like “dirty, stinking illiterate”.

what is my conclusion? I think… ultimately it’s not possible for any one person to do everything, so it’s prudent for individuals to focus on narrow slices of problems they want to address. I believe that there’s a subset of people who possess the technical ability to read but aren’t quite persuaded that it’s worth making the effort to read properly. Those are the people I want to focus on, I think. I have friends who I think are doing well…

I think all serious players end up being in the business of education somewhat. (Most recently in Sept2024 I just saw this in an internal doc that mrbeast wrote for his employees. Andy Grove talked about it decades earlier.)

tbc