In less than a couple months, I had kicked Twitter and consumed all six books. That began a rediscovery of reading actual books for me, and it changed my life.

Personally, I feel mentally stronger and healthier than at any other point in my life. I am more connected to my family, and I have the ability to concentrate in deep work for longer, more sustainable periods.

I attribute all of this to my rediscovery and my artistic pursuit of the skill... of reading.

And as AI looms mighty, likely promising to make us stupid, I believe that reading is and has been one of history's most radical acts of resistance.

Let's first understand what humanity has gained, and what we stand to lose.

In 1820, only one in ten people in the world could read and write. By 1500, adult male literacy rates in urban Europe were about 30%, while rural areas saw rates as low as 5%. Women's literacy was significantly lower.

This wasn't an educational gap, it was a power gap. For centuries, literacy was the privilege of a small elite, a tool of control that kept knowledge, law, religion, and political thought locked away from the masses. When only priests could read scripture, only nobles could access legal texts, and only the wealthy could engage with philosophical ideas, society remained hierarchical and fundamentally undemocratic.

The spread of literacy changed everything.

The printing press in 1440 began to democratize access to information. Rising education levels in Europe, particularly across Northwest Europe between 1600-1800, began to form modern democratic societies. Widespread literacy became an age of enlightenment. This was the foundation of individual autonomy, democratic participation, and human rights. Without it, there would be no Peter Paul Rubens, no John Locke or David Hume, and frankly, no United States of America.

By 1840 in England, two-thirds of men and about half of women were literate. By 1900, these figures reached nearly 98% for both genders. This was social revolution. As more people could read, they could access ideas independently. They could form their own opinions.

They could resist authoritarianism.

The expansion of literacy in the United States helped reduce inequalities, with the race gap eventually closing around 1980, leading to near-universal literacy and unprecedented social mobility.

Every leap forward in literacy rates has had a direct correlation with the expansions of democratic participation and civil rights.

This is a crisis.

After centuries of hard-won progress toward universal literacy, we are witnessing a reversal. In 2023, 28% of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy. That's up from 19% in 2017. That means 54% of Americans (over 130 million people) read below a 6th-grade level.

High school reading scores have dropped to their lowest level in more than 20 years.

Thirty-two percent of high school seniors scored below "basic," unable to find details in a text to help them understand its meaning. The proportion of Americans reading for pleasure has declined by 40% over the last 20 years, dropping from 28% in 2004 to just 16% in 2023.

Professors report that students arrive at college unprepared to read entire books, having been assigned only "Dorito Bags" of excerpts, poetry, or news articles in high school. We're producing graduates who can not just sit and read a book! They lack "reading stamina."

This isn't merely an educational crisis.

It's a democratic emergency.

Yes, because of AI, I consume massive amounts of information digitally. But for the practice of the art, I sit with a printed book and underline with a sharpie S-Gel. Now that I've done this for a decade, I've worked my way up to tackle harder books, digging deeper into what I'm pursuing.

There is a surface level to some books, what economist Paul Mason calls "airport books," the TED talk intellectual equivalent of candy. But underneath these books are ideas with deep-rooted foundations within society and human thought. These airport books are only the beginning of the journey.

If you're interested in storytelling and filmmaking, you can read candy-covered books on how to write a script, but the better path is to go deeper into the myths themselves. Dig from those surface-level books into Joseph Campbell via Bill Moyers, Christopher Vogler, or Robert McKee's "Story," and then further by discovering Jung's work on myths, or the roots of these myths in primary sources. Struggle with the religious connections, the archetypes of characters, the rise and fall of structure.

Similarly, you can start surface level with investing or finance, but you can't go deep into economics until you've wrestled with Hayek, Schumpeter, Ricardo and Marx, all the way back to Adam Smith. Whether or not you believe in radical ideas or find yourself on one side or the other, you need to wrestle with thoughts, and the only way to do that is through the printed word.

This is what resistance looks like:

the deliberate cultivation of deep literacy in an age of shallow consumption.

To fight the decline of human minds, we must pursue reading like an art. Reading is a skill in itself.

Learn to read every sentence, to understand the ideas behind them. Write to support your reading. Draw to support your reading. Consume ideas and pursue them at the deepest level possible, because this is how we stop ourselves from control.

This is how we keep AI from making us cognitively dependent. This is how we stop ourselves from falling into authoritarianism. Read and understand ideas, by grabbing a book and consuming it cover to cover, and by processing and distilling the information within.

We must create a defensive mechanism so our thinking remains our own.

I know this is difficult, so to begin, start anywhere.

Read a science fiction or fantasy novel that excites you. Read Twilight for all I care. My kids consume massive amounts of Dog Man books, and that's great too. It's the time alone with pages and printed words that allows you to consume ideas, process them, and distill them into something deeper. Find a quiet time, and connect with the person behind the pages.

Find people in history you care about. Find ideas you need to understand. Find reasons to show off during cocktail parties, if that motivates you. Dig deeper and pursue reading as if it were an art itself. Make it a source of pride, make it a point of principle, and make it a priority.

We are falling over a waterfall, and I don't like what's on the other side.

For the first time in centuries, we're witnessing a reversal of one of humanity's greatest achievements. All of the progress we made as humans toward literacy, democracy, and human rights is being reversed.

We must fight. The resistance is reading.

It always has been. From the moment the first person outside the priestly class learned to decipher text, from the first woman who demanded education, from the first enslaved person who risked everything to learn letters. Learning to read has been an act of liberation.

For God's sake, get off of Tik Tok, stop doom scrolling, and start thinking. All the ideas already exist, you just need to do the work to find them. The books are waiting.

The resistance needs you.

Thanks for reading. I do this every week. If you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. We'll see you next time.

Nye Warburton is an educator and reader from Savannah, GA. This essay was first written with human labor, and then augmented with a localized generative workflow using Obisidian, Ollama and Llama 4. Research done with the assistance of Claude Sonnet 4.

For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

• Global Literacy Rates (1820): Only 12% of people globally could read and write.

  • Source: Our World in Data / World Bank.

  • Link: Literacy - Our World in Data

• European Urban Literacy (c. 1500): Adult male literacy rates in urban Europe were approximately 30%, with rural rates as low as 5%.

  • Source: Estimates from academic historians.

  • Link: Adult Literacy, 1500 -1800 | Download Table - ResearchGate

• English Literacy (1840): Literacy rates were approximately 67% for men and 51% for women, as measured by signing marriage registers.

  • Source: The Registrar General's annual reports.

  • Link: View of A Historiographical Survey of Literacy in Britain between 1780 and 1830

• US Literacy Race Gap (c. 1980): The illiteracy gap between White and Black adults became approximately equal in 1979.

  • Source: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and historical analyses.

  • Link: Literacy in the United States - Wikipedia

• The Vision of Drucker, August 30, 2025

• Yes, start a company... , May 18, 2025

• Reframing Crisis as Opportunity, April 13, 2025

The Resistance is Reading

Literacy in an Age of Shallow Consumption