9 July 2026 - 6:00pm
The age of post-literacy is upon us. The dismayed warnings from teachers and professors have been growing in volume for some years; now, The Atlantic reports in its latest cover story that one Harvard student needed a set text translated from “Old English” in order to read it. The book in question? A Clockwork Orange.
The digital revolution, author Rose Horowitch argues, completes a trajectory predicted from the mid-20th century by writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman: the end of mass literacy, and with it much of the normative culture we take for granted. Horowitch musters literacy scholars, critics, and doom-sayers to warn that this transformation will change the way we think — that it will usher in a less rational, more demagogic political culture. Her argument goes that this is, in effect, a new burning of the Library of Alexandria.
All this is right. But beyond a gesture at Trumpian rhetoric, Horowitch baulks at thinking through in any detail the political implications of the new digital post-literacy. In fact, this is its central feature, and its implications are less revolutionary than astonishingly reactionary, in ways that make even the most staunch conservative look like a squashy Leftist.
The end of mass literacy means the degradation of every large-scale transformation that formed the modern world, from secularism to industrial technology, nation-states and democracy. A post-literate polity is less rationalistic, meaning it’s also more willing to believe in curses, demons and Satanic paedophile rings. No wonder, perhaps, that from “WitchTok” to hipster Catholicism to apocalyptic AI, a supernova of religious and crypto-religious phenomena has left bewildered commentators wondering what happened to “New Atheism” and the world of science and reason it promised.
Democracy is dying, too. The broad-based middle-class prosperity that blossomed from the early modern age, aided by dissolving social hierarchies and new commercial opportunities facilitated by mass literacy, was already crumbling as “information societies” de-industrialised. Now, AI threatens to centralise power still further, in the process obliterating what’s left of the middle class: its knowledge workers.
Without an active bourgeoisie, you can’t muster the social infrastructure for constituency politics. This has actually been the case for decades, but has been accelerated by the dematerialising power of digital. More saliently yet, without literacy you don’t have an electorate capable of absorbing campaign promises and making informed decisions. A post-literate polity is one that can’t engage meaningfully in mass democracy. Its effects are unevenly distributed across social classes, too. The further one goes down the socio-economic hierarchy, the more pronounced post-literacy is, meaning the class disparities in people’s capacity to think long-form are growing ever starker.
Under such circumstances, electoral rituals may continue to be enacted — perhaps by joke candidates, for example, wearing dustbins on their heads — but the political story of the last 25 years has been the quiet ring-fencing of real power, away from the giddy whims of an easily-manipulated electorate. Horowitch points to Donald Trump as the “first post-literate leader”, but in truth, populism is more of a rearguard action against this phenomenon than its principal vector. Now, we are witnessing demagogic leaders gaining prominence on the Left as well as the Right via platforms rooted more in vibes than coherent policy, as governments worldwide roll out digital censorship and prepare other measures to keep popular discontent in check.
Meanwhile, the obvious lobbying power of super-rich individuals reveals that in place of quaint modernist phenomena such as secularism, democracy, and bourgeois prosperity, postmodern power-broking is once again the preserve chiefly of an unimaginably wealthy aristocracy. Aided sometimes by a small clerical class, this oversees an increasingly volatile and even more post-literate mass.
It’s reasonable to suppose the endpoint — if we aren’t already there — will be the return of some kind of permanent ruling oligarchy, or perhaps even a permanent ruler, appropriately tailored to suit local cultures and granted “aura” by the digital vibe machine. Under these circumstances, the question is less “can this be stopped” (spoiler: unless you know how to unplug the internet, no it can’t) than “are the Windsors up to the job?”.
