HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Reading Practices for Tomorrow’s Infotech World
Originally 2023-07-28. Hoisted & separated out so I will easily be able to find it in the future. From <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2023-07-28-fr>…
Books vs. ‘Bots: Will we still be able to take black marks off of a page into our eyes, and use them to spin-up a sub-Turing instantiation of the author’s mind to run on our wetware? Or: Machiavelli, Sokrates, & the attention-smashing internet. Reading is an ancient cognitive technology; the internet is disassembly. Who wins? Will we still be deep- and active-enough readers to conjure living interlocutors from dead text?
Sokrates distrusted and scorned the written word; Machiavelli feasted on it nightly to satiation. In a world of generative everything, which habit survives?
Reading Practices for Tomorrow’s Infotech World:
Today’s food for thought:
Josh Bernoff: Why books work: A rebuttal to Andy Matuschak: ‘Think about what non-fiction books are made out of. They include overarching principles. Matuschak and I agree, if those are any good, people retain them. There are the arguments that support those principles. Sometimes people retain those arguments, sometimes they don’t. But you don’t have to see the framing to understand how the building stays up. I’d argue that retaining the arguments is less important. There are subsidiary ideas. A good book has lots of those. And a reader is going to recall those subsidiary ideas only to the extent that they are relevant for her. If there are 15 subsidiary ideas and three are relevant for you, those three may be sufficient. If a book is really useful, you may retain more. There are also, in any given book, hundreds of bits of knowledge. There are facts, statistics, diagrams, and, crucially, stories. There are long case-study stories and short “for example” stories. When the author chooses these bits and delivers them well, the reader retains them…. [So] write directly to the reader, using the words I and you…. Tell stories…. Ask rhetorical questions…. Include graphics…. Vary presentation…. Introduce and sum up…
And:
Elizabeth Minkel: Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books: ‘Every new technology from the internet to virtual reality has tried to upend book culture. There’s a reason they’ve all failed—and always will…. One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken…. The “10X MORE engaging” crowd has come in waves… promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy…. Interactive books could have sound effects or music…. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books… eschew… “static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world…. Right now, plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while…. “In the meantime, tech bros will still find VCs to wine and dine and spend more money on bullshit,” [Maris] Kreizman predicts. But for the rest of us? We’ll just keep on reading…
As I say: A good reader takes the black marks on the pages of a book, spins up a sub-Turing instantiation of the mind of the author from those black marks, runs that instantiation on a sandboxed partition in their own wetware, and then argues with that instantiation.
The end result of this process? Niccolo Machiavelli puts it very well in his “Letter to Vettori”:
And as the evening comes on, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them…
Machiavelli is, as people call it these days, an “active reader”: someone who when reading a book induces in themself a kind of multiple personality order that allows them to derive all—or nearly all—of the benefits of active dialogue with another mind from mere black marks on a page. In so doing, Machiavelli short-circuits Socrates’s objection, in Phædrus, to books. In Socrates’s story, the God Theuth [Thoth, ] shows King Thamus his invention of writing, and Thamus responds that it will:
create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality...
And Socrates analogizes writing to:
unfortunately… painting… creations… [that] have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence…. When they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves…
Thus Socrates’s very strong preference for interactive oral dialogue over written text as a way of pursuing philosophy—living and dynamic form of discourse that could adapt to the needs and abilities of each interlocutor, and that could stimulate the soul to discover the truth. Socrates’s critique of writing was, of course, ironic, since we only know his thoughts and arguments through the books written by Plato. Plato accepted (or originated? Plato’s character “Socrates” has a fraught relationship to the real Socrates) by dialogues, myths, allegories, metaphors, and so on. It was only Aristotle who went all-in on books, trusting that they would find the right kind of, or enough of the right kind of readers.
Bernoff is strongly on Machiavelli’s side, but in his Writing Without Bullshit and elsewhere he recognizes that most (all?) readers need a good deal of help to start the spin-up of the sub-Turing instantiation:
Write directly to the reader, using the words I and you…. Tell stories…. Ask rhetorical questions…. Include graphics…. Vary presentation…. Introduce and sum up…
Motivated and curious readers can and do read like Machiavelli.
But one problem is that people these days are reading less and especially reading less in the way of long form extended arguments. Thus detailed multi hour engagement via a book with another mind (or with the self-created illusion of another mind) is becoming much less common, and that will make us much less good at it. This is a problem for books.
Minkel does not believe this is a problem. She argues that, historically, books have resisted disruption by technology because they offer this distinctive mode of engagement—this spin-up of a sub-Turing instantiation—that appeals to many.
But in the modern world of the internet and ChatBots, will we lose our ability to so-easily submit to the power of words to create immersive and imaginative worlds that readers can explore at their own pace and in their own way?
Quite possibly.
Modern technologies may well destroy, via their parcelization of our attention and thus our building-up of our reading neuronal patterns, much of our collective ability to make the use of books that we have made of them for the past 2500 years.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
References:
Bernoff, Josh. 2019. “Why Books Work: A Rebuttal to Andy Matuschak”. May 24. <https://bernoff.com/blog/why-books-work-a-rebuttal-to-andy-matuschak>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2023. “BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-07-28 Fr”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality July 28. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/briefly-noted-for-2023-07-28-fr>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Reading Practices for Tomorrow’s Infotech World”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. October 26. <>.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1513. “Letter to Vettori of December 10, 1513”. In The Prince, transl. & ed. Peter Bondanella, 109–113. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://archive.org/details/historicalpoliti02machuoft>.
Matuschak, Andy. 2019. “Why Books Don’t Work”. May 11. <https://andymatuschak.org/books>.
Minkel, Elizabeth. “Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books” <https://www.wired.com/story/why-generative-ai-wont-disrupt-books/>.
Platon. ca. -370 [2002]. Phaidros. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/phaedrus-9780192802774>.