Literacy Isn't Dying — It's Being Sabotaged
The decline of reading is not a cultural collapse. It's an engineering choice — and we can reverse it.
Screens aren't the enemy.
That sentence will irritate a lot of people. Good. Because the panic around "the death of reading" has become so loud, so repetitive, so comfortably fatalistic that it's drowning out the one conversation that actually matters. Not whether we're losing focus — but why, and who profits from it.
I came across an essay published on Aeon just yesterday — 19 February 2026 — by a university librarian who watches, day after day, how real humans interact with information.[1] And what they observe doesn't match the doomsday narrative we've been fed. Not because the problems aren't real. But because the diagnosis is wrong.
Let me tell you why this matters to me personally.The Boy Who Read the Universe Sideways
I was born in Albania in 1986. By the time I was five, I'd already emigrated to Italy for medical treatment. I live with dystonia — a movement disorder that put me in a wheelchair and, over the years, sent me through surgeries including a deep brain stimulation implant and its eventual removal. My body doesn't cooperate the way most bodies do.
But my mind? My mind has been ravenous since I was a child.
I earned a degree in astronomy from the University of Bologna, a Master's in physics from the University of Milan, and spent an Erasmus semester at Sabancı University in Istanbul. I founded FreeAstroScience, a science and culture group that now reaches tens of thousands of followers. I'm writing this from Tirana, Albania, where I serve as the group's president.
I tell you all of this not to boast. I tell you because I am exactly the kind of person the "literacy is dying" narrative erases. I don't always read the way traditional academics expect. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I watch. Sometimes I think with my hands on a keyboard while music plays in the background and three tabs glow on my screen. And none of that makes my thinking less rigorous.
It makes it mine.The Same Person, Two Different Environments
Here's an observation from the Aeon essay that stopped me cold. The same person who can't get through a novel will sit and watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire.[1] The same teenager supposedly incapable of sustained attention will maintain laser focus for hours inside a complex game — parsing narrative, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time.[1]
That's not inferior cognition. That's different cognition. And the difference isn't the screen. It's the environment surrounding it.
Gloria Mark, Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California Irvine, has tracked attention spans on screens for twenty years.[1] In 2004, people averaged two and a half minutes on any screen before switching tasks. By 2016? Forty-seven seconds.[1] That statistic gets tossed around as proof that screens are inherently attention-destroying. But Mark's own research tells a more specific story: the fragmentation correlates not with screens in general, but with specific design patterns — notification systems, variable reward schedules, infinite scroll.[1]
These are choices. Made by specific companies. For specific economic reasons. They are not inherent properties of the medium.[1]
Let me simplify this for everyone (I'm a physicist — simplifying complex ideas is half the job). Social media platforms use the same psychological trick that makes slot machines addictive. You open the app. You don't know if you'll find 300 likes or nothing at all. That unpredictability — that dopamine "reward prediction error" — keeps you coming back.[1] It's not your fault. It's behavioural psychology, weaponised at industrial scale.
We've Panicked Before. Every. Single. Time.
This is the part where history gets funny — and a bit embarrassing for humanity.
In the late 19th century, more than a million boys' periodicals were sold per week in Britain.[1] These "penny dreadfuls" — sensational stories of crime, horror, and adventure — sent Victorian commentators into fits of despair. The youth were being corrupted! Serious thought was dying! Sound familiar?
Go back further. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat.[1] The terms used were identical to today's moral panic: "reading epidemic," "reading mania," "reading rage," "reading fever," "reading lust."[1] In 1796, the journal Sylph worried that women "of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels… the depravity is universal."[1]
The predicted apocalypse? Mass elopements. Copycat suicides. Moral collapse. As one historian dryly notes, if the manipulative potential of novels were truly that great, women would have been eloping in hordes.[1]
They didn't. The disaster never materialised.
Go back even further, and you find Socrates himself worrying that writing would "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it."[1] The scholar Walter Ong pointed out the beautiful irony: Plato put these misgivings about writing… into writing.[1]
The psychologist Amy Orben calls this the "Sisyphean cycle": each generation fears new media will corrupt youth, politicians exploit these fears while deflecting from systemic issues like inequality and educational underfunding, research begins too late, and by the time evidence shows mixed effects, a new technology emerges and the cycle restarts.[1]
We never learn. And that's the real cognitive failure.What's Actually Different This Time
Now — and this is where I refuse to be glib — something is different about our current moment. The penny dreadfuls didn't follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.[1]
That sentence from the Aeon essay hit me like a cold splash of water.
Previous generations had shallow content too. They always have. Dickens, Mill, and Darwin flourished alongside penny dreadfuls.[1] What's changed isn't the existence of shallow content. It's the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires.[1]
The cognitive operations that the declinists celebrate — sustained attention, logical development, revision, the capacity to build complex arguments — aren't properties of paper.[1] They're properties of writing as a practice. Kant didn't need bound paper specifically to write the Critique of Pure Reason; he needed a medium that allowed him to externalise thought, revise it, and develop it over time.[1] Digital documents do this just as effectively.
The problem is that most digital engagement isn't writing-based. It's consumption of algorithmically curated feeds optimised to maximise time-on-platform.[1]
Disability of the Instruction, Not the Learner
This is where the essay touched something deeply personal for me.
Consider people who thrive with audiobooks but struggle with printed text. For years, educators told them they had "learning disabilities" — meaning, disabilities that prevented learning through the one method educators recognised.[1] But give them the same text as audio, and the "disability" vanishes.[1] The ideas that were opaque on the page become transparent in sound.
The neuropsychologist David H. Rose, co-founder of the Center for Applied Special Technology, puts it plainly: "Each brain is made of billions of interconnected neurons that form unique pathways. Like fingerprints, no two brains are alike."[1] Research in universal design for learning has shown that the real problem is often "the disability of the instruction, not only the learning disability of the learner."[1]
I know this in my bones.
When you live with a body that doesn't conform to standard expectations, you learn very quickly that the world wasn't designed for you. Doorways too narrow. Lecture halls with no ramp. Exam conditions that assume everyone writes at the same speed with the same motor control. I've spent my entire life adapting — finding alternative routes, alternative tools, alternative modes of engagement.
And you know what? That adaptation made me a better thinker. Not despite the obstacles. Because of them. When you can't do something the "normal" way, you're forced to understand the underlying structure of what you're trying to accomplish. You stop confusing the method with the goal.
Reading a book isn't the goal. Understanding is the goal. The book is one path — brilliant, irreplaceable for certain kinds of thinking — but not the only path.Containers for Attention
The Aeon essay introduces a concept I find beautiful: "containers for attention" — bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible.[1]
Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook. They listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively. They read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind.[1] They're not rejecting technology. They're choreographing it.
Others are drowning. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes.[1] They're trying to read serious material while fighting behavioural psychology deployed at scale. And they believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem.[1]
This breaks my heart. Because I've been there. In my university years, I fought that battle too — trying to concentrate on astrophysics while the digital world buzzed and pinged and pulled. The difference is, I'd already spent years fighting my own body for the right to think. I knew the enemy wasn't me. I knew the environment was the problem.
Not everyone has that painful advantage.
The Fatalism That Serves the Machine
Here's what genuinely angered me in the Aeon piece — and I mean that as a compliment to the author, because good writing should provoke.
The essay references a Substack piece by James Marriott (who also writes for The Times) proclaiming the arrival of a "post-literate society" and inviting us to accept this as a fait accompli.[1] Marriott recognises that technology companies are "actively working to destroy human enlightenment," that tech oligarchs "have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat."[1]
And then he surrenders. "Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society."[1]
No.
To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover.[1] If the crisis is a force of nature — "screens" destroying civilisation like some technological weather system — then there's nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.[1] But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.[1]
The fatalism, no matter how beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns.[1]
I've heard this kind of elegant surrender before — in hospital corridors, in rehabilitation centres, in the voices of well-meaning doctors who told my family what I'd never be able to do. "He'll never walk normally. He'll never live independently. He'll never…"
Never is a word I don't accept. Never give up isn't just my motto. It's my operating system.Architecture, Not Discipline
The Aeon essay's conclusion is one I want to tattoo on every school wall, every tech company lobby, every parliament chamber: "Your inability to focus isn't a moral failing. It's a design problem."[1]
The solution isn't more willpower. It's better architecture.[1] Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is.[1]
What if every video came with a searchable transcript? What if every article offered multiple entry points for different levels of attention? What if our devices could recognise when we're trying to think and protect that thinking? What if schools taught students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages?[1]
These aren't fantasies. These are design choices. And design choices can be made differently.
At FreeAstroScience, we've been doing this instinctively for years. We share complex astrophysics and physics through posts, infographics, videos, discussions — meeting people where they are, in the mode that works for them. We don't ask, "Can you read a textbook?" We ask, "Can you understand a star?" The answer, overwhelmingly, is yes. When you give people the right container, they fill it with extraordinary thought.
The Real Choice
The Aeon essay frames the situation as a choice — not between books and screens, but between intentional design and profitable chaos.[1] Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.[1]
I'd add another dimension. It's also a choice between who gets to think deeply and who doesn't.
The essay warns that we risk drifting into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking.[1] As someone who grew up navigating both physical disability and the complexities of emigration — from Albania to Italy, from hospital to university, from the margins to the centre of scientific discourse — I can tell you: access to the conditions for deep thought is already unevenly distributed. It has always been.
The question is whether we're going to make it worse or better.
A Fight, Not a Eulogy
The Aeon essay ends with a line that made me grip my armrest: "The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I'm more interested in a fight."[1]
Same.
I didn't survive multiple surgeries, years of rehabilitation, and the quiet cruelty of a world not built for my body just to accept that human thought is dying because some Silicon Valley executives figured out how to monetise distraction. I didn't earn degrees in astronomy and physics by accepting limits. I didn't build FreeAstroScience from nothing by surrendering to what seemed inevitable.
Your great-grandchildren won't read less than you do. They'll read differently — as part of a richer ensemble of sense-making.[1] Whether that ensemble sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now. About the shape of our tools. The structure of our schools. The design of our days.[1]
Books aren't going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking.[1] But they're no longer the only vessel for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.[1]
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance.[1]
Never give up.And if you're reading this from a wheelchair, or from a small apartment in Tirana, or from a phone screen on a crowded bus — know this: the problem was never you. The problem is the architecture. And architecture can be rebuilt.
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