Writing × Digital Society

Colvile cites Andrea Lunsford's finding that student essays have grown longer and more complex in thought over the past century — a literacy revolution, not a collapse. Meanwhile, Zuboff describes a parallel explosion: every life rendered as "electronic text," from breakfast conversations to parking lot wheelies, all of it raw material for extraction. Here's the tension nobody frames cleanly. Writing used to be scarce enough that producing it *was* a form of power — Rifkin traces this back to copyright law making words into property, authorship separating the individual from the collective voice. Now everyone writes constantly, and writing has never been better by Lunsford's metrics, but the locus of power has shifted entirely from the *production* of text to the *reading* of it. The question Zuboff keeps asking — "Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?" — is really a question about who gets to *read* at scale. We achieved universal authorship just in time for it to stop mattering. What matters now is universal readership, and that belongs to the machines.