Death and Rebirth by a Thousand Cuts

Tech keeps "killing" literacy. Literacy keeps adapting.

Our family WhatsApp thread imploded a few weeks ago after my sister dropped a link to an article by James Marriott, titled "The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society." I watched as everyone—my dad, my siblings, my aunt, across four time zones—landed in the same place: we're watching literacy collapse and there's nothing we can do.

I have a teen daughter, so the panic hit me hard. To be honest, the idea that her generation might be losing the ability to read deeply or think independently isn't new. But after reading the article, I did what I find myself doing more and more often: I asked an AI for context.

Rover, the audio-first platform I co-founded, generates 2-4 minute contextual briefs. Not hot takes, but rather scaffolding for better thinking. I shared Marriott's essay and asked what I was missing.

What came back wasn't comforting, per se. But it did provide perspective.

Around 370 B.C., Socrates thought writing would destroy memory and give people only "the appearance of wisdom." The printing press was accused of drowning readers in shallow information. Radio, television, the internet—each new medium supposedly marked the beginning of intellectual decline.

We've been here before. Each new generation thinks literacy is truly dying this time around.

But the brief didn't stop at the history lesson. It pointed to literacy scholars like Deborah Brandt, who argue that literacy isn't a fixed skill; it's a moving target shaped by whatever tools a culture uses to think. UNESCO's definition of "digital literacy" includes source verification, multimodal navigation, and hybrid communication—skills that didn't exist a generation ago.

Literacy isn't collapsing. It's evolving.

I heard the same pattern echoed in a talk my friend Eric gave last week called "Art vs Robots: Creativity in the Age of AI." Eric showed a slide of Van Gogh's study pieces—works he copied to learn how to see.

Van Gogh built his vision by absorbing other visions: Hiroshige's lines, Delacroix's colors. These influences weren't plagiarism or shortcuts; they were accelerants. They expanded his vocabulary.

Then Eric jumped to photography, the technology critics assumed would kill painting. Instead, it forced painting to reinvent itself. Out of the threat of photography came Expressionism, abstraction, surrealism. Photography didn't end painting—it pushed it into the future.

New tools challenge old literacies. The literate world panics. And sure enough, new literacies emerge.

So I shared Rover's brief back into the family chat. I expected something—debate, relief, curiosity. I got silence and a few emojis. Perhaps audio briefs from AI don't register as "serious" yet. Maybe the medium itself triggers suspicion.

But that reaction is the story.

People tend to treat the last version of literacy they mastered as the only "real" version. Anything that rewrites the rules looks like decline.

The brief didn't win them over, but it did shift something in me.

I stopped thinking about literacy as a shrinking resource and started seeing it as a shape-shifter. Writing didn't kill oral culture; print didn't kill writing; screens didn't kill print. Each one reconfigured what it meant to be literate, and expanded who could participate.

AI will do the same. Tools like Rover aren't replacing literacy. They're exposing how literacy works now: fast context acquisition, rapid cross-medium synthesis, navigating overwhelming information without drowning in it.

My daughter's literacy will not look like mine. She'll develop skills I don't have and lose some I depend on. She'll read differently, learn differently, communicate differently. And we'll worry about her the way past generations worried about us.

But history is unambiguous: literacy doesn't die. It adapts.

The only real threat is refusing to recognize the new form when it arrives—even when it's sitting in your family group chat, waiting to be played.