Brain Rot Without Borders

A Baffler Symposium

Deep literacy is in decline worldwide. Our latest issue gathers eight writers from outside the Anglosphere for a forum on global brain rot. Nicolás Medina Mora sets the stage.

BOTH IN TERMS OF ABSOLUTE NUMBERS and as a proportion of the global population, more people know how to read today than at any other moment in history. And yet if we consider literacy not as the ability to parse simple sentences but as the capacity to comprehend and enjoy complex texts, and ultimately as a sensibility that approaches the world itself as a text that requires interpretation, it’s obvious we live in an unprecedented decline of what neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy.” The manifestations of this catastrophe range from the rise of psychotic conspiracy theories to the return of state propaganda and the collapse of the public sphere. The crisis comes into view most clearly, however, in the sudden and precipitous decline of the cultural practice that first taught all of us how to read the great book of the world. There’s no point in denying it anymore: literature as we know it is well on its way to becoming a lost art.

Consider, for instance, the distressing state of reading and writing in the United States. I disagree with Philip Roth’s 2009 dictum that the novel will soon become a “cultic” concern, not because I believe that literary fiction is enjoying some sort of heyday in the core of the American empire but rather because I’m convinced that literature has always been an esoteric practice in the United States. At the time of his death, Roth was more famous than almost any living American literary writer, but that’s just a convoluted way of saying that his influence on the wider culture was insignificant. Unlike Gabriel García Márquez, he never became the voice of the nation, or indeed of the language—not for lack of talent or dedication but because the United States reserves those roles for musicians such as Bob Dylan, the only Nobel laureate in literature so far to work primarily in an oral tradition. In the decade and a half that has elapsed since Roth prophesied the retreat of the American novel into the windowless temple of a marginal sect of schismatics, literature in the United States and the English-speaking world has deteriorated at a faster rate than our warming planet. As evidence, consider a selection from the fifty works of fiction that since 2020 have appeared in Publishers Weekly’s annual list of U.S. bestsellers: Dog Man: Grime and Punishment, Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, Dog Man: Fetch-22, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, and Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder. That graphic novels meant to help children learn how to read make up such a large proportion of the U.S. publishing market might suggest that most American adults lose all interest in literature as soon as they’re done with basic alphabetization.

The state of anglophone literature is so dire that thinking about the decline of American letters at this point no longer induces despair, only irritation and boredom. In an effort to shake off that ennui and to escape the grip of U.S. cultural hegemony, if only briefly, The Baffler has commissioned seven writers who work in languages other than English for dispatches on the state of postliteracy in their motherlands and mother tongues.

“The state of anglophone literature is so dire that thinking about the decline of American letters at this point no longer induces despair, only irritation and boredom.”

These correspondents’ reports are refreshing in that they are entirely free of the commonplaces with which Americans tend to explain the decline of the written word—e.g., mistaking the symptom for the illness and blaming ChatGPT for students’ plummeting reading-comprehension skills, as if people hadn’t begun to forget how to read long before Faustian Markov-chain machines became the fetish object of an apocalyptic theology—and remind us that there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in American publishing offices, where people believe that reading literature in translation is evidence of worldly sophistication rather than the refuge of the monolingual.

But it’s my unfortunate duty to warn the reader that the essays of this dossier offer few reasons for hope. From South Korea to Sudan, China to Mexico, Morocco to the Philippines, literature seems to be in retreat. The worst part is that, while every unhappy literature is unhappy in its own way, the various dystopias that our correspondents describe seem to be converging into a single literary catastrophe. And though the causes for our common predicament that these writers offer vary wildly, it’s possible to discern a terrifying trend: the loss of deep literacy is not an organic development or an accident without an author but rather the intentional consequence of concrete actions undertaken by the unholy alliance of capital and the state, which has availed itself of technology to slowly erode our capacity to understand what we read—and therefore to imagine a more just future.

Depressing, I know. But as Gramsci taught us, despair turns us into reactionaries. It’d be naive to pretend that reading a novel or translating a poem can be a form of resistance. But who knows? Perhaps reinventing the old literary forms could help us reverse the current moment’s drive to stupidity. Better to be cultic than dumb.

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