The Return of Oral Culture

I sometimes get asked by publishers to write a book. I always decline. It’s not because I hate books, I love books. Books are powerful. They can change your life if you read the right ones, or warp it if you read the wrong ones.

Long text rewires your brain. You draw connections between ideas, generate original thoughts, and literally remodel your brain through sustained focus. That'll only happen through that process of grappling over a long text.

The reason I decline offers to write a book because we are in the midst of a monumental shift, we are exiting the age of literary culture and returning to the age of oral culture. This is one of the big stories of our time and no one is directly talking about it.

I know many authors. For most of them, they write them for speaking fees, not cultural transmission. The book exists so the author can say they wrote a book. It’s the new business card for “intellectuals.” It’s become a means to build a career, it’s something else, not the main thing.

People are reading less now. Instead they’re consuming short form video, images, AI summaries, tweets, newsletters and podcasts. This is what we call today Oral Culture. What we are returning to.

Look, books will always exist, and individual books will become Lindy. They are not going totally away. But they are not for the masses anymore. They are not the engines of cultural transmission. Yes, I'm writing long-form essays while arguing against long-form's dominance, but newsletters and blogs occupy a different space than books in the cultural hierarchy. They're more more conversational, more... oral.

The Collapse of Deep Reading

The data confirms what we already feel. Every generation growing up under our new oral culture reads less books than the generation before them.

Reading scores are falling fast.

Even at elite universities, places that supposedly collect the brightest minds, professors report students arriving unable to finish books. A Princeton historian watches his classes shrink vocabularies year after year, noting that students who "read insightfully and write beautifully" have become "exceptions" rather than the norm.

Everyone feels this happening and It’s really hard to blame the individual. You have to really enjoy books to keep reading them. Books seem slow and hard and boring to the modern mind. There is this constant buzzing in your head from all the stimulation and rapid-fire information you get from short form video, podcasts or AI summaries.

But it’s not like planes are falling from the skies. The world keeps marching on. You can have conversations with people about things. I don’t think we are getting dumber, necessarily, but we are changing. The way we consume and communicate are changing. The good news is, this is how it’s always been, except for a brief period of literacy. We’re just returning to a previous age, which seems new to us now. Here is a summary by Joe Weisenthal.

Back to Oral Culture

For 98% of human history, human consciousness was structured by the spoken word alone. In this oral world, knowledge was ephemeral, living and dying in human memory. There were no libraries, no archives, no way to verify a fact beyond consulting an elder.

In this oral world, knowledge had to be a performance. It has to stick. What was useful. What the group could remember and repeat. The stories were everything. Think of Homer’s epic poems, they are rhythmic, repetitive code for a society with no hard drive. He used an adjective to describe everyone and everything (“wine-dark sea”) They were functional mnemonic anchors.

I do the same thing. It’s hard to remember someone’s name, but I always remember what their job is, what country (or state) they are from, or some physical characteristic (“red hair”). It helps remember this person, names are not enough. I need a descriptor.

Then came writing. As scholar Walter Ong detailed, literacy restructured thought itself. For the first time, people could build complex, precise arguments that didn't need to be easily memorable. The ability to dissect the world through abstract, systematic thought, and to disseminate those thoughts across space and time, made our current world possible. Major religions with holy books. Systemized forms of science, universal ethics, centralized government, all are products of writing.

But this epoch was a historical anomaly, a brief window between the invention of the alphabet and the rise of electronic media. That window is now closing. We can see how oral culture rewards certain traits that makes people in literary culture hate it.

Why Do Academics Fail at Social Media?

Academics don’t do well on social media. But they should, right? Look at their life, they spend all day studying subjects, they don’t have real jobs that suck the life out of them, they are literally paid to consume interesting information. But they don’t gain large followings.

And the ones that do, like Huberman or Jordan Peterson have very different personalities than the rest. More animated, more intense and wild.

They left behind pure academic communication (detached, peer-reviewed) and adopted oral culture tools (storytelling, simple models, provocative claims, a performative persona). The oral culture tools:

• Quick wit over careful analysis

• Memorable phrases over nuanced arguments

• Viral repetition over original thinking

• Personal experience over abstract principles

• Building an audience over convincing peers

• Conflict over consensus

• Provocative claims over hedged conclusions

This is why the influencer often dominates the credentialed professor.

The influencer intuitively understands performance, conflict, and the power of the relatable anecdote. They engage in the real-time, agonistic combat that defines oral tradition. The professor, trained to be measured and detached, brings a literary toolkit to an oral knife fight. The platforms punish literary thinking and reward oral performance.

To navigate this new world, whether to become famous online, sell a product, or to simply build an immunity to it, you must first recognize what the rules truly are.

We are no longer speaking to a society of readers. We are performing for a global, digital tribe.

In This Newsletter

1) Study Oral Culture: Lets break down Walter Ong's 9 characteristics of oral culture, the same patterns that dictate what goes viral today and how to navigate a world that has reverted to these primal rules.

2) The New Characteristics: I have noticed 3 new characteristics that I want to add to the literature of Oral Culture. Something Walter Ong did not discuss. Which is a very popular pattern on social media.

3) Donald Trump (and Mamdani): Trump is a perfect adaptation. His communication style, which seems bizarre and illogical to a literate mindset, is perfectly optimized for the new oral public square. This is the playbook for the future of politics.

The Characteristics of Oral Culture

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