Tag: reading

James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: A Jeremiad Against “Slop,” With the Social Question Carefully Avoided

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James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages is the latest addition to a rising genre of critique lamenting modern institutions: an elegy for reading, attention, and the “culture of print.” It is a compact, quotable book that resonates with the concerns of the Times/Guardian opinion pages. Its core argument can be summarised: smartphones are dismantling the foundations of the modern world. While Gutenberg’s invention fostered democracy, TikTok and similar platforms are eroding it.

This argument isn’t entirely original, nor is it completely incorrect. The real issue isn’t just the fact that literacy is stagnating, attention spans are fragmenting, or cultural life is deteriorating—it’s the explanation behind these trends. Marriott presents a technologically deterministic story in which print pioneered modernity and smartphones are now destroying it. He omits the important social, economic, and class questions. Essentially, his book laments “slop” without considering who produces it, who benefits, or why the institutions that once supported literacy have been systematically dismantled. In short, it’s a diagnosis that reassures its audience by avoiding the root causes of the problem.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ (1985) remains a highly insightful analysis of how public life has transformed under late capitalism. Written at the peak of the television era, Postman contended that the key change in modern culture was not ideological but epistemological: a shift from a print-based public sphere to one ruled by entertainment media. He cautioned that this shift led to a society where the spectacle’s logic replaces political debate, historical memory, and civic seriousness.

Postman’s key insight was straightforward yet powerful: each medium has a bias toward particular ways of thinking. Print fosters linear reasoning, focus, and gradual argument development. Conversely, television breaks discourse into images, emotional signals, and quick edits. A culture shifting between these mediums not only changes its habits but also its ability to think. As Postman observed, “We become what we behold,” and a society fixated on entertainment risks losing the capacity for meaningful democratic debate.

Postman’s book remains powerful because he saw this change as rooted in institutions, not just psychology. Television didn’t undermine politics because viewers lacked willpower; it did so because commercial media found trivial content profitable. The way the medium processes knowledge is linked to its economic system. Postman’s critique isn’t just about missing reading but about cautioning against reshaping public communication for profit.

From a Marxist perspective, Postman’s limitation is also evident. He pointed out the symptoms—the breakdown of rational discourse, the ascendancy of spectacle, and the infantilization of politics—but failed to explore the root causes. He didn’t ask why entertainment became the primary cultural form, who owned the media institutions driving this change, or how the commodification of attention altered the work environment, the educational system, and public life. His concept of ‘technopoly’ described a cultural state rather than a social relationship.

However, this oversight does not lessen the book’s importance. In fact, the smartphone era has validated Postman’s insights more than he might have envisioned. The pattern he observed—entertainment functioning as a form of knowledge and distraction serving as an ideology—has grown stronger through platforms designed to profit from every moment of human attention. The dynamics Postman described in television now underpin digital capitalism.

Today’s goal isn’t just to echo Postman’s warnings but to act on them. The crisis in public discourse isn’t driven by technology itself; rather, it’s rooted in the economic system that uses technology to fragment our awareness and maximise profit. *Amusing Ourselves to Death* stays vital because it illustrates how culture deteriorates when communication is treated as a commodity. However, it doesn’t fully clarify why this commodification happened or why undoing it demands social change rather than moral preaching.

The Whig Interpretation of Print Culture

Marriott’s traditional approach is well-known. He traces a direct line from Gutenberg to Locke, linking pamphlets to parliaments, and literacy to liberty. “With rising literacy came the world we recognise today,” he states, implying literacy is an independent force—like a harmless contagion—that spreads reason and democracy wherever it goes. This reflects the Whig interpretation of print culture in its most straightforward form. It views technology as the driving force of history and considers culture a natural outcome, presenting history as free of conflict, opposition, or social classes.

The truth was different. The rise of print in the 17th and 18th centuries was not the cause of revolutionary change, but rather a tool. The pamphlet wars during the English Civil War, the Enlightenment thinkers, the radical newspapers of the 1790s, and the Chartist press didn’t emerge simply because printing was available. These movements developed because new social classes were forming, fighting, organising, and needed literacy to express their goals. The bourgeoisie used print to overthrow feudalism, while the working class needed it to understand and challenge the new system that replaced it.

Marriott reverses cause and effect to craft a history where the bourgeoisie is merely a reading audience, not a revolutionary force; the proletariat is absent; and literacy exists independently of its material prerequisites. This portrayal aligns with the Times’ favoured narrative: refined, devoid of bloodshed, and boosting the self-image of the educated middle class.

The Smartphone as Scapegoat

Marriott’s depiction of the current situation mirrors the same evasion. He describes the smartphone as “an invasive species” within the cultural ecosystem. This metaphor is telling: invasive species come from outside, uninvited and unplanned, seen as natural disasters rather than social constructs. However, the smartphone did not simply emerge by chance. Corporations intentionally designed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed it, and their core business relies on capturing and destroying sustained attention. Companies like Meta, Google, ByteDance, and others have developed systems that profit from addiction, fragmenting consciousness and turning every idle moment into a source of revenue. In this view, the smartphone isn’t the villain; it’s capital itself that bears responsibility.

Marriott’s choice not to specify this is intentional and forms the book’s central theme. It lacks chapters on the advertising-revenue model that makes engagement-focused design profitable. No sections discuss austerity measures that have decimated public libraries, adult education, and humanities programs. The book also omits topics like the casualisation of academic labour and how universities have become debt-driven institutions. Furthermore, it does not address that students struggling with classics like Dickens often work two jobs to afford fees that once were negligible.

The reading crisis is often seen as a failure of personal willpower rather than a weakness in social infrastructure. The moral appeal of ‘put down the phone, pick up the book’ targets those who still have free time to read, while it is directed at a class that increasingly lacks this leisure.

Why the Commentariat Loves This Book

It’s worth considering why Marriott’s book has been so warmly received by the very media outlets that helped foster the conditions he criticises. The reason is straightforward: it focuses on the wrong enemy. Criticising mass culture by blaming technology instead of capital doesn’t threaten the institutions that publish such critiques. This lets outlets like the Times and the Guardian lament “slop” while still profiting from the same attention-driven economy that creates it. It also appeals to their audience—the few who can read a 208-page book—by suggesting that their own habits are the final defence against chaos.

Most importantly, it lets commentators talk about cultural decline while avoiding underlying social issues such as deindustrialisation in entire regions, the loss of stable jobs, the fragmentation of youth communities, the breakdown of public services, and the militarisation of foreign policy. These are the true causes of the “post-literate society,” yet they are exactly the subjects the Times tends to steer clear of.

Marriott’s book is therefore valuable. It presents a crisis for discussion, highlighting issues often examined endlessly without considering the underlying economic system. Marriott correctly notes that sustained reading encourages sustained thought, which has political consequences as its decline makes the public more vulnerable to demagoguery. Viewing this purely as a technological problem misses the core issue. Trotsky emphasised that cultural issues are always linked to material conditions. Literacy relies on factors like free time, decent housing, proper nutrition, quality schools, and a shorter workday that allows leisure. Culture doesn’t develop in isolation but arises during the free hours after work.

Marriott’s emphasis on “the written word” overlooks important social realities. It defends reading for a privileged class that still has free time, ignoring the circumstances that deprive millions of that opportunity. The connection between readers was never just about printed material; it was built through struggles over education, working hours, and leisure rights. Reclaiming that link won’t come through moral pleas or nostalgia; it requires a fight over resources and societal structures that shape who can find time, energy, and institutional support to read. This essential conflict is missing from The New Dark Ages, and its absence reveals the book’s true focus.

A Crisis Misnamed, A Crisis Unresolved

Marriott has written a book about the death of reading that refuses to ask why reading is dying. He has written a book about cultural decay that refuses to name the social decay beneath it. He has written a book about democracy that refuses to mention the economic order that has hollowed democracy out.It is a jeremiad against “slop” that never asks who cooks the slop, who profits from it, and why so many people have no alternative.The crisis of literacy is real. The crisis of attention is real. The crisis of culture is real. But smartphones don’t cause them. They are caused by capitalism.

Podcast Episode: Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by Harper Voyager (£22).

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Pip: A descent into the underworld — and we're not talking about the academic job market, though the novel makes that comparison explicit. freerein61 has been reading R.F. Kuang's new book, and the review turns into something considerably wider than a book review.

Mara: That's right. We're covering Katabasis, Kuang's novel about academic elitism and class, and the post uses it to open up the katabasis tradition across Dante, Zola, and Engels. Let's start with what the novel is actually doing.

Katabasis and the Class Descent

Pip: Katabasis is R.F. Kuang's departure from the colonial framework of Babel toward something more directly focused on class — specifically, the university as a structure that reproduces hierarchy rather than dismantles it. The question the post is asking is whether the novel's metaphor of descent has genuine social content, or whether it stays psychological and individual.

Mara: The post sets up the stakes with a quote from critic Beejay Silcox: "Katabasis is far from perfect. There's a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. But none of that really matters — especially if you have a score to settle."

Pip: So the imperfections are acknowledged and then set aside, because the novel's real work is settling accounts with a system — the ivory tower as an infernal structure, in the post's phrase, that runs more like a pyramid scheme than a meritocracy.

Mara: The post is specific about how the novel builds that case. Characters like Alice and Peter are described as cannon fodder in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work for senior academics. And financial privilege is named as the real barrier — the protagonists are so absorbed into the system that they believe their lives are literally not worth living without validation from elite institutions.

Pip: Which is where the katabasis frame earns its keep. The post traces the tradition from Dante's Inferno — where the circles of hell encode the class contradictions of late medieval Italy, usurers damned alongside political traitors — through to Engels descending into the cellars of Manchester and Zola sending his characters into the coal mines of Germinal. The underground is consistently the space where the bourgeoisie prefers not to look.

Mara: And the post draws out the reversal built into the trope: the hero who descends returns transformed, carrying knowledge the surface world lacks. As the post puts it, it is precisely from the underworld of capitalist production that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.

Pip: The post is careful to note that Kuang is not a Marxist — but argues her work gives a Marxist critic exactly the material needed to demonstrate that mythological forms take on different social content in different epochs, rather than being timeless archetypes.

Mara: That's the test the post leaves with the reader: whether Katabasis reaches the depth of great literature that illuminates the real social forces shaping human suffering, or whether its descent stays at the level of individual psychology. The post holds the question open rather than closing it.

Pip: From the underworld of academia to the forces that built it — the class logic runs deeper than any single institution.

Mara: The through-line here is the question of what literary form can actually carry — whether a descent narrative points toward systemic contradiction or stays inside individual experience.

Pip: Dante mapped feudal anxiety. Zola mapped the mines. The question for next time is what the present moment maps onto.

On Gerry Healy’s Books

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On 16/03/26, I visited the Socialist Workers Party bookshop, Bookmarks. While looking at the second-hand bookshelves, I noticed a lot of old Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) books, like 10 copies of the Trotskyism Versus Revisionism series 1-6. The bookshop has three large bookshelves of second-hand books. I noticed more books, like Marx’s collected works, Lenin’s collected works and more books by Leon Trotsky.

I felt something was wrong here, so I went to the reception desk and asked if they knew anything about it. I was told that a representative from Vanessa Redgrave had initially offered two storage lockers full of books in early 2025. The SWP told Redgrave that they don’t buy. Redgrave donated the books to the SWP. The books were loaded into a medium-sized van in June or July of 2025. The books were advertised for sale through the SWP’s social media sites.

Given that Healy had a library that spanned over fifty years, one can only imagine how many were donated and what exactly Redgrave kept back. It is not well known that Healy’s secretaries kept a political diary. Excepts can be seen in Corrin Lotz’s somewhat sycophantic biography of Gerry Healy. What documents does Redgrave still hold on to?

Having a further look at the books on the Bookmarks shelves, I notice a significant number with G Healy written inside. Healy spent an inordinate amount of time writing in the books.

Healy clearly annotated his books to engage more deeply with the text, enhance comprehension, and retain information, essentially turning his reading into an active conversation with the author. It serves as a personal record of his thoughts, feelings, and insights, facilitating easier reference later and adding a deeper layer of enjoyment to the reading experience. It means that future historians will not have access to this precious archive.

It is clear that the books donated are not from Redgrave’s library but are, in fact, Healy’s personal library. I know this because six months before the split in the WRP in 1984, Redgrave sold off an enormous amount of her books. I purchased two suitcases full of her books, including the proof copy of One Long Night, with her name inside.Also, there appear to be several books from the WRP library, which I assume were at Clapham. It appears Redgrave must have looted that library. This needs further investigation, but I am pretty sure it is part of, or the whole of, G Healy’s library.

It is clear that Redgrave has no interest in revolutionary politics and by carrying out this act of political and historical vandalism spits on the history of the movement. The books should have been donated to a library or an academic institution such as Warrick University.

Making Space (The Time Traveler’s Passport) by R. F. Kuang, Amazon Kindle Edition 2025

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Making Space is a beautifully crafted 32-page eBook. It is essentially about a childless couple who take in a mysterious boy in a dark and foreboding short story about the responsibility of parenthood, self-sacrifice, and how we perceive the future. It is also what happens to a person’s soul when they sell it to the devil. Although different from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, there are striking similarities.[1]

R. F. Kuang’s Making Space is part of The Time Traveller’s Passport. It is a collection of stories about memory, identity, and the choices we make in life. New York Times bestselling author John Joseph Adams edited the book. It is a little surprising that Amazon would snare an author of Kuang’s stature. The book is currently only available on Amazon, and a printed version has not been released yet. Review copies appear to be sanctioned by Amazon through NetGalley.[2]

Although the short book genre is new to Kuang, she handles it superbly, serving as a testament to her intellect and experience. The dark and not-unsurprising ending is typical of Kuang. Her main narrative is beautifully crafted, delving into the complexities of human relationships and social responsibilities. However, it is a little disturbing that Kuang makes far too many concessions to the right-wing #MeToo campaign.

I am not saying that Kuang is an ardent supporter of the #MeToo movement. However, her work on Making Space makes it difficult to turn such narrow, selfish concerns of Jess into great, compelling drama.

As the great  G. V. Plekhanov wrote, “I know that an artist cannot be held responsible for the statements of their heroes. But very often he, in one way or another, indicates his own attitude to these statements, and we are thus able to judge what his own views are.”

And writing an observation that would not look out of place in today’s world, He writes in the same essay, “in present-day social conditions, the fruits of art for art’s sake are far from delectable. The extreme individualism of the era of bourgeois decay cuts artists off from all sources of genuine inspiration. It renders them completely blind to what is happening in social life, condemning them to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences that are entirely without significance and marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination. The end product of their preoccupation is something that not only has no relation to beauty of any kind, but which moreover represents an obvious absurdity that can only be defended with the help of a sophistically distorted idealist theory of knowledge.”[3]

While there is nothing wrong with using the internet to publish books or short stories, it does contain certain dangers. Kuang has been accused of using AI to write her books on TikTok. But as one reader succinctly puts it, “Sadly, AI is so common now that talent is suspicious! Would you accuse Sanderson or Stephen King of AI? Or is ‘too articulate’ a critique only reserved for female authors?”.

In defence of Kuang Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the ‘realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, and she deploys this (Yellowface) novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A significant portion of Yellowface is represented through Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that “allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.” However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit”[4]

Making Space is still a superbly written book. Kuang is to be commended for her recent efforts in the field of battle against the racialisation of literature, and her defence of the fundamental right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burned or pulped. However, Making Spaces is a dangerous concession to the #MeToo movement. Her new book, Katabasis, which is already a best seller, will be reviewed at a later date.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray

[2] https://www.netgalley.com/

[3] Art and Social Life by G. V. Plekhanov 1912-https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1912/art/ch03.htm

[4] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/rebecca-f-kuang.html