Tilted Planet Press

The Age of Reading is Over, declares The Atlantic.  In her important story, writer Rose Horowich lays out overwhelming evidence that electronic media, and especially digital media, are sucking our minds out the way a black hole sucks power from a star.

The loss of the Library of Alexandria is offered for comparison.  It contained the collected writings and wisdom of the ancients, and it fostered intellectual growth for centuries.  Then, in about the fourth century of the common era, it disappeared.  This could have been the tragedy that triggered the Dark Ages of ignorance and superstition.

Julius Caesar attacked the library and damaged it, and later the Catholic Church finally destroyed it.  This has been the accepted explanation for its loss.  Recent scholars argue that it was actually destroyed by neglect, when budget cutters would not provide funds for its maintenance.  Ambition, religion, and neglect combined to snuff out the light of civilization.

Will to power, dogmatism, greed, and apathy are the Dark Riders of civilization.  They are riding again.

From television to social media to artificial intelligence, human intelligence is under siege.  Today’s degradation of reading, comprehension, memory, and reason is an assault that pushes the population to a chaos-induced dementia.

A small cabal of omnipotent oligarchs decry the dangers of technology while they race forward, gathering all resources to themselves.  They seek to dominate the energy budget of the entire planet, while the natural order of life is exterminated like a pest.

In place of the ancient written library of texts at Alexandria, the modern repository is a computer chip.  Ms. Horowich believes the library was much more vulnerable than the chip.  Actually, the opposite is true.  The library could survive neglect for centuries.  The datacenter cannot survive neglect for a single day. Datacenters require massive inflows of energy every second.

Two forces oppose the final domination by the datacenters.  One is the universal friction of entropy.  The other is the inner light of the human spirit.

Nature—life— is the counterweight to entropy.  When nature is extinguished, entropy will run rampant.  It is already inflating.

Entropy is the inevitable deterioration of matter and energy.  The tremendous inputs of energy will be unreliable.  The perspicacious maintenance required will become inattentive.  The budget cutters and saboteurs will accelerate the attrition.  Guerilla warfare could rise against them.

The other force, the inner light of the human spirit will not be extinguished.  A shroud of ignorance and superstition may be drawn over it, but it is greater than both of those.  We will not go gentle into that good night.  Those words and the speaker of those words may be forgotten.  But the spirit that moved those words will persist.  Now, our mission is to rage against the dying of the light.