How Big Tech Killed Literary Culture

My issue with reading (nonfiction) books these days is that they’re essentially extended opinion pieces. While I am open to learning a talking head’s perspective (not everyone who gets a book deal is necessarily an expert in their topic), my main gripe is that many writers don’t incorporate a multifaceted point of view on their subject. I don’t expect encyclopedic information, or comprehensive analysis, but I think including choice perspectives across the entire history of a given subject matter is important. Otherwise, I’ll just chat with a bot about the topic, and get text books or journal articles for deeper understanding. Book writers need to do a better job, maybe we need digital books that enable chatting with the author’s book/bot. Free idea for whoever has the bandwidth to do it.

The technology-as-entertainment approach is poison. Reddit is the worst of it; even the tech addicts that see themselves as intellectuals mostly can’t be bothered to read. The (intentional) lack of reading comprehension in order to misconstrue comments and pick arguments would make an observer believe that most Redditors are functionally illiterate. I read a good criticism once that reading a single quality book on any topic, puts one far ahead of the knowledge base of the subreddit dedicated to that topic.

Even HN isn’t great anymore. I frequently change my password to gibberish and abandon my account to the ether, to spend several month stretches completely disconnected from the “social” internet.