These are excerpts from an NYT “Interesting Times” podcast episode where the guest was the Times of London columnist James Marriott, and the host was Mary Harrington. The full video is on YouTube: We’re Entering the New Dark Ages. What follows is selected from the official (edited) transcript, That Daily Brain Rot Break Is Taking Us Back to the Dark Ages.

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Harrington: Short-form video has eaten everybody’s capacity to concentrate. I avoid short-form video for that reason. I find it does something very brain-rotting.

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Marriott: There’s something you increasingly hear in these educational circles. It’s the phrase “the 400-word wall,” which seems to be that 400 words is often the limit that students struggle to get past. That’s apparently how long it takes to read for 90 seconds — you get through about 400 words. And that seems to be the point at which people begin to feel fidgety or need distraction or need to look at something else.

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I think it’s happening now because of the phenomenon we’re talking about, about smartphones and short video. I think it’s also part of a longer-term story. When you get into this, the declines in literacy and reading that are measured and that people begin to talk about are in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s, with the arrival of television.

Television just swallows up human free time. There’s a remarkable statistic quoted by Robert Putnam in his book, “Bowling Alone,” about how, between the ’60s and the ’90s, the average American gained hours of free time, and they spent virtually all of it watching television.

When you measure how people are using their free time after the arrival of television, reading just drops off a cliff and the screen just swallows things up.

I think there’s a fundamental and quite comprehensible cognitive mechanism there, which is that reading is hard work. It’s a cognitively taxing activity. It requires a bit of brain effort. And watching a screen is passive. It’s easy to do. It comes much more naturally to us.

Absorbing images through our eyes is something we’ve evolved to do. Absorbing language through our eyes via text is a weird and difficult thing to do. If given the option, we tend to opt for the screen, not the text.

I think the decline of deep reading is really accelerated by the arrival of the smartphone in the early 2000s. That’s a major revolution, and so much has been said about that.

The point we’re at now is almost a revolution within a revolution. It’s become possible to watch video everywhere. And I think that has really, for a lot of people, meant that long-form text — or I increasingly think if you’re young, any text, any real reading — is just beginning to drain out your life.

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[In “Orality and Literacy,”] Walter Ong says there are whole spheres of human knowledge that can’t exist without text. Things like philosophy, history as we know it, certainly logic and mathematics. These things don’t spring naturally out of human minds. They’re the product of the human mind’s interaction with the page.

We move from an oral world, in which people are communicating face-to-face. In oral, preliterate societies, information isn’t stored in words and on paper or on papyrus or on shards of pottery, but in our minds.

And for Walter Ong, this is not just about the way we store information or the way we communicate. It shapes the entire society and culture and politics of a preliterate society

Literacy comes along and, in Walter Ong’s account, transforms our world intellectually, politically, and socially.

And as literacy declines, or as the written word declines in importance in our culture, I guess his argument — and certainly my argument — would be that we’re not returning to a time before mass literacy. It’s not like we’re going to go back to oral poems and “Beowulf” and “The Iliad” and strumming our lyres and singing our epic songs and all those things that were such important features of oral culture.

We’re going to go into a kind of hybrid culture where the written word exists and it’s not like people are going to stop reading — I mean, it’s simply difficult to make an iPhone without text. Emails must be sent, instruction manuals must be read. Text underpins our world, but for a lot of people it becomes radically less important.

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Marshall McLuhan is in some ways, in my view, a bit bonkers, but in other ways, just astonishingly prescient. And some of the connections he draws between what a preliterate and a postliterate world look like are really remarkable.

I think the idea can certainly be taken too far. People online get carried away and do get very excited about the idea that we’re going to have the Homer of TikTok, which I’m skeptical about.

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Harrington: You’ve suggested that this is a world that will be more mystical, more tribal, and more autocratic. Why?

Marriott: There are a few things that literacy does in organizing our minds and organizing our politics. Almost the most important, or to me, the most striking thing about these media theoretical arguments about what literacy does to us is, again, has to do with that unnaturalness of the written word and how strange it is to live in a literate culture, something that fails to strike us all the time.

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If you live in a preliterate world, every single piece of information and your whole experience of the world is mediated through other people. It’s face-to-face, it’s emotional. You’re talking and you’re grabbing each other by the shoulder. Every piece of information is mediated via a human being, and that makes communication more emotional, perhaps more angry, more raucous, more warm. It has this very warm, emotional atmosphere.

A world in which all information is mediated via print and text, I think, feels emotionally desaturated and would feel weirdly cold and alien to those people, McLuhan argues. When all your political information comes not from your friend or your chief telling you what’s going on in your world, but via a newspaper on a blank page covered in text, it’s a much less emotional experience.

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The raucousness of a TikTok feed — you’re back in this emotional world where all information is mediated via a human being, but it has refilled our world with feelings and passions and anger and rage. And I think it’s also one of the roots of this more tribal feeling that our world has now.

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All these kinds of irrational modes of persuasion that were very common in preliterate political cultures were banished by print. Because you can’t shout at someone through print. You can’t charm someone through print. This stuff, I think, is rushing back into our world. These passions that were banished by print are returning to us.

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And there was this point in the middle and the end of the 18th century when journalists and authors began to look at the world around them and say: Oh my God, it looks like everybody is reading!

And allowing for journalistic exaggeration, which has always existed in history, the accounts are very attractive. A gentleman saying: I wondered where my serving girl was, and I went to the kitchen, and she was in there reading the newspaper rather than paying attention to me.

People saying that they’re walking down the street and a guy will be walking past them reading a novel. This strikes them as deeply weird because literacy has been, for pretty much all of human history up until this point, a minority habit of social and clerical elites, and not spread through the population.

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It would be too simplistic to say that if you press the literacy button, you get the Enlightenment. But I think these phenomena are very connected. This creates this culture of more complex and more cumulative thought. As people can correspond more in print, they can talk to each other more, they can build on each other’s ideas.

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Harrington: What’s the mechanism then, whereby all these distinctively modern phenomena bring us to democracy? This has been a central theme in your thesis, that there’s an incredibly central link between democracy and long-form literacy. Can you talk me through what that link is?

Marriott: I think there’s a link. Again, I think the directness of the link can be overemphasized. I think there’s a quote — or maybe a misquotation — from the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, who said: Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.

I wouldn’t go quite that far. I think as literacy spread down through society, people began to access information about their political leaders and their laws. And I think it’s worth emphasizing how, again, how strange this was.

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People who were advocating more democratic or republican forms of politics — like, the examples in my book, Rousseau or Thomas Paine — come from backgrounds in which, a hundred years before, they would not have been literate, and their voices and their political ideas would have had absolutely no influence because they would have had no way of getting their ideas out. Nobody could have listened to Thomas Paine’s great-great-great-grandfather because he wouldn’t have been able to write his ideas down, and nobody would have heard them.

So when you spread literacy through society, you also get more people joining the conversation. It’s not just that more people have more information, but more different kinds of people from different social backgrounds can join that great democratic conversation and advocate for their rights.

All this, I think, is building up through history until the beginning of the 20th century, and I think it’s no accident that the great age of mass literacy in the early 20th century is also the great age of mass democracy. This is when you get votes for women.

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Harrington: I want to go back a little bit before the 18th century, because it seems to me as though you’re skipping over something. Didn’t quite a lot happen between “Beowulf” and the 18th century?

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Marriott: Yes, absolutely. Part of the reason that I don’t write about the Middle Ages is that I don’t profess to be an expert in them. I think the scarcity of books is interesting, and certainly one of the other features of this so-called “reading revolution” at the end of the 18th century wasn’t just the growth of literacy. It was the proliferation of texts.

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So if you have access to only a couple of books — and that was probably the case for most people in this world that you’re describing, unless you had access to a great monastic or royal library — if you wanted to find out about the natural world or theology or science or law or medicine, you might have only one book you could go to on that subject, and your respect for that book is hugely increased.

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This scribal culture that you talk about, this medieval culture, was inheriting a few texts passed down from antiquity. It wasn’t possible to produce lots of copies of them. Each one had to be copied out by hand, and they were treated with great reverence. This was quite a hierarchical knowledge environment. There were few texts, and they were revered.

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What happens when texts begin to proliferate — and I think this probably does to some degree precede the printing press — is that you begin to be able to look at two different texts and say: Hang on, these things contradict each other.

It’s this environment that allows you to begin to ask questions about what you know.

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One of the features of oral discourse that Walter Ong points out is that everything you say has to be intensely memorable, otherwise it will be lost. The thing that everybody cites now — and this has almost turned into a meme — is that oral poetry, for instance, is full of epithets: “The swift-footed Achilles.” “Shining-helmeted Athena.” You have these little verbal tags that tag people in your memory so that you can come back to them and think about them. And if you’re a speaker, you have to make your speech memorable, otherwise it will be lost.

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Modern culture, in which we remember everything, requires highly memorable things to stick in our minds because we’re so unused to remembering things.

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Harrington: So you think where the postliterate culture is retrieving some of these larger than life dynamics, some of these heavy characters — you cite Donald Trump as the everybody’s favorite controversial example — if your thesis is right, and I find it persuasive, the end of mass, long-form literacy is going to make us less rational, more visually oriented, perhaps more participatory, more enchanted, if you like, in our relation to each other and to the world and also to politics.

And you’ve cited, again, I think very persuasively, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, as perhaps a sign of things to come — a postmodern autocrat in the sense of operating in a much more visual register, very skillfully through social media, whilst also doing a fairly unembarrassed end run around some of the more textual and deliberative aspects, I think you might say, of democracy as we consider it today.

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Marriott: Yes, totally. You make me think of that online phenomenon of modern photo on Instagram versus Renaissance painting. Those two visual worlds have more in common than we sometimes remember.

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Bukele is an often cited example of what a postliterate politics might look like, because he is famously one of the most followed world leaders on TikTok. And as you say, his TikTok feed, to a sort of woolly liberal, is quite terrifying. This, to me, is a really dramatic way of bringing home the difference between literate and postliterate politics.

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When you are communicating visually and through TikTok and through images, people have much more access to your personality, and I think it supercharges the ability of charismatic personalities and charismatic autocrats to dominate politics.

I would say this is the fundamental theme of democratic decline around the world. The great threat to democracy in the 21st century is not an ideology — I think ideology is perhaps rather print and text-based — but the threat from charismatic personalities.

I am much more pessimistic about autocracy, perhaps. I think all political systems have their problems. Democracy certainly has its problems. I don’t deny that. I think autocracies are full of even worse problems. If you can’t remove someone from power, if there are no checks and balances on that power, you create all kinds of difficulties that are vastly worse than the ones you’d encounter in a democracy.

I also think the idea of a monarch in a modern state is just unworkable. That is no way to run a complex modern state, and I think it will fail.

We live in these unimaginably complex societies, bigger than any of us could get our heads around. For that whole system to depend on one charismatic leader who is running things in this monarchical fashion, as people often say, people refer to repatrimonialization, this idea that modern leaders are behaving like monarchs and everything is based not on an impersonal civil service and appointing people on merit, but through networks of loyalty and kinship and appointing your friends and your family to diplomatic postings and all these themes of autocracy around the world. That is no way to run a complex modern state, and I think it will fail.

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The really obvious example, which one almost shies away from mentioning because it’s so obvious, is Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I think, basically owes his presidency to his complete mastery of television and social media. And talking about someone who can participate with brilliant effectiveness in a visual environment, Trump is just the undisputed master of this.

Other people you could look at: Modi in India. He’s suffered a setback recently, obviously, but he had a real personality cult, and that was really supercharged by social media. I think Modi has his own app through which he communicates to his followers.

Erdogan in Turkey. Orban, obviously now voted out in Hungary, which shows that this trend isn’t completely linear everywhere. All of these people, I think, were drawing on social media and this culture of the image to impose their charisma and authority on the country’s politics and dominate it that way.

One other obvious example would be Putin, who is kind of the pioneer of this, who used TV and photography to ——

Harrington: But you’re making it sound as though this is just a right-wing phenomenon. Is that right? Or can you think of anybody on the left who expresses this trend?

The one that springs to mind for me is the current mayor of New York City, who seems to have a very competent social media game.

Marriott: I think that’s a really good point.

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That said, I do not think that this is at all a partisan phenomenon. The example you cited of Mamdani is very relevant. There’s one obviously going on in the United Kingdom. We have a prime minister, Andy Burnham, who is really quite astonishingly good, as everybody says, at TikTok — a first for a Labour leader.

I think postliterate politics is coming for the left and is coming for the liberal left. Although it’s probably pioneered on the right, I think we’re going to see more and more examples, and I think everybody will be doing politics this way in 20 years’ time.

Harrington: This is sounding pretty bleak. You think tyranny is an inevitable end product of our current direction of travel, and it sounds as though your fear is that with an increasingly postliterate population, we may not be able to avert this.

What do you think we can do? What’s the best-case scenario for the future that we’re looking at? Is there a best-case scenario? What do you think we can do, either individually or collectively, to avert some of these nightmare scenarios?

Marriott: Good question. Like you, I’m pessimistic about it. I’ve read this media history, and I’ve thought about the history of where we are through this media theoretical lens, and I think one of the great and perhaps alarming lessons is that I don’t think communications revolutions get reversed.

I don’t think there was any point in history at which you could uninvent the printing press.

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That’s simply not plausible. And I think it’s not plausible to uninvent the iPhone. It’s not plausible to uninvent TV. That can’t happen, and I think it won’t happen.

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Individually, some people will probably look at this, our slop-ridden, brain-rotting environment, and think: I’m going to make a conscious effort to read more. I’m going to sit down and make a really tough effort — which is hard when you’ve got a smartphone — to spend an hour reading in the evening.

The analogy that’s often made is the flooding of our nutrition environment in the ’60s and ’70s with junk food. It made a lot of people very fat. It also gave us marathon runners, gym bunnies, and a culture of people who are actively resisting it. And I think there will probably be a culture of active cognitive resistance.

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Harrington: So you think we just need to build an ark and save as many people as we can?

Marriott: If you’re looking for points of optimism, history takes a long time to unfold. Stagnation is always a possibility. If you’re looking at a point of pessimism, I wonder if the scenario we’re outlining in which we return to this bifurcated information environment — in which you have middle-class people subscribing to newspapers, and participating in this more literate culture — how true that’s even going to be.

I think when you look at what’s going on at universities, universities are rapidly becoming postliterate.

We know that with the advent of generative A.I., you can pretty much get through a degree without writing an essay. We’ve been talking about how you can seem to get through a degree without reading a book, and I wonder if these literate institutions will decay as well, and actually we’ll all be postliterate.

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Increasingly, newspapers are full of video.

You open the homepage of a newspaper and you’re looking at video, not at text. And I wonder if perhaps it’s not the case there’ll be a bifurcation, but the educated, well-off people have just simply been lagging a trend, and we might be looking at, we might be, we might see the same story unfold for those people as well.

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