We had a great time at our last InterIntellect, on Audrey Tang and Democratic Technologies, and so I stepped it up and made a series this time. It’s on the ideas of “post-literacy”—that via technological acceleration, our culture has shifted from a reading/writing-oriented life-world to something more speechlike, reactive, and relational.
Sign up WINE DARK 1: The Digital Reversal here.
I’ve fallen extra hard for the ideas of media theorist Andrey Mir, and have been soaking in his 2025 book The Digital Reversal with great eagerness. While the first salon in the series will survey a handful of quick, low pressure blog posts, the following ones will likely work through this book (which he writes as a giant tweet thread.)
From the description on the listing:
In the first episode of our post-literacy reading group, we’ll be reading some of the foundational blogs of the field and sketching out a more serious research program.
INTRODUCTORY READING
Ranked in order of entry-level to niche; no pressure to read them all
The dawn of the post-literate society - by James Marriott
the post-literate society - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmi.news
We Used to Read Things In This Country - Noah McCormack,The Baffler
From Post-literate to Posthuman - Katherine Dee
The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold. - Ryan Zickgraf, WaPo
Digital orality: The flip of text into texting - Andrey Mir
Book Review: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Fergus Fettes
Note: We’re experimenting with some AI-assisted research in this reading group and will likely have an AI note-taker in the Zoom call. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, please email me at falafeldepartment@gmail.com.
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If you’re to believe your textbooks, ‘history’ began sometime around the advent of written language. Though we supposedly live in the ‘Information Age,’ commentator after commentator warns us that we are becoming alarmingly less literate, maybe even regressing to a ‘post-literate’ age of ‘secondary orality’.
Are we leaving history, and entering something dumber?
Is intelligence changing shape into some new TikTok-native form that the readers among us are too old to understand? Or is the shift back to primarily oral, immediate culture a zero sum loss?
What does it mean that feature films and video games, much less books, can barely hold our attention? Are you still reading this blurb?
How will this trend morph as AI keeps reading and writing for us?
Are our internet memes, perhaps, something like the “wine-dark sea” and “swift-footed Achilles” of Homer: poetic placeholders that we use to orient ourselves in a fleeting, speech-based world?
Join us in the WINE DARK collective as we explore what all this means and how we might survive it. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll find a little gold in our coming dark age.
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We’re working on writing/building some cool stuff along with this series. Maybe a zine, and definitely a cyborg digital garden (seen below and available soon.)
If you’re curious what other ventures this nascent collective might try, subscribe for updates at winedark.ink.
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