The voices have reached a fever pitch. They’re no longer just faint static or the hum of a radio left playing in the background; they’ve grown from that to indistinguishable murmurings fading in an out of earshot to the constant dull roar which now occupies the foreground of every facet of life.
Whispered and shouted—and sometimes screamed—words are incessant and ubiquitous in modernity. We hear them at work, at home, at the gas station pump. They are broadcast from our cars and from our pockets, especially from our pockets. We are inundated with words—spoken, written, recorded, videotaped, uploaded, downloaded, and shared. Mostly tedious and banal, colorless and tiresome, but sometimes grating and shrill, the modern age is inundated with interminable words, words, words.
It should be good for humanity that the West is now (mostly) literate; but, unfortunately, we have gone the way of all democracies and joined the race to the bottom.
After the printing press revolution, we garnered the courage to write, to say what we wanted without negotiating with the gatekeepers. We took Sapere Aude! to heart, removed the limitations on the “public use of one’s reason” (for every man was now a scholar), and we put the word out.
Having discovered the unlimited power of the pen, we desired more freedom to spill our ink. Then came along a new Prometheus and gave us the internet, our ultimate chance to overthrow the clichéd literary guardians. We dropped them like a bad habit, sent them packing like a tired trope, told them to hit the bricks, and started pumping out Mcliterature like chicken nuggets in a drive-through on a Saturday afternoon.
Following our enthusiasm for the digital revolution, we quickly got on with the AI revolution akin to Camden Market stoners silk-screening Che Guevara T-shirts. And for all our progress, what did we achieve? We now abide a monotonous cacophony of droning sophists who have pitched their soiled tents along the sidewalks and medians of every literary arterial, video side street, and journalistic back alley from Boston to Tijuana.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us, then, when the next generation of “content creators” and “influencers” are shamelessly generating sputa for public consumption and no one can tell it apart from their tap water.
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