“Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say,” Friedrich Kittler wrote, but that lofty moment was in the eighties, and the fin de siècle of the written word had yet to give way to the twenty-first century’s incessant logorrhea. As Noah McCormack explains, we’re in a second age of orality, the Homeric epic now replaced by short-form video content and podcasting. Brace Belden reports from the latter industry, a heady mix of dick-pill ads and Kamala Harris interviews.
