The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

James Marriott traces the arc from the 18th-century reading revolution — which gave rise to the Enlightenment, democracy, and modern science — to the current post-literate moment, where smartphone adoption has sent PISA scores, IQ, and reading rates into sustained decline. He argues that literacy is not merely a skill but the cognitive infrastructure of civilization: the kind of complex, logical, dispassionate reasoning that books demand is literally impossible in purely oral or video-first media. As that infrastructure erodes, democracies revert to the emotional and mystical modes of pre-literate societies — fertile ground for charismatic charlatans and populist movements.

Connections

• James Marriott — author; the seed essay that became his book The New Dark Ages
• Reading — the collapse of reading as a civilizational threat
• Attention Economy — smartphones as the chief mechanism of the counter-revolution
• Media Ecology — how successive media (print, TV, smartphone) reshape cognition and politics
• Cultural Stagnation — post-literate culture as repetitive, nostalgic, and creatively stagnant
• Amusing Ourselves to Death — Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death cited as the prophetic antecedent
• AI and Learning — indirectly relevant; Marriott’s thesis applies to any technology that substitutes for deep reading