AI Erodes a Legacy of Reading

Philip Su

Jun 26, 2026

Everybody’s got a difference sense for what things are acceptable fast.

About a decade ago, a friend of mine said he started watching TV shows at 2x. This seemed to me ridiculous at the time, and if I’m honest, continues to go against the spirit of enjoying television. I watch many videos online at 2-3x, but those videos are mostly informational and have little meaningful emotional content. I still have a hard time imagining enjoying a TV drama at 2x, though.

Then again, I listen to podcasts at 3.7x. It’s taken me around 15 years to get up to that speed, starting from 1.25x and slowly ratcheting up through the years. My habits here are a huge part of why Superphonic: a) is the only player that goes up to 5x, and b) allows 0.1x increments because that’s what you need to smoothly ratchet your listening speed. When I first started listening at 2x and beyond, jokes weren’t funny because the timing was off. Nowadays, I laugh at jokes even at 3.7x. The mind is malleable.

Years ago I started flipping to Page 3 of online recipes because SEO incentivized recipe authors to insert multipage preambles about how this particular lasagne was something their paternal grandmother used to cook for sick members of the extended family shortly after the war using only what scrap foods were available at the time. SEO is why no recipe online ever starts on the first page.

One in four American adults don’t read even part of any book in an entire year. As reading online becomes increasingly popular, so has the skimming of articles — the visual equivalent of watching TV at 2x.

The death of word-for-word long form reading is a travesty.

It amuses me that AI inserted Sapiens unbeckoned in the book pile.

Deluge-Induced Collapse of Reading

Traditional barriers to publication were also served as a form of selection bias pressure towards higher quality. Back when printing presses were rare, you had to decide very carefully what to print. When the self-publishing of books used to be expensive, literary agents and publishers acted as helpful quality filters when deciding what to read.

Nowadays anyone can publish a Substack, including yours truly. Amazon’s CreateSpace allows anyone to upload a PDF (for free!) to sell both Kindle and print forms of their book. When the cost of something goes to zero, you can bet you’ll get a lot more of it.

We are being veritably inundated by words. This is causing us to skim everything, looking for unexpected words and pausing occasionally to consume a whole sentence or perchance even an entire paragraph.

The long-form essay is dead.

There’s loss of trust around authorship. As AI is increasingly used by even well-known writers, I’m less and less convinced each word was specifically intended by the author. An author spending less time on writing makes me want to spend less time on reading.

Content queues have become infinite. I used to save stuff to my Watch Later list on YouTube and my Save for Later list on Facebook. But after a few years, I’ve come to realize they’re basically guilt-free trash cans, not actually repositories, because I’ve rarely ever consumed content once I mark it for “later.” This is mostly because the amount of new content streaming at our faces each day is already so overwhelming that it’s hard to imagine setting aside even more time in order to catch up on past items.

Summarizers will be needed just to survive the flood. As our content worlds get flooded with ever more AI-generated and AI-augmented content, we’ll inevitably need summarizers just to say acceptably on top of our reading lists.

I now find myself skimming articles these days, even ones written by friends, because I’m not sure how much is AI generated. (By the way, this publication is 100% human generated — not just generated, but typed instead of dictated because I find the sentences come out very differently when I type them instead of dictating them. Using AI on any Molochinations article would defeat the primary point of this publication, which is that I enjoy the act and art of writing itself.)

Musicians are intentional about the whole of their work. For most of recorded audio history, albums were meant to be listened to as a whole. Artists would agonize over whether a particular song belonged on a specific album because they wanted the whole work to mean something. Listeners respected this intention and listened to albums cover-to-cover. It took much effort to skip individual tracks on records and cassettes, which further led to the standard practice of viewing albums holistically. CDs made skipping easier, and then streaming completely demolished the idea of albums as unitary pieces of art. These days, it’s all about individual tracks.

Relatedly, I’ve never believed in abridged versions of novels. With perhaps the exception of most translators relegating Hugo’s 60-page treatise on the Paris sewer system, with nary a mention of a single character from Les Miserables, to an appendix. When David Foster Wallace was asked by an audience member to cut more out of Infinite Jest, his 1,079-page tour de force, he replied that he’d not cut a single word. As with musicians, meticulous authors intend for every iota in the work to be there.

We now skim and skip. We retweet and restack selective quotes the way private equity firms break up entire companies to sell individual parts. Don’t get me wrong — there’s great value in amplifying a good article by advertising one of its gems. But these days, far more people just gorge on gems and hardly ever read an entire piece.

Fireside True Story™ Time: I’ve reread Lord of the Rings three times, and even Silmarillion twice, so I obviously think they’re great books. But even I’d have to admit they both could benefit from serious editing, especially once Elven poems start veering into handfuls of pages.

Nearly everyone understandably puts down Fellowship of the Ring as Tom Bombadil launches into Yet Another Interminable Tune. But I had a friend who once stopped reading the series when Gandalf, his favorite character, was knocked into the abyss by the Balrog, doomed to seemingly assured death. It took years for friends to finally convince him to finish the series — an especially difficult challenge if you also don’t want to give spoilers.

In Defense of Mindful Reading

I’ll here make a defense of word-for-word reading much the same way some espouse slow food.

Long-form reading is a different type of thinking. Sustained attention to one topic feels qualitatively unlike running your mental life as a slideshow of snippets. It’s the difference between experiencing deep flow versus being mesmerized at a kaleidoscope of disjointed sights and sounds. This is why meditation is both harder and better in the modern era than it’s ever been — because our lives have so little sustained attention time these days, unlike when your 10-hour day was basically driving oxen to furrow a field.

Reading is not just extracting information like a doctor reading a medical chart. It’s a pleasurable way to spend your time, the way children dwell in rich worlds of imagination. Long-form reading, perhaps even once in a while putting down the book or article to contemplate a profound sentence, is the only true way to change your mind.

You can read all you want that “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” There’s no way you’ll be convinced. You need to read a long-form essay about how that manifested in one person’s life in order to truly buy into it.

Some arguments — many arguments — cannot be properly mounted, much less concluded, in 120 characters. What you get in snippets are clapbacks and witticisms, equivalent to stuffing your mind with junk food all day. And, as with food, each piece of junk feels much better individually, releasing all the right neurotransmitters, while at the same time it’s sustained healthy eating which leads to more enduring life satisfaction.

The reason I hand-type every single word in this publication is because the point of my writing is not to convey information or tidbits to readers — it’s to enjoy a weekly act of creation where I try to make sense of this complex, uncertain, and often confusing world.

Find a long-form article to read this week in its entirety without skipping paragraphs once their first few words don’t sound new. If you find the right things to read and follow, I believe you’ll experience a deeper sort of enjoyment that our modern world is increasingly making extinct.