Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.

Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 370

Poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst proposes that reading “simply means paying attention to what’s in front of you and trying to make sense of it.”¹ This is what he terms a “non-material” definition of reading, a reading that encompasses both books and texts but also pictures, rivers, your lover’s face. To read words and paragraphs trains you to read the rest of the world, the way a pugilist hits a bag the better to smash someone’s face. The attention reverberates: you read and receive the wisdom the writer has carefully carved, the river slicing through rock, the bag swings back. One of the ways—perhaps the primary way—that people of a modern, literate society practice attention is by reading. Ursula Le Guin writes that

reading is active, an act of attention, an absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or gathering….It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you.

Le Guin, Words are My Matter, page 72

Work—the movement of energy from one system to another, eye to page, hand to keyboard, paw to snapping branch. The work of writing depends on the work of reading; reading came first. Whomever it was who first scratched the bare shape of a goat into a clay tablet had some idea of what they wanted those marks to mean when they did it. Likely it didn’t turn out exactly as they expected it to, for that is every writer’s curse. But they had an intention, an effort that they bent hand and mind towards, and afterwards they could read what that intention brought forth. You must read before you learn to write. All your efforts at writing are efforts at reading, also.

A writer requires a reader but a reader is not so dependent. They can read the dry soil at the base of a tree, a crowd as it throngs a detention camp in protest and grief, the clouds of smoke that blot the sun and clog the lungs. They can read the lies that pass over every smirking autocrat’s face. The writer covets the reader; the reader covets the whole world.

[I]t is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place, or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, then decipher it. We all read ourselves into the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

Manguel, A History of Reading, page 7

No doing but reading. No doing without reading, without first noticing and attending to the world to make some sense of it, to see where we might fit, or where we need, with elbows and speech and fists, to make space. We read ourselves into the world, a world that includes us, that is ours to interpret and make. We read to become aware of reality—a reality that is so often at odds with our own thriving—and in that awareness we become alert to the ways in which that reality can change.

Reality is a trickster. Look at it head on and it vanishes, your sight wiped out as surely as if you stared at the sun. You have to look a little askew, to squint or peer out of the corners of your eyes. You have to be still, so as not to spook it. Very often it is fiction that shows us reality most clearly, by shifting our perspective out of the ordinary, by being just a little bit strange. So I can read in Always Coming Home about the bringing-in ceremonies of the Kesh people, in which a sick person is welcomed into a sacred place, sung to, given a comfortable spot to sleep, guided in taking various medicinal therapies, and accompanied in ritual performances that exercise both body and spirit. And in those descriptions and stories I can see how our own medical system splits the body and mind apart; how we try to heal people independent of the political, economic, and environmental systems in which they live; how that healing, however partial, persists those systems even as they make us ever sicker.

I can see, also, how it could be otherwise.

“[R]eality underlies imagination, and attention to reality trues and tunes imagination,”² Bringhurst writes, and the reverse is also true: without that attention to reality, our imagination wobbles and veers off course, flops down on the ground like a child overwhelmed in the heat. Without reading, we cannot grasp what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is changeable. Rather, we accept whatever is given, as if it were all that ever was and all that ever could be. As if we were merely recipients of the world and not creators of it.

Which is why reading has so often been proscribed.

“Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class,”³ writes Le Guin. It didn’t stay that way, of course, but not for lack of trying. In his history of Black reconstruction, Du Bois describes a one-two punch:

The fact of the matter was that in the pre-war South, there were two insuperable obstacles to a free public school system. The first was the attitude of the owners of property. They did not propose under any circumstances to be taxed for the public education of the laboring class. They believed that laborers did not need education; that it made their exploitation more difficult; and that if any of them were really worth educating, they would somehow escape their condition by their own efforts.

The second obstacle was that the white laborers did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases. They accepted without murmur their subordination to the slaveholders, and looked for escape from their condition only in the possibility of becoming slaveholders themselves. Education they regarded as a luxury connected with wealth.

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, page 641

Witness this sequence of attacks: first, prohibit reading by all but a few. Exclude Black people, women, and servants from schools and libraries. When that prohibition fails, make poverty the soldier who sends the readers back. Do not grant money for schools or teachers or books. If the people manage to pool their resources and build their own schools—as newly freed Black Americans did in the years just after the end of the Civil War—make threats against those schools until they close down. Burn them if you must. Later, fund the schools for your own children lavishly but deploy every instrument you have to make sure the schools for working people’s children are short of both good teachers and good books. Ban the books those children might use to see themselves in the world, for good measure. When some people still manage to learn to read, come at it from the other side: make the work required to scrape together a meager living so great there is no energy left at the end of the day for anything other than a dead and dreamless sleep. Cast reading and higher education as elitist, out of touch with the “real” world, childish and feminized. Make it seem a threat to the bare existence that they have, against all odds, just managed to eke out.

The “real” world positioned opposite reading is a false one, a counterfeit world that is too simple and plain to be read, too hardened and heavy to be moved. It’s a facade that purports to be immutable and constant, comfortingly predictable even as it eliminates all comforts. True reality is neither so steady nor so readily perceived; it requires reading—an attention to text and subtext, to connections between texts, the keen sight of the cat as it watches the sparrow, holding its breath.

The ruling class gets to wring their hands in disapproval at how few people read, as if that wasn’t the intent all along. Then, being in a position of authority, they can propose various solutions to this problem of their own making: mechanisms like pinning teacher wages to test results, or draining school funding into voucher programs, which seem to align the right incentives but do nothing to evoke the attention required for reading to take place. And rarely do these proposals suspend the other hostilities, such that schools and teachers stay poor and work remains too much, both ever-present and ever-precarious. Meanwhile, reading is framed up not as a practice for attending the world—for unmaking and remaking it anew—but as a virtuous leisure activity, good for the spirit, like taking your vitamins. It’s not as productive as, say, inserting onerous new paperwork blockades between people and their doctors; it doesn’t raise the stock price quite like laying off ten percent of your workforce. But it’s good to have read, once, and to be plausibly prepared to do so again.

It’s a wonder anyone reads at all.

Yet people do. And so each generation sees new, creative applications of the same old tricks to get them to stop: accelerated work cultures privilege neat summaries and charts over reading and writing; automated transcription replaces thoughtful note-taking with surveillance and the hyperaccumulation of information; vapid entertainment proliferates that requires no thought or attention at all, billions of hours of television, movies, short video that is little more than anesthetizing spectacle, a denial-of-service attack against our own minds.

[W]e don’t come by stupidity naturally. On the contrary, we come into the world as intelligent creatures, curious and avid for instruction. It takes immense time and effort, individually and collectively, to dull and eventually stifle our intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, our creative perception, and our use of language.

Manguel, The City of Words, page 130

This will be framed as post-literacy, as an inevitable evolution or progression. But such a framing exculpates the executors of a centuries long program to maintain an illiterate, subservient class. When we talk about an absence of literacy, about how few people seem able to read thoughtfully or deeply, we are not talking about something that merely happens, an occurrence without actor or reason, like an asteroid slicing through the atmosphere. We are witness to a strategic all-out attack and the ruins it leaves behind. We are not post-literate but dis-literate, subject to a concerted and well-funded effort to separate us from literacy, an effort proliferated across schools, workplaces, and, perhaps most perniciously, our homes and pockets.

From channel surfing to doomscrolling, we have long been inundated with technology designed to stupefy and placate. The latest assault tries to transform reading from relation into information. Rather than a collaboration between reader and writer, we get knowledge stripped of its context and color, reduced to data points presented in such a way as to brook no dissent. Let the machines read for us while we lay about, listening to neat summaries of books and papers, smug in our time-saving abilities—though what, precisely, we have saved that time for remains to be seen. Let the machines write for us too, displacing thinking and making with recording, every answer to every possible question available at the barest command. No curiosity, no desire that cannot be immediately sated and therefore squashed before it comes to life.

Disliteracy posits that words are simple, basic things, that questions can be answered neatly and briefly, that meaning-making is transactional rather than contested. It produces oracles and supplicants, bosses and bootlickers, tyrants and cowering subjects. But always there are those few who distract the guards and slip away and gather to plan a counter-attack. We have been fighting disliteracy for generations now, from building those first public schools to refusing orders to pull books from our library shelves, from turning off the TV to turning off our phones, to gathering for reading groups and book swaps, to writing and reading and publishing books and poems and zines and blogs, writing and reading with full hearts and minds yet alive to the world. Why would we ever stop now?

On June 23rd, in a Texas federal court room, eight people were sentenced to effective life sentences for acts including printing and distributing leftist zines and running an anarchist book club. The judge in the case openly admitted that the long sentences were intended to deter people who profess similar ideologies. The move from prohibition to austerity to distraction and dismissal comes back around again, to where every effort of disliteracy ultimately aims: to forbid thinking that imagines futures where the wealthy, ruling class no longer rules.

In her 1989 Massey Lectures, Ursula Franklin talks of the dangers of prescriptive technologies. As she defines them, prescriptive technologies are those in which every step along a process is preordained, designed to be followed just so. In a prescriptive process, an individual cannot exercise their own judgment, lacking both the visibility and the agency to do so. Franklin writes that the proliferation of prescriptive technologies has “created a culture of compliance” which has, in turn, “diminished resistance to the programming of people.”⁴

Nearly the whole arc of our technological development in the decades since has been to ratchet up that programming, to make avoidance of it near impossible. What is so-called artificial intelligence if not a large scale effort to program people to move in accord with capital? What is the intense specialization that every industry drives toward, if not an effort to design people who can deliver only what they’ve been programmed to deliver, and nothing else? Disliteracy is the frontline of that assault, as it disarms us against that programming, makes us vulnerable to it, unable to see it clearly and so ill-equipped to interrupt it. By contrast, literacy—the skill to read deeply, to pay attention to both the explicit and implicit, to inquire and make connections—is both armor and weapon, a shield against the infantilizing counterfeit realities tossed at us day and night and a sharp knife for cutting through to the real and ever changeable world, hidden just out of sight.

We live in what Adam Greenfield terms the Long Emergency: a five-alarm fire playing out over generations, in which a warming planet, neoliberal precarity, rising fascism, and a psychopathic billionaire class threaten our very survival. Nothing is more critical than arresting and mitigating this suite of threats. We must urgently and patiently build towards socialism, towards the radical redistribution of wealth, the redesign of our technologies, economies, and social structures that can live in accord with the natural world, of which we are not apart but a critical part.

There is no version of that effort that does not include reading. We must understand how the billionaire-fueled technodisaster works so that we can see where to interrupt it and displace it, how to design counter-assaults and subversive movements. We must be able to see reality before us so that we can true our imagination towards different realities. Such vision requires reading in all its many forms, both the reading of words and the reading of the world.

We must be able to read ourselves into the world, to write new worlds in which we can live and thrive. Reading precedes writing, but writing follows, necessarily and inevitably. This, too, is why reading is such a danger to the autocrat and the billionaire. To read is to seed your own writing, to bring forth the writing that is already in you but needs the fire of reading to set down roots. When we read, we learn not only to narrate our own lives but to reject the conformist roles that have been narrated for us; we learn that no story is ever the last.

Not even the story of reading’s end. Clucking about the end of reading, pitying the child or adult who does not read—these acts not only waste time, they acquiesce. To bemoan the end of reading is to forfeit the fight before you even enter the ring. What is reading for? Reading is for liberty. And the question we must ask ourselves isn’t, is reading ending, but how are we taking up the fight?

Because the fight isn’t over, not yet. Reading has been left for dead many times before, by many a wannabe despot and narcissistic technocrat. But always she gets up. Somewhere a kid picks up a book, and she straightens her back. A library opens their doors, and she spits out a tooth. A banned book is passed between friends and she rises, taking a small but steady step. Soon, she is walking along again, a little cat stepping lithely beside her. We waste our time worrying about her when we should be running to catch up.