Bugging Out in a Post-Literate Control Society
When Deleuze dreamed of “Control,” his serpentine panopticon that replaces Foucault’s disciplinary enclosure, he could little have imagined an entire culture who suddenly can’t read good. But that’s just the culture we are now waking up inside of. Literacy has fallen off a cliff and it is probably not going to climb back anytime soon. We all know who to blame and it lives in our pocket. I am increasingly alarmed, although it is no new thing, to ride the subway and find that most everyone on the train is staring at their phones. This is rich for me to say, a blogger and “content creator,” whose number one rule is to never stop posting and whose content you may even now be reading on your phone. Be that as it may, and actual “reading” aside, from the psychological perspective it is increasingly evident that this continual fixation upon our screens leads to one overwhelming symptom: ADHD. The younger the screen-fixation, the more fragmented and glitchy the attention. The depressing result of this is that the teens are getting locked out of literature. It’s not that they do not want to read anymore, it’s that they literally cannot read. Does the loss of the ability to read result in an inability to think? Some have argued as much. As you can well imagine this sea-change has a number of extraordinary and far reaching effects of which we are only beginning to understand: not least of which is the rise of populist demagogues a la Idiocracy (2006). You do not have to be smart to rule in the post-literate control society: you must only ensure that the populace, by continually bugging-out online, remain incapable of sustained thought—for there is no better control than mass ignorance.
