Everybody Codes. Nobody Reads.

Researchers at a few regional universities in Kansas recently handed English majors the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and asked them to explain what was happening.

Dickens opens with a description of London mud so deep, “it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” Several students thought there was a dinosaur in the story. Another read a description of a man with large whiskers, and imagined a cat.

In the end, five percent of them were able to decipher the opening of a Dickens novel.

Five. Percent.

That study anchors Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic piece on the collapse of American reading, and the numbers around it are worse. The share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. Fewer than half read a book of any kind in 2022. Thirty-eight percent read a novel or a story. For context, fifty-seven percent placed a bet.

A Harvard administrator named Margaret Rennix told Horowitch that her students often experienced assigned reading as an imposition — accusing professors of “arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

Sit with that. To these kids, text is no longer where knowledge lives, it’s just a delivery model alongside infographics, podcast audio, and short form video. And it’s the worst of them, according to students who see it as standing between them and what they came to learn.

For twenty years we told kids to learn to code. Coding was leverage, a scarce skill a small fraction of people had that everybody else paid a premium for. Much of the education policy in this country got built around closing that gap. Parents in my town are focused on it enough to support a Code Ninjas retail store, right next to the Whole Foods.

Well there’s good news. We closed the programming gap, though not in the way anyone planned. Machines write the majority of code now, and a decent product manager with Claude open ships things that would have cost one of my portfolio companies a two-week sprint in 2021.

Meanwhile the skill everybody was already supposed to have is quietly moving in the other direction, pointing to new dangers and opportunities.

What’s the Big Deal?

Reading is the foundation of modern civilization.

That sounds like something a writer would say, so let me be specific about the mechanism. There is no reading gene. The brain arrives with dedicated equipment for seeing and for spoken language, and nothing at all for text. Every literate person on earth built the circuit from scratch, cannibalizing hardware evolved for other purposes, over years of effort nobody remembers making. Maryanne Wolf has spent a career documenting this. Her point is that a thing you have to build can also fail to get built — and can come apart if you stop using it.

What that circuit buys you is not decoding. It’s what Wolf calls deep reading: holding background knowledge, inference, critical analysis, and empathy in a single slow operation, moving back and forth between what the text says and what you already know. It is cognitively expensive by design. The expense is the point.

Marshall McLuhan spotted it first in 1962, and went further. His argument in The Gutenberg Galaxy was that print didn’t just distribute ideas, it restructured them. Lines of type running one direction, one word after another, page after page, produced a mind that thinks in sequence — premise then conclusion, cause then effect, one thing considered at a time and held still long enough to be examined. Typographic man. Objective reason, private judgment, the individual as the basic unit.

Look what got built on top of that mind. The scientific method is an argument somebody else can check. A contract is a promise you can be held to. Due process is a written record. The Constitution is a document. Representative democracy is a reading exercise conducted at scale, by people who have agreed to be bound by text they can go look up.

We don’t just write these things down. We think this way because we started writing things down.

Which brings up the other half of McLuhan’s thesis. He thought electric media would run the process backward — out of the linear and private, into something older and warmer and considerably less careful. Immediate, communal, emotional, everything happening at once. He called it the global village and it got quoted for sixty years as though he meant it kindly. Villages are intimate. They’re also tribal, rumor-driven, and rough on the odd man out.

So the question Horowitch is really asking isn’t whether Americans will miss novels. It’s whether the institutions built by typographic man survive his conversion into a thumb-scrolling dopamine junkie.

A Post-Literate World

You don’t have to speculate about what post-literate governance looks like. We’ve been running the experiment for a while.

Congress regularly passes legislation nobody has read, and this is not a partisan observation — it’s arithmetic. A 4,155-page omnibus with eighteen hours on the clock. A COVID relief package north of 5,000 pages delivered in the early afternoon with a vote called for that evening. As one chief of staff put it, any member who tells you they read every bill before it hits the floor is lying to your face. Both parties, for decades, with the page counts going one direction.

What’s changed isn’t the volume, it’s the sequence. Policy now gets announced before it gets written, and the document, when it eventually shows up, is reverse-engineered to match the announcement. The White House’ current occupant has taken things to a new level, governing through a medium that can’t hold a conditional clause. Today we get tariffs by tweet, with “the details” left to be sorted out by an administration immune to Congressional scrutiny.

That’s dangerous, but despite the excesses of our post-literate President, it isn’t the property of any one administration or even any one country. A post-literate government isn’t a government run by a particular party. It’s a government where the written record stops being the place decisions get made and becomes the place they get announced — and where the gap between the two is nobody’s job to check.

Mike Judge made the movie Idiocracy as a comedy in 2006. Watching it today feels more like a horror movie, a fun house mirror image of the time we seem to be living in.

What It Means Today

When coding was scarce, coding was valuable. When reading is scarce, it will offer those who actually read an advantage in a world of people who depend on AI to do it for them.

First, the upside of reading’s impact on information processing and cognition discussed above will be available to a smaller share of the population. These people will have an advantage if not in consuming information, then in synthesizing it into actionable patterns and insights.

LLMs process a corpus of information developed over time, calculating patterns that are, by definition, averages. People can gather and bias toward current information, using scalpel-like precision in incorporating more recent information, and including what they collect in real time in the real world.

Maybe the pattern that matters in your market isn’t in the training data, because nobody’s written it yet. It’s more likely in the four customer calls you took this week, in the thing your best engineer said sideways at the end of a 1:1, the part right after “anyway, it’s probably nothing.” It’s in the number that moved two weeks before anyone had a theory about why.

Someone who’s read everything and seen nothing is a bore at dinner. Someone who’s seen everything and read nothing has no names for any of it — so they spot the pattern a year late, after somebody else has named it and priced it.

This is most of my job, and I think it’s most of a CEO’s. You’re trying to make out the shape of a thing before it has a name. Reading is what stocks you with candidate shapes. I’ve sat across from founders describing a business I couldn’t place for twenty minutes, until something they said landed against something I read a decade ago and I finally knew what to ask. That’s not intelligence. It’s inventory.

Second, reading is how you build a tolerance for not understanding something yet.

Go back to Kansas. Those students had the entire internet open in front of them. Every unfamiliar reference in Dickens was one search away — the Megalosaurus, Michaelmas term, the Lord Chancellor, all of it. They just didn’t take the time to look. That’s not an information problem. It’s a stamina problem, specifically the stamina to stay with something that isn’t yielding clarity yet.

Which happens to be the job. Every consequential call you make as an operator gets made in fog, with partial data, about people whose motives you can’t fully see. The work is staying in the fog long enough to make out the shape of it. People who need the summary first can’t do that. They need the ambiguity resolved before they’ll engage, and it never is.

It’s also your only real defense against a confident machine. The model doesn’t hedge. It hands you the same fluent, well-organized, plausible paragraph whether it’s right or invented, and the only way to catch it is to have read enough of the real thing to feel the wrongness — and then to be willing to go check. Fabricated citations turned up in one of every 2,828 academic papers in 2023. By early 2026 it was one in 277. Every one of those got past somebody who didn’t feel like looking.

You Can’t Move Someone You Can’t Model

Finally, I don’t know a single great writer who isn’t a deep reader. Not one, in forty years. That’s not a correlation, it’s a formula.

You cannot write a sentence that changes somebody’s mind if you’ve never had your mind changed by a sentence. Reading is where you learn what actually lands — the turn that made you sit up, the paragraph you went back and read twice, the argument that got past your defenses before you noticed the door was open. You take a few thousand of those. Then, years later, you write one.

And persuasion is just applied empathy.

A novel is the only technology we’ve built for spending twelve hours inside a head that isn’t yours, belonging to somebody who won’t explain himself and doesn’t much care whether you’re keeping up. That’s the rep. It’s how you learn to sit across from a person whose motives you can’t see and stay curious instead of annoyed.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans did one of those reps last year.

If building companies is mostly a people problem — and it is, or I’d have chosen an easier job — then we’re producing a generation of operators who can read a dashboard and not a room.

Your Company Goes Write-Only

This shows up in business before it shows up in culture.

Everybody can produce more than anybody can absorb. The pull request nobody read. The deck nobody read. The forty-page MSA nobody read. The strategy memo you spent a weekend on that got summarized before it got opened.

The output is real, but the comprehension is gone. Your organization is already write-only, you just haven’t noticed.

Which makes the management question of the next five years an unglamorous one, and you should start asking it now. Who read this? Not who owns it. Not who signed off. Who read it, front to back, and can defend the third paragraph?

In most rooms the honest answer is nobody. In the rooms where somebody can answer, that person could end up running the company.

Two Honest Notes

First, never believe a writer writing about how important writing is.

Second, literacy panics have a lousy track record. Socrates thought writing would wreck our memories. Every generation decides the next one can’t read, and every generation has been mostly wrong.

What’s different this time isn’t the complaint, it’s the substitute. The summary is good. It’s good enough for most of what most people need most of the time, and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous. Nobody walks away from a skill that’s still obviously paying.

I read maybe forty books a year, and couldn’t reconstruct the argument of most of them. That’s fine. What I have instead is a stocked cabinet of other people’s thinking that shows up uninvited when I’m across the table from a founder, trying to work out whether the thing she’s describing is a company or a feature. I don’t experience any of that as reading. I experience it as judgment.

The coding advantage got democratized. Mostly a good thing, and faster than anyone planned for.

The reading advantage is still sitting there, unpriced, in a medium most of the country has stopped touching.

So the next twenty years belong to a small fraction of people. Same as the last twenty. Different skill.

And it’s one you can polish up tonight, for free, off a shelf you already own.