[jf]

It’s weird, and a little unnerving, to have a line from Anathem by Neil Stephenson immediately come to mind:

“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…” “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”

[mapontosevenths]

Similarly, I thought of "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Stephenson is right, of course, but I think that Miller more fully understands that our fall begins not just with the fading of literacy and the rise of ignorance, but also in post modern relativism and the reign of cynicism. If one more otherwise clever person tries to explain to me how there's no such thing as objective truth, I might just scream.

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”

[XorNot]

Everyone who wants to tell me about objective truth is about to tell me about which group of humans it's okay to persecute in about 2 more sentences.

People making an actual good argument don't front, nor bookend it with a thesis on "the nature of truth".

[pixl97]

Heh, ya it seems that the term objective truth has been ate by conspiracy theorists and psychos.

I like using the term thermodynamic truth myself. Such as what you would find if you ran time backwards. The problem we humans have is we attempt to put absolute truth on complex statistical systems. They don't realize they outcome they saw once was either random or by a set of circumstances that can't be replicated.

[ashton314]

Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”

…

“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.

“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”

Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”

“So that they could make money.”

“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”

“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”

“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”

“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better.”

…

“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.

“Yes.”

“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”

---------------------------

That section plus Samman's little bit about the "Artificial Inanity" systems that made the internet basically unusable are hitting way too close to home these days.

[phendrenad2]

> I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler

2008. Stephenson is 10 years ahead of the current discourse, as usual.

[ribosometronome]

Things have been feeling very Snow Crash and Diamond Age, lately, except I don't think there are any literally underground sex cults that are worthwhile.

[trenchpilgrim]

"They had parties underneath the supermarket in Brooklyn..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S5_0atkZTU

[user982]

When I first read Asimov's Foundation, I thought the decline and loss of knowledge in the Galactic Empire within a few generations was unrealistically quick. It's been eye-opening to witness new parents who not only don't know that they're supposed to teach their children to read, but wouldn't know how to do so.

[hedora]

Also, the Portland thing.

We have cameras and planes and stuff. How is the idea that downtown is a burnt out hole in the ground full of rubble (or not) an actual controversy?

[pixl97]

Late GenXer here. I went from a place with pretty good schools to one with with pretty bad schools and a strong religious/honor culture background. I went from a humans can accomplish anything to one of we are damned at a pretty young age. It seems so many people are fact resistant from a young age.

[walkabout]

The people who need to find out aren't curious and aren't looking for proof that counters what they're inclined to believe. They won't check what locals are saying and the videos of nothing-much-happening they're posting. They watch the same handful of shocking crime videos on Facebook and are sure the cities are overrun with rampant lawlessness (and apparently the residents are just persistently too stupid, over decades, to do anything about it, voting-wise, and need the Federal Government to step in despite their protestations and save them? It's a puzzling world view if you think about it for even a second), watch Fox News showing b-roll of fire and violence from one city block on one night for weeks on end (or from another city and year entirely) and claiming that's the whole city all the time, see news sites doing the same (one infamously put a photo of early '90s LA riots at the top of one of these articles recently, JFC)

You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically, overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century. The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still here, everything turned out OK) will be curious & interested enough to find that out.

[nicwolff]

Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis (who wrote The Hustler and The Color of Money, and Queen's Gambit, and The Man Who Fell To Earth – quite an oeuvre!) has long been one of my favorite books and it's been eerie to see how right he was about how eager mankind is to hand over all intellectual labor to the robots.

(The last level 9 robot that hasn't killed itself is now the Dean of NYU, and in the 25th century it hires the first man who has learned to read in 400 years – to translate the title cards in silent films. Hilarity ensues. Well, no, but there is kind of a happy ending.)

[jdonaldson]

I thought that book was pretty dull, and had a terrible romance subplot. But I do have to say it pops in my head more and more often, just like Idiocracy. Someone should definitely do a movie so the illiterates know what they're missing at least.

[shagie]

It's a philosophy text with a lot of ideas masquerading as a work of fiction. The closest analogy to it that I can think of is the Symposium... which is a philosophy work that uses a plot and stories to express the ideas. Incidentally, there's a part of Anathem that feels a lot like the Symposium (complete with chatting about philosophy around a table).

[Jtsummers]

I haven't read that book, but the concept is also in his book The Diamond Age.

[Liquix]

Mediatronic glyphs on our chopsticks when? Love the way the Nell's vocabulary and disposition evolve as the Primer (or Miranda) teaches her to spell, read, and eventually understand Turing machines via binary and logic gates.

[trenchpilgrim]

I don't remember that line in Anathem. It seemd pretty clear that the Saecular society at the time of the novel was a literate, 21st century tech level. e.g. there were characters like Samman who was basically a sysadmin.

[WolfeReader]

It's in the first chapter. The quote you were replying to was in the book, verbatim.

[Nasrudith]

Weren't the ita basically 'half-concents' essentially? Where the caste, despite being allowed more of the trappings and technological luxuries of the Saecular society, specifically were kept away from the other sciences to handicap them because they couldn't enforce the same asceticism on one whose job it is to maintain the technology.

[ashton314]

They all use Kinagrams—a moving picture script. Very few are literate. Well-off burgers typically can read and write, but lots of the workers and virtually all the slines can't read.

[trenchpilgrim]

Aren't Kinagrams and Logotype Arban forms of logograms, like Chinese characters or Kanji? I interpreted that as "most extramuros can read and type their daily language, but not the alphabet used for technical writing"

[ashton314]

The extramuros language is “Fluccish” and it’s stated that it uses the same alphabet as Orth. I think it’s a little more pictorial (esp. Kinagrams with animation) than Chinese

[Theodores]

In the 1980s, the BBC did a realistic nuclear war movie called Threads. It is a classic and always relevant. The scene I found most shocking was in the aftermath, when the children of the survivors can't read or even speak properly. There is this record player and they have no idea what it is for or what music is, because they have never heard of it. One of them plays with it, intrigued that the turntable moves, but that is about it, nobody is hooking it up to get everyone dancing.

I live in the UK which has been slow compared to the USA when it comes to TV. In the 1960s, Americans were watching 4+ hours a day of colour TV, with a vast choice of channels. It took is about three decades to catch up in the UK. I think the same can be said for Europe and elsewhere outside the USA. We have just been behind with TV watching and several other American conveniences, such as driving everywhere and convenience foods.

At the start of this year I made 'reading part of an actual book' my new years' resolution. It was going well for all of six weeks (then I had to spend a log time from home, away from my books), but why did I need to make it something I was committed too with a resolution?

There was a time when I would literally fight over books, magazines and newspapers with family and friends. Before then, there was a time when, as a child, I would be reading by moonlight until the small hours.

Then, before my time, before TV, the cinema and radio, was a time when people would go out to a hall to listen to someone read the latest Dickens installment. That was 'peak book' even though literacy wasn't great for everyone.

Nowadays books have been relegated to what people have on show in the back of a Zoom call, sometimes contrived, often not so contrived. There is a long history of doing this. Middle class people used to buy books for the parlour to show they were educated, often with out of copyright classics, hardbound.

I suspect that some people read more for the 'bragging rights' than for the pleasure of reading. I also suspect that any surveys on book reading habits are going to be unreliable since it is easy to say 'year I read three books this year' and cite the three that you had to read under duress as a schoolchild.

[coliveira]

Some young people have started to widely use emoji in personal communications. We may not be far away from a society that partially abolished written language and relies only on images and videos to communicate.

[trenchpilgrim]

"some young people?" I hardly know anyone who _doesn't_, regardless of education level or age.

[devilbunny]

Well, I don’t, but unfortunately for me I am in, as you say, a small and dwindling minority.

I don’t find them useful, really, but the bigger problem lately has been complex emoji (so, not just a thumbs-up) in a size that is fine for reading the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets but useless for trying to pack a lot of info into a very pixel-limited block. If you think this sounds nuts, wait until you’re about 45 and presbyopia kicks in. It is rapid and merciless.

[trenchpilgrim]

heh, my eyes have been terrible since I was a young child

[devilbunny]

I'm also very myopic, but that at least is easily correctable for me (no astigmatism, just pure spherical deformation). Presbyopia doesn't care.

[mallowdram]

Symbols are archaic, time to replace language with something self-organizing, self-teaching, concatenating and concatenated, ruled by verbs, and defanging nouns and agentic occlusions.

[jdonaldson]

I don't think this quote is in the book.

[shagie]

The larger context...

    “Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…”
    “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”
    “We don’t have underwear, or bleach—just the bolt, the chord, and the sphere,” said Fraa Orolo, patting the length of cloth thrown over his head, the rope knotted around his waist, and the sphere under his bottom. This was a weak joke at our expense to set Quin at ease.
    Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”

This was from the part where Fraa Orolo was interviewing Artisan Quin about the world outside the Concent.

[WolfeReader]

It's in the first chapter.