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Colm Tóibín’s depiction of 1910s German literary culture in The Magician might as well be a portrayal of Martian puppetry, for how unfamiliar it is. It’s a novel about German writer and 1929 Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, whose Germany is unenviable in many respects but has a virtue that could be easy to admire today: writers mattered, including politically. Mann, in the novel, is approached on the street at one point by strangers whose eager interest suggests his work matters. They thank him— he was doing a service to the nation, writing the way he was, holding the opinions he did. What writer wouldn’t want that kind of acclaim?

If you’re the kind of person who reads lengthy essays in your email inbox, or the kind of terminal case who even pays for more of them (thank you, exalted subscribers), you might romanticize this too. I’ve seen a few arguments recently that America is transforming from a literate culture to an oral one, in the schema of Walter Ong; it is perhaps telling that while I read about this in text, the reason I was in a position to read about it at all is because the opiner-in-question has a notable podcast (Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal). What is short-form video doing to our politics? What are we becoming?

I don’t know that we’re losing as much as it might seem. Reading earlier this morning I caught myself envying Mann for a moment— in this specific moment in the book. But the 1910s essays that got him the reception I’m specifically referring to in the intro here were as far as I can tell low points in a stunning career; in Tóibín’s narration they feel like immature delusions rather than doomed convictions. Poor stupid Thomas was misled by his belief in a sacred Germany that came from the heart and the phonograph and the orchestra hall, a Germany that was felt, into endorsing the war that shattered the actually-existing Germany of human beings and communities, a Germany that was lived. The work that briefly resulted was well-received because it matched what state power and national culture wanted to hear. As far as I can tell as someone who is very much not a 20th-century Germanist, this work didn’t matter except as an excuse to justify what the empire was already doing, and failing at.

My heart is sick at the replacement of text with video, and I think it can make our political culture fundamentally less intellectually serious– but “serious” does not mean “good,” and “written” does not mean “serious.” Thomas Mann was a very serious writer, which didn’t keep him from ultimately silly defenses of a sad little empire of funny hats that killed millions of people directly and millions more later on by refusing to even die in a dignified way. John Wilkes’s defense of free speech, which played a not insignificant role in the development of free speech in America, was a defense among other things of a kind of porn-comedy poem. The “Golden Age of Magazines” didn’t exactly lead to elevated public discourse: the 1990s New Republic, as influential a publication as there has ever been, resurrected and mainstreamed scientific racism, and one of its star writers was a complete fabulist. 

I am somewhat skeptical that we have lost some kind of thoughtful deliberation because I am skeptical we ever had it. We may have lost something else though. Here I want to use an AI concept as a metaphor: the “context window” of AI/LLMs. The context window is the amount of information that an AI can be processing at once. If you ask it to parse an entire novel, current models can do this in chunks but never all at once. It’s often compared to short-term memory, but I don’t like the analogy– while I’m not altogether uncomfortable with human-machine analogies in certain areas, I like the context window analogy for media precisely because of how it isn’t like the human mind. 

We can think many things at once, whereas the entire attention of any LLM is singular. It is fixed– less like thought than like writing or speech, where I say exactly one word at a time and in order.  All communication compresses, winnows, weeds. I mentioned Walter Ong once here, and if you followed the earlier link you’ll find more compression of his work rather than the original thing, and if you went to read his work you would find other concepts and events similarly compressed toward the purpose at hand. 

The amount of information contained within something influences not just how much we can say (that is obvious) but what kinds of things we are capable of saying. An LLM can summarize search results very competently right now– they don’t exceed its context window. But in one go LLMs struggle to engage a book. You cannot use AI to generate a competent monograph that has a consistent throughline, because (among many other more important reasons) this is not something that one can do in chunks, and currently a book well exceeds the context window of any LLM.

Short form video and blogposts likewise cannot handle certain kinds of arguments. I have battled editors over chapter length and will do it again: there are certain stories I simply cannot tell you in two 9000 word chapters versus one 18000 word chapters. My newsletter is longer than is wise or practical: I would probably get better engagement if I kept things to 1000 or 1500 words (looks like I have today!) and I would certainly save time. With a good editor I could cut any of these numbers down I’m sure. But that stretches limits, it doesn’t abolish them. 

For most of my life I’ve been hearing complaints about the 24-hour news cycle. Newspapers and broadcast news had a daily rhythm, while cable news and now social media are constant noise. There are many, many reasons for the media changes of the late 20th and early 21st century– monopoly, decreased ad revenue, economic inequality, competition with other media– but this change in rhythm was one of them. 

I think it’s also a change in attention. Donald Trump is a master of the short form. Context windows present no problem for him– his speech and I presume even thought fits well within 140 characters or 30 second soundbites. I’m nostalgic for FDR’s fireside chats or, hell, even a good 19th-century parliamentary speech. Keynes’s famous line “anything we can actually do we can afford,” is an excellent encapsulation of his argument in a 1942 radio address… once you’ve read it or had it explained to you. 

Unfortunately “we don’t have money for this” is a more easily compressed idea than Keynesian thought; more generally, I worry short forms always favor the powerful. “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country” is a common phrase you hear on the right regarding immigration. Nearly every rejoinder I have is far longer: well actually the nation-state as you’re thinking of it didn’t really arise until the 19th century and border controls have been limited for all of human history and – and and and– I don’t know how you convey that to the public. 

But I refuse to believe you can’t. Pessimism and conviction do not mix well: if you believe you and a few fellows know the right way forward for the world but the benighted masses will never allow it, your convictions are an affectation and not a philosophy. So bemoaning the shortening of political discourse is not and cannot be an excuse to disengage. I would love for more people to read left-wing trade nonfiction and lengthy blog posts, or listen to 2 hour podcasts or video essays, rather than get their news from TikTok. In the meantime I’m going to need to rely on people who do work in those mediums and at those lengths to convey and yes compress discourse happening elsewhere.