This is written for someone with a higher reading level than me. I skimmed the first few paragraphs and have no idea what it is about beyond the title.
One way to approach this work is to understand the genre of the work you are reading! We can determine genre in a few ways, but in this case, we see that the publication is the New Yorker, which tells us to expect magazine-style writing, specifically longer form feature pieces.
Another important clue is that this is published in the New Yorker's "Books" section, suggesting that this is a book review. And, if you know much about the New Yorker's book reviews, they often include things such as history of the field the book addresses, compares the book to other related books, and what the book's thesis might imply about our world today.
This longer form book review can introduce important context and enrich your understanding of the world! I encourage you to keep an open mind and continue to read pieces that are outside of your usual genre.
It meanders around the history of tales involving selling one's soul for worldly power or gratification, then in the last sentence says that's what smartphones are, because we trade privacy and identity for convenience.
I don't mean this offensively, but if this is beyond your reading level and you went to college, your college did not do a good job. The vocabulary and structure is nothing out of the ordinary for college level reading.
That said, like some college level reading, it definitely meanders a bit, is a little self-important and feels padded with unnecessary filler, and is just only somewhat but ultimately not deeply interesting unless you are already pretty interested in how tales of the devil featured in medieval Europe. It's ok. I didn't finish it. If you misspoke and meant you didn't feel like reading it, but certainly could have comprehended it, then never mind I guess
But again, this isn't personal-- but if you are a successful educated software engineer who genuinely finds this beyond your reading level, your reading level is low for your station in life. It will limit your rise. Take it as an insult if you like though I don't mean it that way or else a wake up call.
The reason I dare stick my fingers into this fire and possibly offend you is, there is a trend of "educated" people who know science but completely skipped humanities, and thus have huge blind spots. My real audience for this comment is other people who will be encouraged to value the ability to read obtuse things and write clearly, to understand history and literature. And if you are picking a college for your kids, check out the readings for some classes. If they are not expected to easily be able to read something at this level, then it's a waste of money unless it's very cheap.
You must be old. Nowadays even Harvard students aren't expected to be able to read anything complicated. From coincidentally, another New Yorker link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the... -- "The last time I taught 'The Scarlet Letter,' I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb," she said. "Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago."
That is terrifying. If the elite of the elite can't interact with historical works, how can we trust them to make informed decisions about the present? I really don't want foreign policy on India set by Harvard grads who have never read Ghandi, and I don't want domestic policy set by people who haven't read the Scarlet Letter.
The nineteenth century, hell. I have to limit the grammatical complexity I use here, or expect to be fussed at by people asking for summarization.
Or, lately, pasting into ChatGPT, I suppose. There's a thought: I wonder if I could develop a style that's consistent with the rules of English grammar and reads naturally to the fluent, but is also too complex for LLMs to reliably summarize. It'd be a pure gimmick, of course, but it still might be fun to play around with...
Yes; alas, "fluent" is mu (nothingness). Barriers, barriers are. One may permit it in art, but communication thwarted brings pain. (This has absolutely nothing to do with a squirrel.)
Granted. But are we engineers or aren't we? If we won't develop the capacity to reckon with complex thoughts, then what can we even claim to offer over a coding model?
(You also suggest my use of "fluent" begs the wrong question. How so? Not every thought is trivial of expression, or we'd need no words but the commonest ten hundred.)
Science is not obscurantism. Of their purpose, these tools are early (we hope). Of their ilk, these tools are late, almost unsurpassable, and unenviable.
Ah. So that's why so many people think chatgpt is such a boon for drafting trivial things that a competent writer could do almost as fast, but with more control. They really can't do it.
The deskilling continues. "What can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years putting heads on pins?"
PS: I am not that old. I was in the college class '11 at an average small liberal arts college with an over 60% acceptance rate. I was not exceptional. I think the deskilling has accelerated very greatly and very recently.
The story by E.M. Forster is actually "The Machine Stops". The dystopia that came to mind for me was Harrison Bergeron, only instead of a human Handicapper General enforcing an equality of sub-mediocrity, it will be the masses and the tools they were bequeathed by the FAANGs. Having also been at uni in '11, I agree - GenZ and below are unnerving to observe.
Not just Gen Z. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade reading level[1][2][3]. The younger generations might skew the results, I haven't dug deep into the links.
I wonder what impact it will have on America's ability to operate over the next few decades. Will a lack of intelligent communicators find themselves unable to coordinate complex business? Even the simplest of enterprises at scale are quite complex.
I expect the end game if it continues is something like Elysium where we're going to bifurcate into a small, literate, educated class, whose parents were able to send them to private schools or overseas to be educated, and who will run the show, and a large underclass who end up as fodder for the corporate machine and/or the war machine. Today, we're in a competitive race to make enough to ensure our great-great-great-grandchildren end up in the first group and not the second.
NB- this is in reply to an earlier version of my comment, which I edited out purely for brevity, but now guiltily am restoring here-- where I worried we're marching towards a dystopia like the ones imagined in many works like Idiocracy, Wall-E, or The Machine Stops (misremembering the title as The Machine Breaks Down or something)
You make a very good point. I am starting to hear things along the lines of "But it's normal that some people learn better from videos" and "Why are you gatekeeping this knowledge" and even here you increasingly see references to videos that are much lower detail but higher time commitment summaries of writing that has much more detail available yet could be consumed, skimmed, etc more quickly than sitting through a video that your eyes have no ability to skip around, rushing past the irrelevant and dwelling on the relevant, without ever having to click a button.
They already invented telepathic interfaces -- books.
I was really confused when I posted my comment and didn't see any mention of the titles I saw in the original.
A succinct encapsulation of the problem is that the total "signal" of civilization is now being eclipsed exponentially, in all sorts of ways, by "noise". Some people say we're heading towards singularity, and others towards collapse; either way I'm confident we'll live to see some sort of great Reckoning, because I don't see how the generations after Millennial can sustain the current setup and weight of civilization.
"Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison."
Scarlet Letter was important among the limited works that could afford to be published. It touches on important idea. But it's stilted language of a different society isn't better than modern language. Just as we don't consider Nathaniel Hawthorne stupid because he wouldn't easily understand a modern sentence like "An open source platform for building a writing space on the web."
And just 19 years later, Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad, which I remember loving. I haven't looked at either in decades, but I'd bet that I'd still find The Scarlett Letter to be ponderous and boring and The Innocents Abroad to be an absolute delight in its subject matter, storytelling, and playful use of language.
Why do people like yourself have such an allergy to becoming familiar with the past? It is as small-minded to be parochially bound to your own time as it is to your own country. Think of it as analogous to learning Spanish or Chinese so you can understand people from those places.
Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same language, only a very, very, very slightly different dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a slightly different distribution of which are popular. Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find the rest easy.
When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are admitting you've never tried for very long.
Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker would understand it), as well as the fact that the average urbanite today does not know the names of many common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)
Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn from it and make good choices in the future.
Almost any company now. If you're not growing faster or making more profit than you were last quarter, forever, the entire world will crash, apparently.
It's not that well-written. It's mostly a literary review with a paragraph about silicon shoe-horned in at the end to try to bring home some kind of thesis.
For what it's worth I absolutely loathe this writing style. Just look at this sentence:
> No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and buttressed, marching efficiently through our merely material world, grim-faced assassins of mystery.
You could say instead: "Since the Enlightenment people believe in magic less."
Come on, "buffered and buttressed", really?!
This article is one close to my heart but the pompous writing put me off.
Ah, yes, an article about deals with the devil should be straight to the point for the effortless efficiency that only the best bureaucracy can provide. As I tell my team, "bottom line up front, folks!". I hope I have understood you here so please understand me - that is meant with irony but not sarcasm. Perhaps there is a reason for the purple prose, if we only could find it.
This happens every time an article from the new yorker is posted. Now we will mostly talk about this, about the merits or pointlessness of literary nonfiction and literature in general. Maybe recommend each other some brandon sanderson or malcolm gladwell and all have a great time.
