The intensely sobering Dawn of the Post-Literate Society by James Marriott lays out a simple diagnosis: the book once disciplined the mind. The screen is dissolving it.
Reading cooled passion into argument. Print birthed democracy. Literacy made the Enlightenment possible. But smartphones, TikTok, and the infinite scroll have snapped the thread. The result is students who cannot read Dickens, citizens who cannot follow arguments, democracies incapable of rational deliberation.
It is a story of loss and it is not wrong. But it is incomplete. What that essay names as collapse is also acceleration. What it calls a theft of knowledge is also a migration of cognition. If literacy once armed us with tools to build modernity, the latest consumer AI now oils the blade that cuts those tools away.
This is what I mean by the grease on the barbarian’s axe. The barbarian is not some external invader. No. It is the natural entropy of our attention and the substrate that literacy held at bay for three centuries. The axe is the force that cuts through institutions built on reading and reason. And the grease is AI: not the weapon itself, but the substance that makes its swing effortless, silent, and devastating.
Sora 2 arrived on Monday as the newest layer of grease.
A single prompt can produce a full scene of Family Guy or Futurama. Voice, animation, jokes, pacing all created without writers, actors, or animators. An entire season could theoretically (and likely will) be generated on demand for a viewer.
Platforms no longer require a supply side at all. The infinite scroll has mutated. Instead of fetching content we can now all manufacture cameos of Sam Altman as skibidi toilet. BARF.
The book forced us to sit still with arguments. The feed forced us to skim fragments. This new model now forces us to do nothing at all: desire becomes indistinguishable from fulfillment.
The problem is not just that people don’t read.
It is that people will no longer want to. Reading trains us to sustain attention, construct arguments and build shared worlds of meaning. Infinite production abolishes desire.
We can now summon cultural artifacts with a prompt but our intent is messy, half-formed and often contradictory. In the old world scarcity disciplined intent. You had to decide which books to read, which shows to watch, which ideas were worth the time. Now infinite supply flatters every incoherent desire. The user no longer learns to shape intent.
And so two dangers converge:
Post-literacy erodes our capacity to comprehend.
Infinite production erodes our capacity to author.
This axe does not fall with blood and spectacle. Students raised on TikTok are untrained to read Dickens. Students raised on Sora 2 and its ilk will be untrained to specify what they want from culture, from politics and I fear more broadly from life.
What happens when comprehension and authorship both migrate?
When books die we lose a a way of thinking. When supply chains in all media die, we lose a reason to choose to think. Culture becomes a hallucination loop: personalized, infinite and frictionless.
If the printing press birthed the citizen-reader, what will Sora 2 birth?
If democracy depended on citizens who could deliberate, what happens when deliberation is offloaded to machines that simulate it for us?
If our attention once constructed shared public worlds, what happens when each person inhabits a bespoke hallucination channel?
Don’t pay attention to other people’s minds. Look straight ahead, where nature is leading you—nature in general, through the things that happen to you; and your own nature, through your own actions. — VII. 55
The prognosis is stark.
Civilization does not collapse in fire. It recurses into something stranger. Culture does not vanish. It multiplies into endless streams of synthetic media that no longer require true authors.
Three outcomes are unfortunately visible already:
Decision without comprehension. Corporate boards, governments, and even households will lean on AI-generated reasoning chains too complex to audit. We will know what was decided but not why. This is governance by cognitive prosthetic.
Culture without authorship. Media becomes fully on-demand. Shared texts novels, films and even viral shows dissolve. Each citizen lives in a hallucination loop generated for their consumption alone. The loss is not just content but the rapid deterioration of common ground.
Politics without debate. Democracy thrived when citizens were trained through literacy to argue, deliberate, and question. The post-literate, post-supply citizen won’t be trained at all. Politics is already trending towards algorithmic manipulation of demand-side hallucinations.
This is the grease on the axe: it makes each cut painless, almost invisible, until the trunk is gone and the forest with it.
And so what does this mean for us? The answer is not ambiguous.
Those who build defenses against cognitive dissolution will preserve what makes us human. The rest won’t be equipped to resist the slide: mistaking infinite personalized content for freedom, algorithmic suggestions for their own thoughts, frictionless satisfaction for a life well-lived.
Sora 2 and what will soon follow is a hyper accelerant and defense is vital:
Cultivate radical attention. In a world designed to scatter focus, deep attention is your act of rebellion. Read books. Actual books, cover to cover. Sit with boredom. Practice sustained thinking without digital aids.
Choose difficulty. Every system now optimizes for ease. Choose the opposite. Write by hand. Calculate in your head. Navigate without GPS. Cook without recipes. These small frictions are cognitive weight training.
Build communities of meaning. Shared reality dissolves when each person inhabits a custom-generated world. Go to book clubs, debate societies, workshops to construct meaning together with others in real life.
Develop immune systems. Not every output that feels true is. Not every desire you feel is yours. Build habits of questioning: Who benefits from this? What is being optimized for? What human capacity does this replace?
Literacy made us human. It gave us the ability to think beyond the moment and to build cathedrals of meaning. Its loss will not return us to some preliterate paradise. It will deliver us into a species that has forgotten how to think just at the moment our tools have learned to think for us.
But unlike previous transitions, this one offers little time for adaptation. The printing press took centuries to transform society. The smartphone took decades. AI in this horrible form (short form on-demand generated reels) will take years. Perhaps we have three. Or fewer.
The barbarian is not at the gates. He is inside us. That chooses spectacle over contemplation. That chooses the infinite supply scroll over the difficult page.
What we do in this moment matters.
The grease makes the blade swift and silent. But hands that still remember how to grip can yet refuse to swing.