Beyond Books
Building Infrastructure for Understanding
Orwell feared banned books. Huxley feared forgotten books. Marriott fears the smartphone. But what if we’re all making the same mistake—mistaking the growing pains of transformation for the death throes of civilization?
The Crisis Is Real
Let’s start with what Marriott gets right: something is genuinely wrong. Students who once could parse Dickens now stumble over his first paragraph. PISA scores have declined globally since the mid-2010s. Reading for pleasure has fallen forty percent in twenty years. The OECD reports literacy “declining or stagnating” across developed countries. IQ scores, after a century of steady gains, have begun to fall.
These aren’t the phantoms of conservative panic. They’re measurable, documented, alarming.
But Marriott makes the same error as the 18th-century moralists he mocks—the ones who warned that novel-reading would corrupt society, exhaust the heart, and raise impossible expectations. He sees crisis and assumes the new medium itself is to blame. Screens are destroying our minds. The end of books means the end of civilization.
What if he’s misdiagnosing the cause?
The Real Problems
The cognitive decline Marriott documents is real, but it’s not caused by screens replacing books. It’s caused by:
1. Institutional gatekeeping disguised as guardianship. Marriott mourns declining book sales and shrinking literary culture. But whose books? Which literary culture? The one where five major publishers controlled what counted as literature? Where university presses determined what counted as serious thought? Where most people were consumers, not creators?
Creative and intellectual work hasn’t disappeared—it’s escaped the gatekeepers. Writers build audiences directly on Substack. Musicians bypass labels through Bandcamp. Game developers self-publish complex narrative experiences. Video essayists produce rigorous analysis on YouTube without waiting for academic journal approval.
The institutions Marriott defends weren’t just preserving literacy—they were controlling access to literate culture. When those institutions lose their monopoly and call it “civilizational collapse,” we should ask: whose civilization? Who benefited from that control?
2. Education systems that have lost their purpose. Universities no longer foster curiosity and understanding—they cram facts and credentials. If students can’t engage with Dickens, it’s not because screens destroyed their capacity. It’s because no one showed them why Dickens matters, how he illuminates human experience, why struggling with difficult texts is worth the effort. When universities successfully inspire genuine curiosity, students seek out challenging texts themselves. The education crisis is upstream of the literacy crisis.
3. Information abundance without navigation infrastructure. Marriott celebrates the 18th century when 56,000 books per decade seemed overwhelming. We now produce that volume every few hours. The Dewey Decimal System organized thousands of books. We need infrastructure that can navigate billions of pieces of content. Without it, we’re not enlightened by abundance—we’re drowning in it. The problem isn’t too much knowledge—it’s inadequate tools for finding signal in noise.
4. Addictive algorithms as design choice, not medium destiny. The mid-2010s inflection point Marriott identifies isn’t when screens arrived—it’s when algorithmic engagement optimization became dominant. TikTok and infinite scroll aren’t inherent properties of digital media. They’re specific implementations designed to maximize attention capture for advertising revenue. We chose to build systems that fragment attention and reward rage. We can build different systems with different incentives.
5. Transition growing pains mistaken for terminal decline. Every medium transition produces a generation that struggles with the new while losing facility with the old. The first generation of widespread literacy struggled with the oral memorization and improvisational rhetoric that defined pre-literate scholarship. Medieval scholars could hold vast amounts of text in memory and engage in complex verbal disputation—skills that atrophied as reading became dominant. That didn’t mean civilization was ending. It meant cognitive patterns were shifting, with gains in some areas and losses in others. We’re in another transition, not a collapse.
These aren’t signs of decline—they’re symptoms of capture: institutions protecting monopolies, education serving credentialism, algorithms optimized for profit, all while we mistake adaptation for collapse.
What Print Actually Gave Us (And What It Cost)
Marriott is right that print enabled certain forms of complex thinking. Writing let Kant develop arguments over years, refining and connecting ideas that would be impossible to hold in spontaneous speech. Reading let students engage with those arguments, checking logical connections and meditating on difficult passages.
But notice what print required: isolation, silence, solitude. You alone with a static text, working through it sentence by sentence. The author’s voice frozen at the moment of publication, unable to clarify, respond, or adapt to misunderstanding.
This was revolutionary compared to what came before. The democratization of knowledge that print enabled was genuinely transformative. But it also displaced something valuable: the dynamic, dialogic nature of oral learning traditions.
In Socratic dialogue, understanding emerged through question and response. In medieval disputation, ideas were tested through immediate challenge and defence. In oral cultures, knowledge was living and adaptive, shaped by context and audience. These traditions had profound limitations—they couldn’t scale, couldn’t preserve complex arguments with precision, couldn’t enable the kind of sustained logical development that writing allows.
But they also had strengths we lost: immediate feedback, collaborative reasoning, adaptive explanation, the ability to meet learners where they are.
The cognitive benefits of print weren’t magic properties of ink on paper. They emerged from specific practices: sustained attention, logical reasoning, grappling with difficulty, building mental models, making connections across texts. The question isn’t whether we preserve the physical format of books. It’s whether we preserve and extend those practices while recovering what was lost in the transition to print.
The Hybrid Possibility: Radical Pluralism as Infrastructure
For the first time, we have technology that could combine the strengths of both traditions—the permanence and logical rigour of writing with the dynamic engagement of dialogue.
But this hybrid isn’t a Western invention. It reconnects with practices that existed long before print culture declared itself the only valid form of serious thought.
Indian debating traditions like Nyaya logic and Tarka dialectics developed sophisticated methods for rigorous philosophical argument through oral disputation. African philosophical discourse—Ubuntu philosophy, Akan thought—carried complex wisdom through dialogue and practice, dismissed by Western academia because it wasn’t written in approved formats. Indigenous oral traditions preserved intricate knowledge systems—ecological, astronomical, historical—that Western institutions ignored because they didn’t fit the print paradigm.
The “crisis” Marriott describes partly reflects these traditions finally bypassing the gatekeepers who decided only certain forms of knowledge-transmission counted as legitimate. What looks like decline from inside the old institutions looks like liberation from outside them.
The question isn’t whether we can combine oral and literate traditions—it’s whether we can build infrastructure that honours both without letting either dominate.
But technology alone won’t solve anything. The question is what kind of infrastructure we build and what values it embodies.
Here’s a concrete proposal: Radical Pluralism (RP) as philosophical and technical infrastructure for the oral-literate hybrid we’re moving toward anyway.
RP rests on a demanding practice: brutally honest and compassionate dialogue with transparency and accountability.
Brutally honest: Say what you actually believe, without defensive posturing or strategic omission. Make your commitments explicit and open to questioning.
Compassionate: Hold space for others to do the same. Recognize that their beliefs are as real to them as yours are to you. Listen not to win, but to understand.
Transparent: Disagreement leaves a trace—visible, durable, and open to reflection. No backroom deals or invisible exclusions.
Accountable: When harms are named, they must be addressed. No immunity cloaked in authority or ideology.
This isn’t relativism or feel-good pluralism where “everyone’s right in their own way.” It’s the recognition that disagreement itself can be an invitation to deeper understanding—even when minds don’t change, even when conflicts remain.
What This Means for Books
Imagine books not as static texts but as nodes in a network of transparent dialogue.
Imagine struggling with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and being able to ask the text itself: “What does this mean?” Not getting a summary that replaces the work, but a clarification that lets you push deeper into the argument yourself. The AI doesn’t do your cognitive push-ups—it spots you so you can lift heavier weights. When you finally grasp the concept, that moment of understanding leaves a trace. Others can see not just what you concluded, but how you got there: the questions you asked, the false starts, the breakthrough.
Imagine reading Pride and Prejudice and discovering how materialist readers, feminist readers, religious readers, and postcolonial readers interpret the same passages in radically different ways. Not to declare one reading correct, but to understand how different frameworks shape interpretation. The novel becomes a site of documented dialogue rather than isolated consumption. You see where your blind spots are—not because someone lectures you, but because the text reveals how others see what you missed.
Imagine textbooks that fork like open-source code. A biology text gets adapted for medical students, for policy makers, for high schoolers—each version preserving full lineage to the source. When new research emerges, updates propagate through the network with transparent reasoning about what changed and why. Knowledge becomes living and collaborative while maintaining accountability to sources.
This isn’t making reading easier—it’s making engagement irresistible. The cognitive work that builds understanding remains. But now it happens in dialogue rather than isolation, with transparency rather than obscurity, building collective wisdom rather than fragmenting into private interpretation.
The Five Commitments
But infrastructure without constraints becomes infrastructure for domination. The same tools that could enable transparent dialogue could also enable transparent surveillance. The same systems that could make reasoning visible could also make dissent punishable. Dreams need anchors—not aspirations, but non-negotiable minimums.
For this to work, certain minimum conditions must be met. Not lofty ideals—the brutal minimum for coexistence.
Any framework that enters shared conversation must bring these offerings:
Non-violence — No truth is earned in blood
Reciprocity — Your framework respects boundaries as mine respects yours
Transparency — What you ask of others must be named clearly
Accountability — Your actions must carry the weight of your claims
Consent — No framework may conscript the unwilling
Without these, dialogue collapses into domination. These aren’t utopian ideals—they’re the brutal minimum for coexistence.
Evidence This Can Work
Existence proof from oral traditions: Socrates engaged in dialogue and developed rigorous philosophical reasoning without writing things down. Medieval scholastics built cathedrals of logic through oral disputation. The Enlightenment emerged from coffee house conversations as much as from books. Complex thinking doesn’t require one specific medium—it requires practices and infrastructure that support it.
Existence proof from collaborative knowledge systems: Wikipedia demonstrates that knowledge can be collectively maintained, transparently versioned, and held to accountability standards—while remaining more comprehensive and often more accurate than traditional encyclopedias. Open source software shows that complex systems can be built through transparent, distributed collaboration with documented reasoning traces.
Existence proof from human-AI collaboration: People already engage with AI to clarify difficult concepts, explore alternative interpretations, and test their understanding—often reporting that dialogue deepens rather than replaces engagement with source material. The reasoning that shaped this essay emerged through exactly such collaboration: human and silicon intelligence questioning assumptions, pushing back on weak claims, tracing implications together. Not AI replacing human thought, but collaborative reasoning that sharpens both. This happens now despite systems not being designed for this purpose. Imagine what becomes possible with intentional infrastructure.
Pattern detection at scale already works: Recommendation systems can identify what proves persuasive across different audiences. Search engines surface relevant information from billions of sources. Social networks detect emerging patterns in discourse. The technology exists—the question is what values guide its implementation.
What This Addresses
Education that rekindles curiosity: Imagine universities where engaging with Dickens means the text can show you why it matters—not by summarizing, but by revealing connections you hadn’t seen, responding to your confusion, making the struggle worthwhile. Students don’t read because they must. They read because the conversation pulls them in.
Navigation tools for abundance: Imagine filters that trace meaning rather than optimize outrage. Not algorithms designed to capture attention for advertising, but infrastructure that helps you find what deepens understanding. The system rewards genuine engagement, makes shallow interaction visible, documents what actually proves persuasive across different perspectives.
Cognitive benefits through infrastructure: The practices that made print valuable—sustained attention, logical reasoning, grappling with difficulty—are preserved because the infrastructure rewards them. But now that work happens in dialogue rather than isolation. Your reasoning becomes visible. Others can see where you struggled and how you broke through. Understanding compounds across generations rather than starting from scratch in each mind.
Democratic discourse made tangible: Imagine disagreement that leaves a trail others can learn from. When reasoning is transparent, when arguments are tested across diverse perspectives, when power structures become visible—we create conditions for informed citizenship. Not by manufacturing consensus, but by making disagreement conscious, explicit, and negotiable rather than invisible, assumed, and imposed.
The Wager
RP makes a specific bet: transparent, compassionate dialogue infrastructure can reduce suffering even when conflicts remain irreconcilable.
Not eliminate suffering—reduce it. Not resolve all conflicts—make them bearable.
Much human suffering stems from invisibility (being excluded without voice), misunderstanding (conflicts based on false assumptions), arbitrary power (decisions imposed without transparent reasoning), and unaddressed harm (violations never acknowledged).
RP addresses these through recognition, transparency, accountability, and informed choice. When someone is heard, when reasoning is visible, when harm is named—suffering doesn’t disappear, but it changes character.
Suffering with recognition is different from suffering with invisibility.
Could this fail? Absolutely. RP cannot solve material scarcity when resources are genuinely zero-sum. It cannot reconcile incommensurable values when core commitments are truly incompatible. It cannot reach those who refuse dialogue entirely.
But the alternative is what we have now: attention-optimizing algorithms that reward rage and fragmentation, education systems that have lost their purpose, information abundance without navigation tools, and the cognitive collapse Marriott documents.
The question isn’t whether RP creates utopia. It’s whether making tragedy conscious, explicit, and negotiated creates less suffering than leaving it invisible, assumed, and imposed.
The Path Forward
Marriott sounds like the conservatives he mocks—diagnosing necessary adaptation as apocalypse, mistaking format for substance, clutching at ruins instead of building new foundations.
The age of print gave us extraordinary gifts: the democratization of knowledge, the tools of rational argument, the birth of modern science and democracy. We honour those achievements by extending them, not by pretending we can freeze them in amber.
We’re not choosing between oral and literate culture. We’re developing something new: mediated dialogue at scale, combining the dynamic engagement of conversation with the permanence and precision of text.
The vitality Marriott thinks we’ve lost is already visible in self-published essays reaching millions, collaborative game worlds rivaling novels in complexity, open-source research bypassing journals, indie musicians building direct relationships with listeners. The question isn’t whether literate culture survives—it’s whether the old gatekeepers can accept they no longer control it.
This isn’t inevitable. The technology exists, but the values that guide implementation are a choice. We can build systems designed to capture attention and maximize advertising revenue—and watch literacy collapse while we wring our hands about screens. Or we can build infrastructure guided by honesty, compassion, transparency, and accountability—infrastructure that preserves what made books valuable while recovering what was lost in the transition to print.
Fear tells us the golden thread is snapping. Hope knows it is branching.
The question isn’t whether we can preserve the past. It’s whether we’re brave enough to build the future—one that honours what books gave us while reaching toward what they couldn’t.
The better book isn’t the one we cling to in isolation—it’s the one we write together.
This sketch builds from a larger framework called Radical Pluralism. Here is the full philosophical and technical proposal.