The Oral Culture Revival

AI chatbots are accelerating a shift from literate to oral culture, replacing text-based precision with dialogue-based thinking.

Writing enabled knowledge to exist separate from its author, fostering objectivity, falsifiability, and independent critical thinking—you can ponder someone's idea in quiet solitude. But we're returning to an oral-first world where video overtakes text, social media emphasizes instantaneity over permanence, and LLMs make literary precision obsolete by serving as universal translators. This shift changes not just how we communicate but how we think: from individual analysis to collective consciousness.

"Writing birthed the heretic." — Jasmine Sun, on how text enables independent thought