Literary Strokes Against Haste, Banality, and Technological Noise

“It’s the small portable books that one must fear most.” This was Voltaire’s fervent warning in a letter to his friend D’Alembert upon concluding the French Enlightenment’s grand political project, the Encyclopedia. For the French philosopher, this publishing enterprise fell victim to a fatal obsession with exhaustiveness. Today, as generative artificial intelligence comes of age, humanity faces an old dilemma anew: Should we codify all human knowledge to stave off the threat of a digital blackout that could hurl us back into the Stone Age, or should we embrace the idea of a clean slate as an opportunity for a better world?

As this conundrum remains unresolved, many turn to nonfiction genres to accumulate knowledge. In a world inundated with over-information and misinformation, we consume more ideas than ever through essays, documentaries, and narrative podcasts. According to some figures, nonfiction sales now account for 30% of the publishing market. Knowledge is in vogue. Partly, this stems from the discrediting of digital platforms for knowledge dissemination, such as social media or algorithm-driven content platforms. Books are far from dead. New bookstores are opening. Podcasts are flourishing. Documentaries are more prolific than ever. We want to know. Some of us do, at least.

And we especially crave knowledge in short, easily digestible formats—snackable, as they say in English. “We live in the era of short essays for hipster bookstore counters like ours,” remarked an employee of a well-known Madrid bookstore. Esteemed publishers like Debate, Anagrama, and Destino are nurturing collections of mini-essays with evident success. This preference for concise and accessible intelligence seems to vindicate Voltaire once again: “Never will 20 folio volumes spark a revolution.” Xavier Nueno echoes this sentiment in his book The Art of Light Knowledge: A Brief History of Information Overload (Siruela), a riveting and erudite journey through the violent tension between preserving knowledge and destroying books that runs through our culture. In examining the historical challenges of what we now call information management and storage, Nueno anticipates some of the dramatic issues posed by today’s technological revolution. “Every smartphone user faces challenges similar to those encountered by a 16th-century librarian,” he writes.

It is fascinating to see how, when faced with the advent of the printing press—the mother of all technological revolutions—its detractors perceived it as “a hellish machine flooding the world with books and devaluing them by multiplying them.” The parallels with the anxiety generated by ChatGPT’s limitless capacity for automated content production are unsettling. Against the Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment idealism of binding all human knowledge, opposing reactions emerged that birthed fundamental innovations of the modern world. Examples include the filing system as a portable information unit or “cut and paste” as a basic text-processing technique. Nueno, a Harvard Ph.D. and researcher at EPFL Lausanne, traces the incendiary historical process that produced a canon of portable, abbreviated, and mobile knowledge as “an ideal for circulating works.” “The art of light knowledge emerges with the promise of exorcising the ghost of exhaustiveness,” he reveals.

Taking up this thread, political consultant and communications expert Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí highlights the attributes and formats of this light knowledge in A Brief Praise of Brevity (Gedisa). “Brevity is not smallness; it is intensity. Brevity is not simplicity; it is complexity. Brevity is not ephemeral; it is memorable,” he states. In the digital age, with its inherent tendency to fragment knowledge and foster rapid, distracted content consumption, short formats thrive as vehicles for information. Gutiérrez-Rubí examines PechaKucha presentations (20 slides at 20 seconds each), the 18-minute limit of TED talks, Instagram reels capped at 90 seconds, and the astonishing communicative power of emojis.

“What gives brevity its meaning is not its length but its synthesis. That is its soul” the Catalan consultant asserts. In today’s context, he notes, interacting effectively with tools like ChatGPT and Copilot makes brevity a key quality for successful communication with machines. Once again, with the advent of disruptive technology, humanity must invent a new means of accessing information: prompts. These commands, which we now issue to ChatGPT with naive clumsiness, could herald either a new era of enlightened civilization or, conversely, the definitive enshittification of our digital lives.

Reasons for optimism are scarce. “Influencers, photo filters, likes, reality shows, transhumanism, selfies, plastic surgery… Modernity today is a narcissistic celebration, leaving those in silence grappling with the constant exaltation of the self,” laments Pedro Bravo in Silence! A Manifesto Against Noise, Restlessness, and Rush (Debate). This militant mini-essay in the EnDebate collection, directed by Miguel Aguilar, would surely earn Voltaire’s approval. As its title bluntly declares, Bravo’s essay warns starkly: “Noise, restlessness [call it anxiety], and haste make us more isolated while preventing us from enjoying solitude.”

Bravo advocates for a radical dismantling of the anxious digital overlay that obscures our lives, calling for time and space to be restored to silence and calm—a kind of liberation movement for the states that make us human. These might include states of concentration—what some call “flow states”—that turn us into creative and productive champions. At other times, the increasingly valued mental wandering might emerge, a state of fruitful musing rather than useless distraction, from which innovation and new ideas often spring. Studies cited by Bravo suggest we have between 4 and 40 thoughts per minute. “Our minds are constantly active. If we’re focused on a task, that powerful processor—the brain—concentrates on it. If not, it doesn’t matter; the mind keeps firing,” he explains, referring to the default mode network, described as “the brain’s autopilot” and “the background noise of the universe.”

Against this noise, these brief essays offer a valuable mental prophylaxis. A contemporary echo of Montaigne sequestered in his tower, Irish essayist Brian Dillon defines the genre as “a combination of precision and evasion.” In his dense meta-essay Essayism (Anagrama), published in 2023, Dillon describes it as “a form [of writing] that must instruct, seduce, and beguile in equal parts.” In a recent interview on the Hotel Jorge Juan podcast, Bravo explained that he approaches essays as “small inquiries stemming from a series of questions, which I see as a shared search with readers; for that reason, I leave answers open, fostering a healthy relationship with readers and the complexity of the world.”

In this rejection of exhaustiveness, these new champions of portable, light knowledge may find the secret to their success. Overwhelmed by an incomprehensible reality, these literary (or audiovisual) sparks rekindle our intellectual vitality and critical awareness. Voltaire already grasped this in his Philosophical Dictionary: “The most useful books are those that, half-written, must be completed by the readers.”

Published in Babelia, El País, December 21, 2024.

By Borja Bergareche.