No different than other forms of communication and experience, writing has forever changed. Probably for the first time in its history, it has become secondary to all other forms of expression. Even the advent of cinema, arguably the most influential art form of capitalism as well as history, was unable to dethrone writing as a standalone art form back in the day. Adapting well to the new mechanisms of distribution and domination, writing has exploded in its genres and left no stone unturned in an attempt to endure.

Writing cannot be discussed independently of its medium of consumption, reading. It is reading that has caused the act of writing to be completely sidelined in the intellectual experience, not the other way around.

Longform texts, which would have been considered just “texts” a decade ago, exist only for a Deep Research or Extended Thinking to quote from, yet the way this research is consumed is simply a subsequent query asking for a tl;dr and a bunch of bullet points. No text-based answer is short or digestible enough, something which was a trend until the great neuron degradation of 2020-21, and became a fact afterwards. Now, there is no mental faculty that is being satisfied from reading, because reading a page requires infinitely more effort than a finger swipe. Therefore, at least five separate, independent short texts must be present on the screen, stacked on top of each other (what we fittingly call a “feed”), each vying for attention; else the effort is considered a complete waste of time and very inefficient for consumption, one of the new homonyms for education.

Whereas form and content were ever in a play with one another until now, form has become subservient to content. The purpose of writing today, as with other types of content, is to help the consumer digest that particular media as efficiently as possible, as demonstrated by likes, views and engagement rates. In such an environment, writing can only shine in SEO, LLM training and dopamine-induction methods, where adding auto-captions to a video is expected to increase the engagement rate. When a longform text is written, it is doomed from the onset. Not because the writer has “refused to sell out”, but because its audience lacks the sensory strata to acknowledge its existence as authentic as the mass media content they are usually exposed to. When everything is short and bite-sized, a wall of text must be an anomaly, an experiment, an algorithmic error that taints the feed. Not discounting the truth-elements that are still inevitably communicated by posts, reels and summaries, any truths that emerge out of the tension between form and content have completely disappeared.

Earlier, a grammar inconsistency could have acted as a metaphor, or a spelling error in an experimental play, nowadays they are an actual signal of not proofreading, or not letting the AI have a go at it. The AI, in turn, treats every little -isms as a linguistic error: “Here is a better way to put it…” The title of a text, for example, isn’t merely the measure of how well of an algorithmic “hook” it is. It is also a window into the writer’s personality as well as their epistemic prowess. The possibility of a bad title, and whatever truth-elements we acquire regarding the author or the text itself, are stripped of their content and sidelined. Whereas Grammarly or Thesaurus had been a requirement of academic writing, using AI is now inscribed in writing itself. The text was once the emergent medium of human struggle with language, and a locus of authentic expression, or the attempt at it, of the author’s mind. The authenticity at play now is that of statistical optimization. What we lose in this process is not just the idiosyncrasies that once revealed truth, but the very possibility that writing might resist, surprise, or genuinely communicate something that cannot be predicted or automated.

Whether this obituary is premature, or a vindication in becoming, is an open question. Until then, we exist in this liminal space, where the old forms of writing persist as artifacts of a disappearing literacy, while new forms emerge that we can barely recognize as descendants of the same human impulse to create meaning through language.