0.0 Context Setting

Tuesday, 20 January 2026 in Portland, Oregon, where it is cold, but not as cold as other places in the country. Apparently there were visible aurora last night, but I was too busy being asleep.

A long one, today.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My attention

1.1 The Collapse of Form

I was reading Paul Musgrave’s newsletter of today¹ on amongst other things the Mark Carney-saying-out-loud that the old international world order is dead, that Trump has kicked them all over, and that it’s time for the rest of the world to deal with an antagonistic and yet still fairly predictable and dangerous toddler. (Predictable in the sense that he’s capricious and in it for himself, and like I wrote elsewhere, exceedingly goal-oriented and method-agnostic).

Anyway, I ended up reading Musgrave’s issue on the decline (or collapse?) of the literate society², and it put a few things into clear perspective for me. Here’s what caught my attention:

• A speedy dismissal of the “adults have always complained about kids since the days of Socrates” due to the specificity and consistency of current complaints/issues;
• the difference (and here I trust Musgrave) between a class where 70% of the students have done 50% of the reading and what’s alleged to be the current situation of 20% of students having done 10% of the reading;
• what the decline of print culture “really means”

I have written a lot over the past 25 years about the collapse of form of content due to digitization. It feels weird to have written about it over the last 25 years and to then watch it happen, participate in it happening, and also see the results of the collapse of form not just in children and young people in general, but in my own children.

So this is less of a new-thing-that-caught-my-attention and more of a oh, another thing I’ll put in my confirmation bias bucket about how I feel good about an insightful observation.

If you were born before, say, 1985, you were educated in and came of age in a thoroughly print/literate society. What Musgrave put clearly was this:

At some point, I and many people my age must have been taught the difference between a book written by a single author and an edited volume; this is now knowledge I will be working into my lesson plans²

and another example:

Print literacy assumed and facilitated conversation; it also developed familiarity with the conventions of a literate society — that is, a society in which a dominant, even a predominant, stratum was aware, if sometimes only implicitly, of distinctions now lost, such as the difference between a tabloid and a broadsheet or between a pulp and a textbook. (In my recent experience, students no longer reliably process the pagination and layout of textbooks as helpful or as conveying hierarchies or cues about how to read them — rather, many struggle with how to navigate textbooks, as they have not often been exposed to them.)

This is simultaneously fascinating and to a degree, horrifying because of what I think is undeniably a collapse, just due to the speed in which the change has happened.

I didn’t really think about or understand what literacy meant in terms of common understanding in a society, or how literacy played a fundamental part of the societies in which I grew up. What I thought it meant, naively, was “being able to read and understand things”, but you can drive a truck through “things” and “understand”.

The key there is common understanding, or at least some degree of common understanding. I’ve written before about somehow knowing the difference between a tabloid newspaper and a broadsheet newspaper, and that this isn’t something you’re explicitly taught in the way that you’re sat down one day and your parents or educators teach you about editorial intent, business model, and how they interact with for historical reasons the size of paper on which news is printed.

No, what this helped make clear was that (duh) we’re shaped by a literate society, and after a while, the shaping of a literate society means that due to common understanding, we can take shortcuts. Shortcuts like “a serif font is more trustworthy than a san serif font”. You are the fish that’s swimming in water, doesn’t know what water is, and unless you pay a lot of attention, you might not notice what literacy is doing to, or for, you.

But if you’ve been reading this for a while, then you’ll know where I’m going here.

Digitization is the ultimate collapse of form. For reasons of economics (i.e. storage and processing capacity), taking information and reducing it into a form that can be stored, manipulated, and retransmitted by computers involved breaking that information down to, well, its Shannon bones³.

It is, like they say, just ones and zeros at the end of it. That would get you started.

Musgrave points out that a literate society discovered, created, and then built itself around a whole bunch of affordances that could rely on a shared experience:

students no longer reliably process the pagination and layout of textbooks as helpful or as conveying hierarchies or cues about how to read them — rather, many struggle with how to navigate textbooks, as they have not often been exposed to them

Now this isn’t to say that print design practices to show information hierarchy are sort of inherently baked into our brains, a sort of Chomsky-esque hierachy-detection-device. But it is to say that a bunch of emergent standards, well, emerged to create shortcuts, like I mentioned above.

There are distinctions that exist in knowledge that I think were reflected in physical media, yes sometimes out of physical constraints, but also perhaps due to the underlying information and its structure itself. I imagine there are a bunch of library information science graduates reading this shaking their heads at my reckons here.

Another example here is the story about kids these days not knowing what filesystems are and instead throwing everything into the Google Drive blender and just searching for things. That works, yes, but is it helpful in terms of organization? Could more explicit organization -- folders! anything else! -- be more helpful in helping keep track of information and keep track of understanding? This isn’t me just doing a god I wish kids these days would use folders, it’s as much a reflection on Google’s opinion that may have been a result of business strategy that search is the best way to do things, and it just so happens that search (or, rather advertising based on search intent) is Google’s bread and butter.

There is a whole part here where cognitive psychologists might chime in about how we think and the structure of our brains makes us predisposed to, what, understand? certain types of information certain forms more easily, whether you want to go into the (discredited?) theory of learning styles or not.

I’ve written before about how the feed collapsed the distinctions between the kind of media that people grew up with, a sort of unintentional confusion.

Facebook was one example of this when links and content were introduced into the feed -- by design, the information in a feed was more or less undifferentiated. Make the feed easy to use. Make it clean. Make Facebook the important thing, not the information coming from external sources.

This was also technically easy, of course. It would be more difficult to present, say, the NY Times differently than the NY Post in someone’s feed, unless you were rendering say the information as an image (of which! more storage! more expensive!)

Change is happening from two positions, here: those who grew up with shortcuts lost them and had to adapt. The shortcuts you’re used to from a lifetime of a literate society and the forms and frames of such a society have been blown away, creating the opportunity for in some respects disguise and trickery. Too expensive for you to create a physical broadsheet newspaper? Well with internet publishing you can look like a broadsheet newspaper now.

Then from the other end, the creation of new forms, new shortcuts, new affordances at breakneck speed, to which Musgrave alludes to:

It is specifically that assignments and examinations that functioned well within the span of a few years are no longer feasible.

by which I interpret to mean that assignments and examinations created within and assuming knowledge of the common understanding affordances of a literate society could no longer rely on that common knowledge and understanding. You can imagine in this way the combination of cheap mobile computing and connectivity a sort of cultural K-T extinction event that within a decade had eaten away at or wiped out a whole method of understanding in replace of a new one, and a new one that was under economic pressure to win, as quickly as possible.

My position is that we’ve undoubtedly lost something. Whether what’s replacing/outcompeting that literate society is better or not is I think still out for the jury. It’s certainly different, and the literate institutions -- those institutions that were created within and designed to assume that literate common understanding -- are clearly not capable of adapting quickly enough.

This is to say nothing of the effects of generative AI. If you are going to say “well, generative AI lets us do what we could do with Photoshop for years anyway” then you are wrong and you need to learn why⁴. It is now easier than it ever was to make a thing look (or sound, or read, or so on) like another thing. Style transfer itself is already more than, what, five years old? When I say “easier than it ever was”, that undersells it: it is now trivial and ultimately accessible to anyone who wants to.

What does this mean? It means another perspective to look at digital natives for one, a concept that I think is easily (and sometimes willfully) misunderstood. We could now look at digital natives as those who have grown up predominantly with digital forms of content (whatever they are), and on aggregate lack the common understanding of physical literate forms (like Musgrage’s example, the fact that “journals” exist with issues an volumes).

But one attribute of those digital natives is that they understand that forms are malleable. In fact, forms may not be trustable at all seeing as exactly how malleable they are in the first place. I (and others) make jokes about the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise encounters tamarians, who speak only in metaphor⁵ (“Shaka, when the walls fell”, “Temba, his arms wide!”, Darmak and Jalad at Tanagra”), and their parallels to memes and image macros, the rapid spread of shared understanding, a sort of gestalt around the combination of an image from popular culture (or an image of popular culture) and corresponding text.

Are image memes rich in meaning? I’d say so. Are they like poems? No, they’re different. But do they share common intent to convey feeling? I think so.

But now we have, at speed, a sort of shattered Babel of shared understanding that also stems from a shattering and re-forming of form.

Again, another example: what is a podcast? What is the form of a podcast? Is it a piece of audio, accessible by an RSS feed? Is it two or more people discussing something? Is it two or more people discussing something on video? is it two or more people discussing something on video that can only be accessed on Spotify and not in a podcast app? Is it something that can only be played back through a Podcast app? Is it audio visual content that can be accessed on Netflix, and Netflix only, but still retains. conversational format? Is it allowed to include editing? Is it allowed to include indoor locations as well as outdoor locations?

And then what does it mean if some content comes from a podcast? Does that mean it was cheap to produce? Does that mean it was produce independently? What does it mean to be produced independently? When I say I learned or heard of something from a podcast, how trustable do you think that information is? Do you need to know who hosted it? Could you guess at how trustable or accurate the information was from just the name alone and the fact that I listened to a podcast?

That’s to say nothing of the branding of form, either. What’s a newsletter? What is a Substack? One intent of branding is to create an emotional connection and to set some sort of definition and expectation. How is a Substack [sic] different from a newsletter, and if I tell you I read something from a Substack as opposed to a newsletter, what does that mean to you?

Did you know that a tumblr is a form? That a gif means something different than a meme? What does a TikTok versus a Reel versus a Story mean?

All of these are malleable forms that have been designed. Their constraints are different that literate media, but constraints exist nonetheless. Portrait versus vertical formats still exist. Pixel density exists, or used to exist. Website versus app exists, hell, the platform upon which a form exists makes a difference, whether from the OS level through to whether Netflix or Spotify or Facebook or Libby or Kindle is a platform.

It used to be that I could tell, physically, if I were need the end of a novel. There would be fewer pages left. It used to be that I could tell if I were near the end of an ebook because my percentage read indicator (not! the page number, another loss of shared reference point, replaced by, what, “location”) would be at what, 98%. But now 98% doesn’t mean I’m near the end. Now 85% might mean I’m near the end because the cheapness of storage and transmission means that it’s trivial from a technical “publishing” point of view for a publisher to include a few thousand words of teaser for the next novel in the series. So now I’m not nearly finished of the book, of the ebook, but I’m nearly finished of the story that I paid for, that’s encapsulated in a digital file that still mimics due to affordances and expectations the holdover of people who grew up with and understand books.

Here’s some drama that caught my attention, I swear it’s related. The other day, some guy with a big Twitter account complained that on Bluesky, he was getting way less “engagement” than the equivalent post on X. He bemoaned that if Bluesky’s intent was to become the next global townsquare then it was failing, and it would never achieve its goal. So like I’ve done before, I blithely posted that:

Global townsquares considered harmful at this stage of humanity’s development.

which is another way of rehashing the context collapse argument and conversation, which is another way of pointing out that “we” lack shared understanding to the extent that platforms big enough (e.g. the EU’s Very Large Online Platforms, those with over 45 million users in the EU) do not have users with enough shared understanding to not, essentially, get in big fucking fights the entire time, short of genuinely world-spanning events like, I don’t know football or the Olympics and even then, not really.

Tom Carden then helpfully pointed me towards Herbert Dreyfus’s book On The Internet⁶, of which he helpfully quoted:

But the vision of a worldwide electronic agora precisely misses the Kierkegaardian point that the people talking to each other in the Athenian agora were members of a direct democracy who were directly affected by the issues they were discussing, and, most importantly, the point of the discussion was for them to take the responsibility and risk of voting publicly on the questions they were debating.

For Kierkegaard, a worldwide electronic agora is an oxymoron. The Athenian agora is precisely the opposite of the public sphere, where anonymous electronic kibitzers from all over the world, who risk nothing, come together to announce and defend their opinions. As an extension to the deracinated public sphere, the electronic agora is a grave danger to real political community. Kierkegaard enables us to see that the problem is not that Rheingold's 'electronic agora' is too utopian; it is not an agora at all, but a nowhere place for anonymous nowhere people. As such, it is dangerously distopian.”⁶

Yes, it’s a long paragraph. I believe in you, you can finish it.

What Dreyfus is getting across is one aspect of our so-called global town squares or agoras, that they fundamentally lack a sense of accountability. It is different if you turn up to a town square and nobody knows who you are. (You could make an argument, I suppose, that doxxing is a backlash or some sort of attempt to actually get to an agora by instituting accountability to one’s words, but then that doxxing is invariably used towards a purpose of, well, mob justice)

But the Athenian agoras weren’t just about accountability, they were about taking the responsibility and risk of voting publicly on the questions they were debating. What shared questions are being debated? The colour of the dress? Is this entertaining? Sure. Helpful? I mean to the extent that it’s a lesson into the variability of the human experience and how what we perceive isn’t what’s actually out there, the science lesson that colours don’t really exist? (Which I imagine can be felt like a universe-ending existential threat calling everything you hold dear into question).

“Smaller” groups of people, sure. Groups that coalesce around forms, sure. At least Star Trek fans have previous series to coalesce around when they decide to be the best at hating the newest iteration of the franchise.

So I’m not worried in the sense that forms are being destroyed and new ones are being created. Creating the new ones is exciting! That we’re creating the new ones without potentially applying what we’ve learned before is disappointing but not surprising. What I am worried about is the difference between the two, the phase change between what was and what is now, and then what will come after. Computing I think means there’s nothing stopping malleability of form. Someone posted the other day a portable Sony video editing rig that looked like exactly the kind of thing that you’d use for a couple of decades during the heyday of electronic newsgathering. I don’t know, miniDV ingest on one end, some quick editing on the rig before squirting the DV files elsewhere for broadcast. Now it’s Capcut on a phone, or Da Vinci for a video essay. (What is a video essay?) Or whatever’s used to create MasterClass videos, or Veritasium videos, or what have you.

What’s a world where there’s less and less shared understanding? I don’t even know if there’s less shared understanding, to be honest, versus rapidly reconfiguring shared understanding that surfaces and then drowns to be remade again, form and content both.

All I know is that when my kids found out about what a phone directory was, and why it existed in the time of a lack of search, they thought it made sense as was a pretty good idea. So there’s that, at least.

OVER THREE THOUSAND WORDS THIS TIME. I don’t know about you, but four times looks like a trend. I shall try to subvert it next time.

How have you been?

Best,

Dan

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