We Can No Longer Read Books

-- By ReynaldoWilson - 14 Jan 2025

Introduction

The Atlantic reports: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. Students at Columbia University in the City of New York, and similarly situated elite, selective universities lack the ability to read full books cover to cover. In reflecting on my own lived experience, as a kid, I used to read full books both on my own and in my English classes throughout school. I noticed a change even during my four years at my undergraduate institution where professors assigned shorter and shorter articles and excerpts instead of full-length studies and grand sociological works. It feels like my attention span was getting shorter and shorter. This essay will discuss some of the philosophical reasons of shorter attention spans from a neoMarxist vantage point and underline the contemporary consequences of shorter attention spans in the first days of the Trump Administration.

The Culture Industry

In The Culture Industry, Adorno and Horkheimer point to Walt Disney as the most dangerous man in the United States. To summarize an incredibly dense work, the theorists posit standardized and unoriginal mass media products that Disney and similarly situated media giants put out at enormous volume are designed to pacify otherwise angry, alienated, and overworked proletarians by creating a false sense of satisfaction and stifling critical thinking/class consciousness. It follows, then, that the more one engages with ‘false’ mass-produced art, the more pacified an individual will become.

While quality artistic expression takes time, the ‘owners’ of mass culture like Disney are uninterested in meaningful art as it hurts their revenue. Over-production, on the other hand, is very much within their interest. This overproduction of serialized and lazy yearly installments of the same film and music has led to far more than the theorists of the Culture Industry were able to predict. More than a pacification of the proletariat, near complete mental domination by Disney and the purveyors of mass culture like Google and Meta has colonized our most basic cognitive processes: our ability to direct our mind to our pursuits and our attention spans.

In the times of Adorno and Horkheimer, the proletarian had to travel…leave their house to go to a cinema and watch a motion picture made by Walt Disney. If you want to hear music, one will have to purchase a record deliberately and play it on a record player. Those days are no longer. With the pervasive grip of modern technology, the deluge of mass media is constantly being constantly beamed to phones and computers constantly distracting us from our other pursuits. It is to the (relatively) new capitalists' advantage to keep the proletarian consistently engaged as people themselves become the commodity.

The Age of Survalience Capitalism

Shashona Zuboff’s in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, similar to theorists at the Frankfurt school in that Zuboff is trying to explain a further re-engineering of the capitalism Marx wrote about and adapt the theory to contemporary times. For Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism refers to the status quo of domination by the hands of giant tech firms like Google and Facebook. Specifically, she argues that our interface with these ‘free’ technologies produces behavioral surplus (information on our behavior) which is refined and commodified to be sold in behavioral futures markets. In other words, Tech giants are amassing wealth by converting human experience into data and using that data to predict and control users at a massive scale.

In many ways, the tech capitalists have it better than traditional owners of labor. While going to work producing commodities for a world over and above oneself, to use Marx’s language, labor seemed to engage with capitalists out of necessity (make money to buy food, raise a family, etc.). Now, we generate data for a world over and above ourselves willingly and to our detriment. The massive behavioral data exhaust renders no individual byte of information tech capitalists gather about us inconsequential. We voluntarily surrender personal details to, say, Meta, like picture of ourselves and our families, who we associate with, and which cultural spaces we occupy. These tech giants use data collected to predict and proscribe behavior.

The issues with mass culture and modern technology are fundamentally intertwined as if mass culture and modern technology alone do not cause issues in our society in their respective vacuums. It is at the intersection of mass culture and modern technology which we find our decreasing attention span. Mass culture’s overproduction of pacifying, distracting shlock has permeated our very ontology by brute force. Tech capitalists require this ideological domination because our subconscious brains provide the necessarily immense data exhaust that drives their instrumentation/authoritarian power. The deteiments of a shorter attention span are more than just our own to bear. The pervasive intersection of mass culture, authoritarian power, and politics was on full display before the American people on January 20th, 2025.

Contemporary Impact of a Shortening Attention Span

As unsafe, frigid temperatures rolled through Washington D.C. before the inauguration, the executive decision was made to move the previously open-air and public ceremony to the incredibly small rotunda inside the United States Capitol building. Seating in the room generally and on the stage with the President specifically was extremely limited and highly sought after. Overflow rooms for the ceremony were spread around Washington for the immense amount of foreign dignitaries, state governors and federal officials which were invited to the event. Amongst all the scarcity and the litany of important government officials, Elon Musk (Twitter/Tesla), Mark Zuckerburg (Meta/Facebook), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Shou Zi Chew (TikTok? ) took the stage behind the Presidnet.

While the issues with an authoritarian President obviously aligning with authoritarian profit driven mega capitalists could fill a treatise, it should suffice to say here that there is an interesting interest convergence in decreasing our attention span. Donald Trump has blitzkrieged the United States with more executive orders in the first month than any president has in their first 100 days, and he has shown no sign of slowing down, handing out orders biweekly. It seems the news media charged with reporting updates directly to our phones at dizzying paces cannot even keep up with the Trump administration. What hope do we have as our attention spans continue to be neutered disrupting our ability to resist both Trump and the surveillance capitalists.

Works Cited & Further Reading

Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W. Adorno, and Gunzelin Noeri. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Zuboff, Shoshana. "The age of surveillance capitalism." Social theory re-wired. Routledge, 2023. 203-213.

Horowitch, Rose. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The Atlantic. 2024.

Moglen, Eben. "The dotcommunist manifesto." In Copyright Law, pp. 553-559. Routledge, 2017.

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