Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death

Ed West reviews James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, arguing that the decline of reading — accelerated by TV in the 1950s and now turbo-charged by smartphones — is not merely cultural nostalgia but a measurable cognitive and political crisis. The piece traces the Flynn Effect’s reversal, the zombifying history of television, and the collapse of political discourse into an oral, pre-literate mode, culminating in the observation that the cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism at the precise moment it was most needed.

Connections

• James Marriott — author of The New Dark Ages, the book under review
• Reading — the central subject; literacy decline as civilizational threat
• Attention Economy — smartphones as the accelerant of the literacy collapse
• Cultural Stagnation — the post-literate world as repetitive, static, lacking innovation
• Media Ecology — how television restructured domestic space and social life before phones finished the job
• Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic cited throughout as prophetic forerunner
• Lonesome Dove — indirectly connected via the Marriott literacy-and-culture arc