Widespread literacy… is not a natural baseline but a costly ecological accomplishment. It depends on sustained, large-scale societal investment in both cultivation and maintenance. If that investment falters—or if new modes of communication arise that are less cognitively demanding and more closely aligned with our oral-auditory predispositions—then this hard-won literate ecology can erode rapidly.
In other words, mass literacy is not simply a skill that might fade. It is a complex cognitive adaptation—difficult to build, easy to displace—and, if outcompeted, literacy may once again become the province of a specialized elite.
Historically, we accepted literacy’s steep training cost because it offered a unique bundle of symbolic affordances: durable storage, precise retrieval, spatialization, and combinability. These were not luxuries— they were prerequisites for disciplines like law, science, literature, and philosophy.
Now, AI-mediated oral-auditory systems provide many of those same affordances—cloud memory, instant query, spatialized workspaces, speech-to-anything translation—at a fraction of the acquisition cost. We do not need ten years of schooling to learn to ask a language model, by voice, to store or retrieve language.
If new media outperform text on primary utility, ordinary selection pressure may displace literacy from its cultural and cognitive niche. But while these systems may replicate many of the affordances of textuality, their effects may be fundamentally different. And when it comes to literacy, it is precisely the secondary and tertiary effects that carry disproportionate value.
These effects include recursive empathy, long-horizon abstraction, disciplined counterfactual reasoning, interiority, and the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives over time. They emerge slowly, through sustained symbolic engagement. They are difficult to measure, easy to overlook, and prone to erosion when unattended.
To be clear about the mechanism: our society selects for the affordances of a medium—speed, ease, efficiency—not for its effects. And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized. They rarely register on the dashboards that guide decision-making.
Jac Mullen
https://jacmullen.substack.com/p/before-and-after-literacy