The End of Reading Is Here
8th July 2026
The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
Underclass people who depended on government schooling are functionally illiterate anyway; once again, Democrats seem to be ahead of the curve here.
Most machine operators during the first years of the industrial revolution were barely literate, but they did good work just the same. Navy sailors on the China Station between the world wars often had Chinese coolie servants who could do their work competently, as illustrated in the famous Steve McQueen movie THE SAND PEBBLES—I doubt that any of them were even literate in Chinese, much less English. Simple operations that depend on a job being demonstrated and then done by rote was, until recently, the default way that working people worked, and still rules in the Turd World. We may be reverting to that, and I doubt that the heavens would fall.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to the day when college was only for rich people’s kids and affordable for intelligent non-Crustian kids who were willing to work their way through or get scholarships.