The ruling class wants you to be literate enough to understand their written orders. And nothing more. True literacy is punk. True literacy is revolutionary.
If you look at this article and think “this is too long to read” you’re part of the target audience. Make the time.
I love reading, but the moment an author tries to guilt me into reading their particular viewpoint as though I’m just a slave of the system if I don’t, I check out. I have better things to do, and this person doesn’t have any right to my time.
In one breath the author tells us that people who don’t want to read the article are the target demographic.
And then in the next 8000 breaths they proceed to use some of the most dense, obtuse, wandering, inappropriately poetic language for an essay I’ve seen outside of academia
I agree with nearly everything the author has to say and yet I think the essay is a complete and utter failure at even approaching the goals it claims to have.
Nobody who needs to read this will. Not because it’s too long (though some will have that reason) but because anyone with moderate to poor literacy - the people explicitly called out as the target of the piece - won’t be able to grok half the sentences, let alone an entire paragraph, without re-reading it 2, 3, maybe 4 times.
Unfortunate, because the message, and the information contained within the essay, is incredibly important for those people
I feel like there’s an assumption that Americans don’t read when in fact they read a lot.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
And to add, book reading is not the only kind of reading.
If you look at this article and think “this is too long to read” you’re part of the target audience. Make the time.
It outright told me this is going to take 40-ish minutes. The problem isn’t that I “hate to read”, the problem is that sitting in one place doing one thing for 40 minutes makes my skin crawl (because I have productivity brain poisoning). I’ve switched to audiobooks because I can get through them while also doing other tasks (like when I’m zoning out on the welding press at work) and I’m chewing through about one book a week these days. I’m reading theory! I’m reading fiction again! I’m just not literally reading them, because I’m not going to make the time.
EDIT Okay this doesn’t seem to actually be critiquing podcasts and audiobooks as much as I expected, but is more focused on TikTok and other video content. Easy to digest, requires zero concentration, and doesn’t stick in your brain the way long-form content does. Not as disagreeable as when I started. Although her point “Can you tell me the thesis and supporting arguements of videos you watched from two calendar years ago?” doesn’t really land for me - I can barely remember my own life from two years ago. I need notes for that, and this argument seems more in favor of active reading than just reading in general.
