What is a book in the age of AI?

A book is a long, mostly linear text string secured under a signature. As libraries get gutted, teachers complain of students not doing assigned readings, and AI use consumes universities with anxiety, a legitimate question for any student is: why go through the arduous, time-consuming labor of reading with unpredictable outcomes if the task time of information extraction can be radically compressed with AI?

AI delinearizes reading. It allows you a thousand possible ways into a text, while dissolving the singularity of the book into a mass of facts, word-sequences, patterns, etc. In the end, the very identity of the book—as a signatured, indexed, authoritative text-string—loses its mooring.

The humanist would object that reading is an innately valuable colorful experience that is as much about formation and transformation as it is about information. Reading can be a profound, memorable, self-reshaping journey, a meaning-laden chunk of time spent with a text, leaving permanent imprints on the subject—rather than a process of optimally efficient extraction of data points.

The grammatologist would demur: no book ever was read in a linear manner. Books were always caught in intertextuality constituted by the archive of other books, dictionaries, laws, etc. A reader would always bring their reading history to bear on how they approach a book, and their itinerary through the text is necessarily contingent.

That however does not trivialize the hypothesized shift in reading practices. New technology reveals what was always there, but it also reveals the gradient and ruptures in that series.

Reading was always more non-linear than we might imagine, but AI’s delinearization has a dehumanizing effect on reading as an institutionalized practice, which in turn will reshape how people relate to politics, identities, ideas, etc. If reading constituted the territory of the literate or inter-literate subject, the de-linearization deterritorializes the subject from the book and reterritorializes them on the cybernetic platform.

The shift pits a jubilant, anti-humanist global neo-liberalism against a hopeless cross-civilizational humanist tradition. Will universities fund you to spend years poring over old texts? Will archives of ‘folklore’ collected by nationalist projects over the 19th-20th century still have any takers, or be relegated for slow extinction?

The accelerated acid-dissolution of the linear text will further unground the subject. The metaphoric-paradigmatic sense of commitment of the subject will be further flexibilized with the death of linear reading. As late capitalist, techno-feudal platforms become constitutive territory for the subject, it becomes more metastable than ever without individuating in the traditional political, aesthetic or erotic territory.