Orality vs. Literacy

Almost everything I've written that people tell me they like has a secret.

They're not really written.

This newsletter is 100% written, so far.

But there's stuff from my blog and books that aren't.

Instead, I spoke them out loud.

They were recorded.

Then transcribed by an AI.

Growing up, I put thousands of hours into trying to write like the authors I enjoyed most.

Writer's writers.

Using the visual structure of a sentence on paper to say something. The rotation of shapes through words.

It took me decades to realize that most people are not moved by shapes.

They are not moved by words on paper.

We are moved by words spoken out loud.

A playing of the pink trombone.

We see this in the history of how civilizations communicated.

The big world epics, your ancient blockbusters like the Iliad or the Ramayana?

Those were oral traditions first.

Stories spoken, remembered with the aid of rhyme and rhythm.

Writing came with accounting.

Eunuchs noting who owed what to the throne they served.

Often, the number of grain.

So writing is not just putting what we say down.

It's a different way of thinking. William Ong goes on about this at length. How the world you perceive is different when you're literate, vs when you primarily communicate through speaking out loud.

In this sense, most people are still illiterate.

And that's good, probably.

The world might be duller when perceived through literacy.

 It literally changes the structure of your brain.

Today, you can see a more dramatic difference between programmers and the rest of us.

I'm not a programmer.

I may have written a program or two, but I do not primarily think in software.

Similarly, many people have written a paper or a dozen. But they don't really think in terms of the written word.

This doesn't mean that an illiterate person is less capable.

Just that they are less capable at dealing with modern scales.

An illiterate, on average, would probably kick the living shit out of a literate person, all things being equal.

And what they don't read on paper, they read in the land. The wind. The stars. The tracks that animals make. Faces.

There are always trade-offs with new ways of communication.

What can we expect of tomorrow?

We know that programmers think differently. A next step after literacy. But what medium can we expect next century?

Literates lost literacy of faces and geographic points, most dramatically.

What did programmers lose, when they gained the ability to think at scales our ancestors couldn't imagine?

Whether it's neural links or prompting digital intelligences, our new ways of communication are going to require us to make trade-offs.

And when that happens, will some of us remember the fundamentals?

For all it's scale, oral culture still moves people in ways that are far more intense than anything literate culture can muster.

Rap, after all, has more penetration in people's hearts than formal argument.

Every time we take on a medium, some of us will have to remember the old ones.

Remember the fundamentals.

Or we'll be unmoored.

Lost like a boat in a storm without anchor.