Politics after Literacy

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/politics-after-literacy

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/politics-after-literacy [unpaywall] [archive]

Nobody can read any more; and that sucks.

All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks.

But:

Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and non-literacy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness.