With The Power Of AI, Information Can Pour Straight Through Your Skull And Onto The Ground Without Ever Slowing

Reading. What is it? Why does anyone do it? Can anyone at Axios do it? No. Maybe that is why they write like that.

When you read a book, the stuff in the book goes into your mind, and your mind assembles all of the stuff into imagery and thoughts and feelings, and alchemizes meaning from it. A person reasonably could consider this “what’s good about reading,” or “the point of reading,” or “buddy that’s actually just … what reading is,” but that all assumes that your reason for reading anything is that you want to learn something from it, even if it’s only at the level of, like, what ultimately happens to the Whos down in Whoville.

Before today I had taken for granted that this, the desire to put into one’s head something that wasn’t already in there, was the only reason anyone would want to read anything, ever. Even the reading people do in furtherance of the most dismal goals—even when somebody reads some miserable how-to-get-ahead-in-business book, or a sociopathic pickup-artist manual—they do because they hope to extract from the text something useful, which will reside in their brain long enough to be exploited. The compulsory reading students do for school, likewise: They hope to retain enough of this dry 19th-century novel about variability in the relative politeness of indistinguishable British persons to score a decent grade on the upcoming test. In all cases, the goal is best understood as putting something into your mind that wasn’t there before.