[mortsnort]

And yet thousands of people have liked (and presumably read) his long article and hundreds have replied. Substack provides levels of information sharing that a book can't provide.

With books, some small amount of people read difficult works while most people read beach lit. With phones, some small amount of people are learning at rates never possible before, while most people consume Tik Tok.

I agree that social media may be causing a collapse in society, but not that a lack of book reading is causing societal collapse.

[dash2]

I only wish that Substack were a good substitute for books.

I’m off social media. I don’t even have Safari on my phone usually. I consume Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Substack essays.

It turns out I’m just as able to mindlessly consume this media for hours a day, and although it is not as superficial, emotive or corrosive as X, it is still no substitute for the deep book-length reading I used to do and now do increasingly less.

Literate intellectuals are stuck in the shallows too.

[MontyCarloHall]

>With books, some small amount of people read difficult works while most people read beach lit. With phones, some small amount of people are learning at rates never possible before, while most people consume Tik Tok.

Same with gen-AI. A small amount of people have become autodidacts like never before, while others just use it to replace their own reasoning capabilities, which atrophy as a result. I know someone who self-taught graduate-level math courses using ChatGPT as a personal tutor, and I can confirm they actually learned the material well. I also know college students for whom gen-AI wrote every single word of every assignment.

Any social collapse will be caused by technology further accentuating this bifurcation. The exponential increase of information readily available to us, whether gold or slop, means that the motivated will get exponentially smarter and knowledgeable while the less-motivated get exponentially more distracted, which will lead to unprecedented levels of social inequality.