Poster for 'The slop-ification of literature' with James Marriott, Ed West,
and Kathleen Stock at the Unherd Club (London, 8 Dec 2025)
I.
Located along a 'beautiful side street in London's Westminster', the Unherd Club is a place where 'intelligent people can come together to talk freely
and without fear of retribution'.
In other words, it's a member's club based in one of the wealthiest parts of Town, with a cosy bar and a large library where they hold discussions and debates, lectures, and seminars, or interview well-known authors keen to promote a new book.
My friend cynically described it as:
A posh talking shop above a posh restaurant intended to attract the kind of conceited middle class individuals who, laughably, like to imagine themselves part of a persecuted minority for having dared to separate themselves from the semi-literate masses.
Perhaps that's a bit unfair - but it's not far wide of the mark (the clue is in the very name of the club).
II.
Despite my friend's less than favourable impression of the UnHerd Club, he invited me along on Monday to a talk entitled 'The slop-ification of literature', featuring three speakers:
(i) James Marriott, a Times columnist who writes on society, culture and ideas. Before joining the paper he worked in the rare book trade. He is also the author of a weekly newsletter published on Substack: Cultural Capital.
(ii) Ed West, an author, journalist and blogger, who was worked as the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald, and as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He frequently posts work on his Substack, amusingly called Wrong Side of History.
(iii) Kathleen Stock (OBE), is a British philosopher and writer, whose research interests include aesthetics, fiction, and sexual politics. Her trans critical views brought accusations of spreading harmful rhetoric and obliged her to resign from her post at Sussex University in October 2021. A contributing editor at UnHerd, her articles can be accessed by clicking here.
III.
Essentially, the argument put forward by all three of the above was that due to the rise of accessible AI and the total ubiquity of smartphones, we are now in a post-literate society and belong to a new dark age of endless scrolling.
This, they said, is a very bad thing; because whilst reading books elevates the human spirit, watching videos on social media results in brain rot. We should, therefore, read more and scroll less.
And, err, that was really about it ...
It's not that I don't essentially agree with them, but what the speakers didn't seem to fully appreciate is that people are not the passive victims of the tech giants and social media companies; that they willingly yield to the network in which they are integrated; that they love their 24/7 virtual lives and the gadgets that facilitate it such as smartphones and i-Pads.
And what the speakers call brain rot is what most people experience as happiness and they are grateful to YouTube and TikTok etc. for providing them with a world in which they can finally feel safe; a world which anticipates and addresses their needs.
Thus, rather than wanting to spend less time online, most people wish to immerse themselves ever further into the digital realm and become one with their digital selves (their avatars), in much the same way that Narcissus once desired to become one with his own reflection.
It is, ultimately, a kind of religious desire; a wishing to submit to something greater in order to find not freedom but fulfilment (or a kind of fatal satisfaction). People are exalted by belonging to the digital new order beyond feeling or reason; they may lose their minds and their hearts might perish within them, but it's what they want; to participate in a great and perfect network.
IV.
In sum: what the trio of speakers needed to do (but didn't) was place the discussion within a broader philosophical discussion on the question concerning technology; someone mentioned Mark Fisher at some point, but it was Heidegger - not Fisher - who needed referencing.
For Heidegger it is who recognised that the "threat to man does not come [...] from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology" [1], rather it's the essence of technology as a form of revealing that he terms enframing [Gestell] wherein the danger lies.
To speak about removing smartphones from classrooms or restricting access to social media for those under the age of sixteen is to entirely fail to understand the problem has to do with 2,500 years of Western metaphysics and the fall into idealism.
I would politely suggest, therefore, that Marriott, West, and Stock read less Jane Austen and more Heidegger. And more Baudrillard, too; for the latter is another author whose predictions about the world we now inhabit and his insights into digital culture have proved to be extremely prescient [2].
Notes
[1] Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994), p. 333.
See the two-part post 'O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology', published on TTA on 26 May 2016: click here to access part one or here for part two here.
[2] See the essay by Bran Nicol and Emmanuelle Fantin entitled 'How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today's AI 30 years before ChatGPT', in The Conversation (4 November, 2025): click here.
Fantin and Nicol are the authors of a biography of Baudrillard, published by Reaktion Books (2025), my thoughts on which are presently being published on TTA; click here to read part one of what will be a four-part post.
This post is for Thom B. and Nick Cave.
