From Text to Tokens
Mapping the Post-Literate World
Hi, I’m Jac.
I’m a writer, teacher, and theorist, working—often with keen interest; sometimes with sadness—within the strange frontier spaces of post-literacy: areas where textual literacy is collapsing, and new minds, human and non-human, are emerging.
Unfortunately, those ‘frontier’ spaces are not staying at the frontier. Instead, they’re rushing inward, from vanguard to center.
For the past few years, I’ve been investigating a phenomenon I call detextualization: the long, slow erosion of text-based cognition in a society that once treated reading as the bedrock of memory, imagination, governance, and selfhood.
As a species, we don’t come with literacy baked in; we have to recreate it within each new generation. Transmitting literacy—giving children the ability to perceive language through visible forms—requires a massive socialization infrastructure: time, energy, and resources which we often take for granted (“everyone goes to school—it’s what you do!”).
Today, that infrastructure is crumbling. Literacy—the foundation of memory, agency, and political life—is no longer our default. It’s becoming the exception. Meanwhile, powerful new intelligences have emerged.
AI models, trained on the residue of our textual civilizations, now metabolize and extend the very symbolic systems we ourselves are forgetting how to use. These models are simultaneously post-literate and hyper-literate, raising profound questions about authorship, memory, and what it means to think at all.
This newsletter will follow these questions, wherever they lead.
Where This Work Began
I come to this project as a deeply textual person: I have built myself through text, and have devoted much of my professional life to tending the cultural deposit of literacy.
In my twenties, I founded The American Reader, a literary magazine dedicated to preserving print culture even as it was already vanishing.
Around thirty, I decided to step away and become a high school teacher, teaching literacy in chronically under-resourced schools.
From my front-row seat in the classroom, it became clear we aren’t facing merely a pedagogical crisis or policy failure—not just a debate between “whole-word reading” vs. “phonics” (these are symptoms, not causes), nor simply a struggle to build reading stamina. Instead, what we are experiencing is an ecological collapse: the destruction of the mental and environmental scaffolds that have sustained literacy for millennia.
And the pace is only accelerating—faster, frankly, than I ever expected.
Where We Are Now
I’ve come to believe that what’s happening is at least as momentous as the invention of writing itself. Writing externalized human memory, gradually transforming consciousness. Now AI externalizes attention—threatening to reshape not merely how we know, but how we will.
We are witnessing the end of visual language processing at scale—the ability to experience language not merely as sound, but as visible form—which once anchored democracy, nurtured interior life, and gave communities a shared sense of the real. We’re entering a new regime where memory is outsourced, attention is weaponized, and meaningful agency risks becoming the preserve of a very small, very powerful elite.
The question is no longer whether this shift is happening. The real questions are:
What can we preserve?
What can we rebuild?
What new symbolic scaffolds do we need to invent?
Alongside the transformation of literacy, we must also engage the question of who controls our attention and memory. Surveillance capitalism has rewired entire generations to produce endless outflows of text and “data exhaust”—generating revenue for a few gatekeepers and fuel for the next generation of AI models. That might sound bleak, but there’s another side to the story: brains rewired can also be re-rewired. The very same AI systems that manipulate our attention could become powerful allies in recovering depth, quiet, and truly human forms of cognition—if we can disentangle them from the purely profit-driven logic guiding their current development.
This transformation of our cognitive infrastructure demands urgent study, creative resistance, and radical forms of rebuilding. It’s part of what led me to help found the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA)—a para-institutional space where we practice “attention activism,” design “attention sanctuaries,” and convene classes that can respond to seismic shifts even faster than conventional schools or universities. Something extraordinary can happen when we come together to study, think, and talk about urgent problems—attending collectively in a way that changes the very ground of possibility. The world is changing rapidly, yes—but we can still gather and make meaning from it in real time. The promise of collective intelligence still holds, even as its mediums shift.
What This Is (and Isn’t)
At heart, I intend for this newsletter to be neither an uncritical rejection nor an uncritical embrace of technology. It’s not driven by nostalgia. If successful, it will be a chronicle and a blueprint: an attempt to see clearly how we got here and to reimagine ways forward.
At root, I am searching for two things: understanding and agency.
Yes, I mourn deeply for what we’re losing. At the same time, I see AI’s potential for restoring depth and interiority if we adapt it thoughtfully—turning it into an ally rather than a tool of profit-driven subjugation. We can fight to preserve the best gifts literacy gave us—conceptual layering, strong “theory of mind,” context-independent reasoning—and repurpose them within the symbolic ecologies that are now emerging. Perhaps we can rewire ourselves more intentionally, forging a new symbolic ecology that harnesses AI and digital tools without ceding all cognitive ground to the mega-corporations monopolizing those tools.
The work ahead is daunting. The ground shudders; even the sky, at times, seems to fall. But, as a species, we’ve always excelled at building new shelters—sometimes even cathedrals—from the rubble of collapsed orders.
Already, we have the seeds of new institutions, new communities, and potential cooperative alliances with machine intelligence that we might choose to make emancipatory rather than extractive.
If you’re here, you likely feel the tremors, too. Let’s stand in them together, track them back to their sources, and practice the radical attention that might carry us somewhere hopeful—even as the old scaffolds buckle behind us.
Thank you for reading, thinking, and feeling your way through these questions with me.
—Jac
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NB: I will post on a weekly schedule (likely more frequently, but at least one a week, I’ll post a substantive piece). I’ll go into the newsletter’s name—After Literacy—in a post later this month.