Text is Dead

I stopped reading. Not books, not articles — everything. Any text that lands in my inbox, any document a colleague sends, any thread someone reposts — my first thought is the same: this is bullshit. I'm not going to read this.

A few months ago I noticed I started calling it "sludge" — a meaningless wall of text. Six pages of a report that could be three sentences. A tweet thread that says nothing. A document no one will ever return to. Sludge.

And I realized: I don't treat text as something meaningful anymore.

Text was the foundation. The most important tool humanity ever created for transferring knowledge across generations. Books, research papers, textbooks — if it was long, it meant the topic was explored deeply. You could read 300 pages and walk away with real understanding.

But the internet corrupted it. Writers learned that longer means more time on page. Clickbait headlines drive revenue. Publishers need volume to justify a book's price. 90% of any given text became water — filler designed to keep you engaged, not to make you smarter.

And then AI inherited all of it — and multiplied it.

Every pattern — the vague transitions, the "not only this, but also that," the endless padding — AI absorbed it and now reproduces it at scale. People didn't make AI a piece of shit. People made text a piece of shit, and AI learned from it.

Now everyone communicates through generated text. I prepare documents that no one will read. They'll paste them into AI and ask five questions. I receive documents and do the same. The document itself is meaningless — it's just an intermediary between two AIs.

Text didn't disappear. It changed form. I still read — but I read AI's answers to my questions, not the source material.

And here's the problem: you don't know what you don't know.

When you read a 300-page book, you encounter ideas you never would have searched for. You stumble into areas of knowledge you didn't know existed. When you ask five questions instead — you only get answers to what you already know to ask. The entire space of unknown unknowns is lost.

The most likely outcome: everyone will know everything on a surface level and nothing deeply. We'll all be generalists with the depth of a TikTok comment.

And maybe that's fine. If AI knows everything deeply, why should we? From first principles — deep knowledge exists to drive discovery, invention, progress. If AI does that, humans don't need depth anymore.

But something about that feels like a loss.

I'm writing this as text. For a blog. About text being dead.

I know no one will read it. Or they'll paste it into AI and ask questions. I'm writing this for myself — as self-expression, as documentation of a thought. Not for a reader.

And maybe that's what text is now. A diary no one reads. You write it, it joins a billion other texts, and nothing happens.