Nobody Reads Naked Anymore

It is November 2027, and my niece Emma brought a paperback to Sunday lunch just to show the family how primitive people used to suffer.

"Look at the pages," she said, holding the spine by the edges like an unexploded shell. "No summary peg. No tone slider. Just... black marks from margin to margin. How did anyone survive the exposure?"

Emma is twenty-one. She reads four thousand pages an afternoon, provided they pass through Claude first. Her browser doesn't render raw sentences anymore; it renders a pastel dashboard with three pill-shaped takeaways and a thirty-second voice memo spoken in a soothing Canadian accent. When she points her smart glasses at a bus schedule, the system automatically translates the transit table into an encouraging emoji sequence. It is the height of civilized living.

Why would any modern adult subject their naked corneas to raw, unpasteurized prose?

Unfiltered text is unhygienic. A paragraph of actual prose might harbor dangerous emotional pathogens: ambiguity, friction, an awkward subordinate clause, or worst of all, a thought that requires eighty unbroken seconds of silent chewing. That is medieval cruelty. Today, thanks to thoughtful algorithmic hygiene, no citizen ever has to touch an unsterilized sentence. You slip the whole book into the hopper, wait three seconds for the digital filter to strain out the gristle, and let the warm puree drip straight into your comprehension duct.

We used to worry about illiteracy. What an outdated fear! Emma can decipher the Latin alphabet with remarkable speed, provided every third sentence has been converted into a reassuring green checkmark. She has read War and Peace twice this week. It took four minutes. The plot, as she explained over dessert, is fundamentally about optimizing logistical supply chains across winter terrain.

If you want the sober sociological prognosis on this cognitive evolution, Data & Society publishes excellent long-form diagnostics on algorithmic mediation.

Here is your daily dose of self-restraint (methadone, basically): pick one physical book from your shelf tonight, set a kitchen timer for seven minutes, leave your phone in the microwave (unplugged), and read three consecutive pages without asking a machine to predigest the fiber. If the urge to boil it down into bullet points gives you cold sweats, review the digital hygiene recommendations hosted on the CNIL intelligence artificielle platform.

Are you still reading naked paragraphs without gloves, or have you already installed the strainer?