Doomscrolling ourselves to death
TL;DR
Ed West reviews James Marriott's The New Dark Ages. The book argues that television started a decline in reading. Smartphones sped it up. A post-literate public drifts back toward the habits of oral cultures, with repetitive, conservative culture and cruder politics.
The article
- Marriott traces the decline in reading for pleasure and in student comprehension back to television, not the phone. Neil Postman gave the same warning in Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985.
- He credits mass literacy, from Protestant Bible reading to the Enlightenment novel, with widening empathy. He also credits it with making democracy possible. Readers of Pamela or Equiano's memoir lived inside lives they would otherwise have ignored.
- Television took over leisure time fast. US ownership went from 1% of homes in 1948 to over half by 1954. Dutch weekly reading fell from five hours to three and a half. A Norwegian study found conscript IQ fell 0.08 points for each year a hometown had full cable coverage.
- Smartphones made it worse. The average person checks one 144 times a day. A TikTok user may scroll 260 videos in half an hour. Pop songs and TV dialogue are getting simpler. Even scientific papers are getting less disruptive.
- Politics follows. Marriott sets Truman, who read all 2,000 books in his hometown library, against Trump, who reportedly can't finish a one-page memo. He also points to Candace Owens, who has more YouTube followers than the New York Times has subscribers.
- West ends on the elite. College graduates born after 1969 read less than less-educated people born before 1950. He suspects distrust of institutions comes partly from a sense that the people running them aren't very smart.
Why it matters
The review is a fair stand-in for the book's argument, with the Norwegian cable study and the Truman anecdote intact. Read the original for Marriott's own quoted passages, including his account of hiding his phone from himself. West's openly elitist closing paragraphs are there too, and several commenters read them as the real agenda.
The discussion
A large, mostly sympathetic thread. Most commenters accepted that something is wrong. They argued over algorithmic feeds, Reddit, the drug comparison, and whether 'kids can't read' holds up. A vocal minority called the book a recycled moral panic from a reactionary writer. Dozens of people shared how they cut back.
The feed is the problem, and Reddit counts
The top thread started from one reader's confession and turned into a case against algorithmic feeds in general. Several people said Reddit, YouTube and X escape the 'social media' label while doing the same damage, Reddit above all. One camp held that anything driven by an algorithm is bad, while others noted that a time-sorted list is an algorithm too. For them the real target is ranking tuned for engagement and profit.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
It's the combination of profitability motivations and manipulation of dopamine responses that are the outcomes people object to.
Moral panic or real decline
The first skeptic said you can't compare a millennium of literacy with a decade of social media, and there have always been stupid people. Replies said literacy data already shows a decline over 20 to 40 years, and technology now changes too fast for 'wait a few centuries'. The story's submitter conceded that old panics such as 'calcu-holism' had a point, and others said past shifts went well partly because critics pushed back. The skeptics cited Plato's distrust of writing and old complaints about young people reading too much.
The “check back in a few centuries” doesn’t work, because we’re not going to be using the same stuff in a few centuries. We’re probably not going to be using the same stuff in a few *decades*.
The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
Can students read, and will AI help
The Atlantic piece on elite students who can't read books drew a sharp exchange. One commenter called the claim idiotic, saying PISA measures something other than long-form reading and the past had weak students too. Others said 'can't read' means failing to follow a long argument, and cited OECD data showing more university students at a ten-year-old's level. On AI, one commenter called LLMs the tutor they wished they'd had, and another said that at scale students use them to skip the work.
No, professors are not claiming that college students are literally incapable of sounding out words.
The crux of the matter is that you need to know what “good” looks like to use automation or augmentation tools well. This is why it’s a greater boost to people with experience.
Is it a drug?
Commenters argued over whether comparing feeds to opium or cocaine helps. One commenter likened it to the era when cocaine was in Coca-Cola, a habit normal until it wasn't, and predicted the same turn against feeds. Another said anyone who has known an opioid addict can see the comparison is false, and that the case against social media doesn't need it. The commenter who raised opium said it was about how urgently governments should act, and pointed to evidence of withdrawal symptoms.
It’s possible to make arguments about social media that don’t depend on obviously false equivalence to powerful drugs.
I'm comparing to Opium not for exact chemical effect equivalence but for the level of Government urgency required.
Padded books, edutainment and what counts as reading
Some commenters said people read less because most nonfiction is a blog post padded to 300 pages. Others said history and serious technical subjects can't be learned without long-form reading. On educational YouTube, one commenter said watching physics lectures only teaches you to watch YouTube, while others learned cooking, car repair and calculus from videos. A few defended length itself, saying a novel builds empathy because it takes hundreds of pages to live in someone else's head.
People watch "education YouTube" but don't get a tangible education, they learn how to watch YouTube.
Like, you can explain to someone in 3-4 sentences that slavery is cruel but that's not the same as inhabiting a characters circumstances for 500 pages.
Consensus
Engagement-ranked feeds are built to keep people scrolling and do measurable harm, adults included. Most commenters reported their own trouble finishing long books. What worked for them was friction: Pi-hole blocks, dumbphones, e-readers, book clubs and RSS.
Dissent
A minority called the book a recurring moral panic and Ed West a reactionary who uses history to argue against liberalism. They noted his ideal society looks like the oral culture he criticizes. People also read more text than ever now, including LLM answers and source code.