For most of my life I’ve been a voracious reader. I remember creating 75 links in a chain symbolizing every book I’d read during my first grade school year for a class project. In my twenties I began to keep track of the books I was reading using Goodreads, and during grad school and the two years following I was reading 50-75 books each year, sharing aesthetic pictures of the books on Instagram. Non-fiction, YA, romance novels, canon classics, social commentary, self-help, science-fiction, fantasy, theory — everything was interesting to me and I’d go through phases of consuming one genre or another before something new would pique my interest.
Instead of “you are what you eat”, I’d argue that I am the texts1 I’ve consumed in my life. They are the foundation upon which my personality and worldview is built. The connections between my synapses. The basis of my knowledge. “Writing is thinking”, and writing truly only exists to serve reading, because we learn(ed) to read before we learn(ed) to write (even as a species), and most of us learn(ed) that through stories told out loud.
Stories are our way of understanding ourselves and one another and the world around us, so perhaps it is no surprise that literacy rates are declining at a time when we are becoming increasingly isolated from one another, whether through polarizing ideologies, lack of third spaces, fear, technology, etc. Our society has become so individualistic in our hyper specific echo chambers created by the all-seeing algorithm that we have forgotten what it means to be part of a community, our responsibilities towards one another, and our common humanity2.
Then, in 2020, two things happened that altered (or perhaps I should say, destroyed) my reading habits for the next several years.
First came COVID. In the months leading up to the lockdowns, I’d been reading 5-7 romance novels a week, burnt out from a several years where I tended towards non-fiction and theory. When I wasn’t reading, I was teaching, writing, and spending time with friends.
During COVID lockdown and my move to an area where I knew no one, I was introduced to TikTok. And within a month, I stopped reading. Instead, I scrolled. Endlessly. Or at least for most of my waking hours. Anytime I became bored for even a second, my phone was in my hand. Anytime I wanted to stop thinking, or needed stimulation, or needed a distraction, I was scrolling TikTok.
And unlike Instagram, it always seemed to know exactly what I wanted to see. It tailored itself to my interests until it seemed to know me better than I did. It offered up on a silver platter all of the things that made me feel okay in a time period where I was feeling increasingly anxious and depressed.
Over time, I became uncomfortable with that familiarity. In graduate school I had written a paper in which I had likened social media to Foucault’s panopticon and to Plato’s allegory of the cave. It was a place where I was somehow always visible (even when I wasn’t creating content, the algorithm saw me) and where the images I saw which were presented as reality were, in fact, manufactured.
On the first page of Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1967) he quotes Ludwig Feuerbach (1841): “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, . . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane.” Social media is a spectacle in which influencers will rent fake private jets to appear wealthy and successful in order to, they hope, become wealthy and successful by duping their followers into thinking they already are. All that matters is the image that is projected.
TikTok increasingly became a place that I did not want to be. I felt overstimulated by the sounds of it: the constant shifts in music, loud voices, noise that caused the muscles in my back to tense with the changing of the channel. I began to watch it in silence, skipping any video that did not utilize subtitles because I was unable to bear the cacaphony any longer.
But even this was not enough to quell the mental fatigue I felt from scrolling, which sometimes left me feeling almost physically ill, like I needed dramamine.
I noticed a distinct shift in the content over time, and similarly to what happened with Facebook and Instagram before it, every post seemed intent on selling me something.
When I was depressed, it fed my depression. When I was angry, it fed my anger. When I was anxious, it fed my anxiety. I was reminded of the study that Facebook had conducted in 2012 on “emotional contagion”, manipulating the news feeds of its users to see if that in turn could manipulate the users themselves. When something went viral on TikTok, it began to feel like a literal virus, insidiously changing my brain. Like it was testing the limits of “emotional contagion” and whether it could be used to create a hive mind of people whose emotions it could puppet to a dystopian end.
In the documentary Hypernormalisation, which I wrote about earlier in the year, we see people so overwhelmed by the world around them that they are anxious to retreat into a simpler world that reflects themself back to them. TikTok does this: it shows us people who think like us, who fear what we fear, who love what we love, people who stitch videos of people we hate to hate on them with us, people who read the same books we do, who share the same religion, who do all of these things at once.
So we trust them, and where their ideas end and ours begin becomes more nebulous.
In my English classes, I teach Neil Postman’s (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argues that it was not Orwell’s 1984 but Huxley’s Brave New World that correctly predicted our dystopian future, and that television would be the medium to bring this decline in intellect and critical thinking about. Reading it today, one of my students argued that, it is not an either/or proposition, and I am inclined to agree: our entertainment surveils us even as it distracts us from what is important.
Postman wrote that,
The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of the news may appear . . . it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse. Imagine what you would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a few words in behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect for you and, certainly, no respect for the subject . . . We have become so accustomed to [television’s] discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, “Now . . . this.” One can hardly overestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place. The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world. In watching television news, they, more than any other segment of the audience, are drawn into an epistemology based on the assumption that all reports of cruelty and death are greatly exaggerated and, in any case, not to be taken seriously or responded to sanely.
. . . For those who think I am here guilty of hyperbole, I offer the following description of television news by Robert MacNeil, executive editor and co-anchor of the “MacNeil-Lehrer News-hour.” The idea, he writes, “is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required . . . to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.” He goes on to say that the assumptions controlling a news show are “that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism” (104-105).
Postman’s concerns about the medium of television seem almost quaint when compared to the media landscape today, and in particular regarding TikTok where conspiracy theories mingle with fact, the unreal is made to seem real, the serious becomes absurd, and we scroll from tragedy filmed as entertainment to an advertisement if our attention is not grabbed within the first few seconds.
How can one possibly be expected to maintain the attention and focus required to read a book when this is its competition?
During the decade that I have been teaching composition I have noticed a steep decline in my students powers of observation, in their critical thinking skills, in their capacity to comprehend what they are reading, and even in their ability to form an opinion of their own. They often reject anything that is not personally interesting to them as unimportant. They have no stamina to read “long” texts. And worst of all, they increasingly rely on AI to do their thinking for them3.
And this isn’t only a problem with my students, articles like “College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds”, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, and “My Students Can’t Read: The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.” show that this is a growing trend in higher education.
One of the worst things that resulted from the anti-intellectual push over the last several decades is the idea that disciplines located within the category of “the humanities” have no real value and that only business and STEM were majors worth pursuing. This model of education, where funding has been stripped so thoroughly that students must prioritize return on investment over passion or interest because they must be able to justify and pay off an increasingly ludicrous student loan debt, has led to a devaluing of the majors that are not only practically necessary for a functioning society, but which allow us to ask important questions about the society that we inhabit.
The link between business and STEM, between capital and technology, has led to a pursuit of technological developments that will boost the bottom line and extract the most profit for those who have already made billions extracting every kind of resource, material and human, rather than asking what technological advances will benefit humanity, what the potential ethical implications are, and what humanitarian dangers might result from new technologies.
Each term, I have my students read the blog post “There Is (Still) No Ethical Use of AI” and then I ask them their opinion of the article and how they use AI in their daily lives. In part, this assignment is an attempt to get them to stop using AI or to at least think about it more critically; in part, it’s a way for me to see the general mood around its use.
One thing I find particularly interesting is the answer to the question of whether they believe it’s ethical to use AI. Of course, the ones who use it, find it ethical. But their reasons for this seem to be that because they use it, because it’s available for them to use, because it makes their lives easier in some respect, that it must be ethical. And I wonder how many of us subscribe to the same idea of what is “ethical”.
And honestly, I wonder how many of us think about whether the things we choose to do are ethical and whether, ultimately, we care. Ethics seem to be no match for the power of comfort and convenience in a society whose citizenry finds life to be so chaotic, frightening, and overburdened that we just want something to be easy. And, like in the Good Place, perhaps there are just no “good” choices available to us, so it becomes habit to default to what is comforting and easy, and to justify these choices because to do the “right” thing is one more difficult thing on a pile of burdens that feel increasingly overwhelming.
But if we are going to have any chance of turning the ship around, we must. We must begin to think about the ethical consequences of our decisions, of the way we spend our time, of the technology we choose to use. Because if we are ever going to have an ethical society, that must begin with us; our leaders in politics, business, and tech, those with the most influence on society, have long since abandoned ethics in favor of power and wealth.
More than anything, I’d like to encourage you to read more. Since beginning an intentional reading practice of at least one long-form article and one chapter of a book a day, my mental health and my attention span have both improved. I am reading voraciously again, surpassing my goals most days. To that end, I will sometimes be sharing what I’m reading in the hopes that it will inspire more people to read more often and spend less time interacting with algorithms and AI designed to steal our attention, intellect, and humanity.
read along with me
Books:
If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein
The Shadow of Perseus by Claire Heywood
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
Articles:
“AI and the threat of “human extinction”: What are the tech-bros worried about? It’s not you and me” by Émile P. Torres
“The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch
“How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition” by Rose Horowitch
“Loitering towards war” by Anton Cebalo
“First Contact with America” by Anton Cebalo
“Political Pornography” by @deepleft
Movies:
Obsession (2026)
Persepolis (2007)
Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Him (2025)
- By “text” I mean any kind of media, not only books. ↩︎
- Don’t mistake this as me saying that we should all just put important moral differences aside and meet in some fantastical middle (I say fantastical because, what, for instance, is the “middle-ground” we can meet in when the issue is something like genocide or not? Slavery or not? Concentration camps or not?) So much of life is grey, but it’s ridiculous to think that people should just find common ground on issues of this moral weight. It only means that you don’t feel you’ll be affected by the outcome of the decision. Agreements like “don’t murder”, “don’t rape”, “don’t genocide”, “love your neighbor as yourself”, etc. should be part of what we consider our “common humanity”. But when we allow them to divide us based on made up hierarchies that only serve to benefit one group of people, we are choosing not only our own suffering but perpetuating the suffering of others. White people cannot stand in class solidarity if they cannot see the ways in which BIPOC people have been much more heavily oppressed in the class system as a whole (don’t bother pointing out the exceptions that prove the rule). Cis-gendered and male people cannot stand in class solidarity if they cannot see the ways in which trans-people and femmes have been much more heavily oppressed in the class system as a whole. etc. ↩︎
- I should note that I also have many students who are very vocal in their dislike of AI and who do not use it, and for those students I am eternally grateful. ↩︎
The Tower is Falling 
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