James Marriott calls my critique “frustratingly naive.” Fair enough. Let me try to be less naive and more precise about where we actually disagree. First, Marriott reaches for condescension where argument would do. I won’t return the favour. One of us should keep the focus on what actually matters.

The concession. Marriott is correct that I overstated his position on literacy and democracy. He explicitly acknowledged multiple causation; I implied he hadn’t. That was uncharitable reading on my part. He’s also correct that my anecdote about teenagers doing sophisticated multi-modal research doesn’t counter aggregate data. PISA scores have shown what the OECD called an “unprecedented drop” maths falling 15 points, reading falling 10 points across developed nations. Reading for pleasure in America has declined by 40 percent over the past two decades, according to research published in iScience this year from 28 percent of adults in 2004 to just 16 percent in 2023. The cognitive impacts of smartphone adoption are documented and concerning. Anecdotes about exceptional teenagers don’t refute population-level trends. Point taken.

So where’s the real disagreement?

Marriott and I agree on the symptoms. We disagree about the disease.

His diagnosis: screen culture inherently biases toward poorer quality thought. As he puts it, “the general bias of a screen culture is towards poorer quality thought and information.” The medium itself degrades cognition.

My diagnosis: we’ve built extractive attention economies that exploit cognitive vulnerabilities for profit, and we’re blaming the victims of this extraction for their own exploitation. The problem isn’t screens; it’s what we’ve designed screens to do.

These diagnoses are consistent with identical data but lead to radically different interventions. If Marriott is right, we need cultural revival, a return to books, a restoration of print-based habits of mind. If I’m right, we need design activism and regulatory intervention against the specific mechanisms that capture and degrade attention.

Here’s why I think the design diagnosis is more accurate: the cognitive operations Marriott valorises -sustained attention, logical development, revision, the capacity to build complex arguments, aren’t properties of paper. They’re properties of writing as a practice. Kant didn’t need bound paper specifically to write the Critique of Pure Reason; he needed a medium that allowed him to externalise thought, revise it, and develop it over time. Digital documents do this as effectively as paper. I’m doing it now.

The problem is that most digital engagement isn’t writing-based. Its consumption of algorithmically curated feeds optimised by sophisticated behavioural engineering to maximise time-on-platform. Research published in peer-reviewed journals demonstrates that social media platforms exploit variable reward schedules, the same psychological mechanisms that make gambling addictive. Users don’t know what they’ll find when they open an app; they might see hundreds of likes or nothing at all (this place does that). This unpredictability produces more dopamine than predictable rewards, keeping people checking habitually.

Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, has tracked attention spans on screens for two decades. In 2004, people averaged two and a half minutes on any screen before switching. By 2016, that had fallen to 47 seconds. But this isn’t because screens are inherently attention-destroying; it’s because the dominant platforms have been deliberately engineered to fragment attention in service of advertising revenue. This is a design choice made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. It is not an inherent property of the medium.

Popular print content was often shallow too. In the 1860s and 1870s, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold per week in Britain — sensational stories of crime, horror, and adventure that critics condemned as morally corrupting and intellectually shallow. By the 1850s, there were up to a hundred publishers of this penny fiction….continued below in a reply