I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.

I was reminded of this quote from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler during a midterm this evening. My professor was using this timer web app to tell us how much time we had left before the exam was over. The web page had like, six large banner ads on it, and my professor didn't have an ad blocker. Genuinely, it was kind of hard to focus on anything except the advertisements. It makes me wonder how people manage to live in a world without basic protection on the web. But they do. They find a way.

I had the opposite feeling the other day when another professor showed up to class with what appeared to be an entirely AI-generated slide deck. AI generated images, even some of the newer, less obvious ones, are disturbing to look at for a number of reasons. But whereas advertisements feel overwhelming, AI generated images feel like… nothing. I can't help but look at them, picking out every little detail, swimming in that discomfort, because despite containing a lot of symbolic data, they're just semantic noise. They're nothing.

A few months ago I was hanging out with some people who don't spend most of their time touching computers, as every healthy person should, and I asked them if they had ad blockers on their browsers. They all said no, and so I asked why. Each of them gave more or less the same answer: they didn't feel like it. They knew they existed, they knew they were helpful, but they just never got around to downloading one. It's strange to me, because downloading one takes all of ten seconds, from looking up UBlock Origin to having it ready to go. If people aren't doing it that has to mean something. I presume it means they're so used to seeing ads they've gone from meaning to much to meaning nothing at all.

I was starting to question my reality as my professor lectured over their AI slides, as everyone watched silently as though nothing were wrong, as I was transfixed by the strange, disorientating figures that labelled nothing with computer-generated asemic writing. But today as I was sitting in a common room, I overheard some of my classmates pouring over the slides in the same way I had the day before. I have to imagine there were many others in the room just as disorientated by it as I was, for all the same reasons.

If on a winter's night a traveler explores many different kinds of readers, or different ways of reading. Including one who doesn't read at all—not for lack of a choice, but rather an active decision to be freed of the tyranny of literacy. To not be haunted by the images others foist into our minds just by virtue of having been written.

There is a sense in which we can write to make ourselves vulnerable.

Dispatches from emotional vulnerability

And there's also a sense in which we become vulnerable by reading.

The subtle ways in which "Expert in a Dying Field" by The Beths has changed me as a person

Reading something (or watching, or listening) literally transports a thought from someone else's mind into yours. The transmission isn't lossless—in fact, it can be very lossy, but when you stop to think about it it's kind of crazy it's possible at all. And those experiences transform us. I like to think I'm strong enough to not be hurt just by reading something hurtful, but for the same reason I got weirdly into Mormonism in high school after reading the Small Plates of Nephi, I've seen plenty of advertisements that've made me feel bad about who I am. The only reason I'm not constantly reading things written with the intention of making me hate myself is because I'm digitally filtering them out before they're rendered on my screen.

So maybe this idea of freeing ourselves from the tyranny of literacy isn't so silly after all.

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