Today, under the absolute rule of the algorithm, video content is dominating human communication, turning human attention into a currency consumed second by second. In this relentless race toward images that constantly replace one another, we are forgetting two of civilization’s most fundamental acts: writing and reading. Through this forgetting, we are severing the invisible thread that binds us both to ourselves and to the world.

This dominance of superficial imagery does not simplify our understanding or solve our existential problems. On the contrary, it is crippling our ability to remain part of an organic mechanism of memory that has functioned for thousands of years.

Human beings have survived by leaving traces. We are the product of a continuity that began with symbolic drawings on the walls of dark caves, continued with the first scratches of thought on soft clay tablets, unfolded across ancient papyri, and found its permanence in the printed word.

When people abandon reading, they do not merely lose a habit; they lose the laboratory where critical thought and imagination are cultivated. The ready-made video, served up by the algorithm, feeds the brain with a product that has already been pre-chewed. It demands no intellectual effort and leaves no room for pause, contemplation, or doubt.

By forgetting how to write, we are losing the ability to structure our own inner chaos. Writing is the process through which thought takes shape, where a person confronts their own consciousness, and where the bridge of profound communication with others is built.

From antiquity until today, the passage from the cave to the written page was not simply a technological evolution, but an act of spiritual survival. Paper and the written word require time and attention—two elements that today’s algorithms are trying to eradicate through the culture of endless scrolling.

If we allow this millennia-old mechanism to die out, we risk becoming functionally illiterate inhabitants of a hyper-technological age:

We will have machines that think faster, but human beings who feel and reflect less.

Preserving our connection with books, with the written page, and with words that demand weight and consideration is not merely an act of romantic nostalgia. It is the highest act of resistance in the struggle to preserve our humanity.

If there is one metaphor that dissects our relationship with the algorithm with surgical precision, it is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The ancient philosopher imagined human beings chained inside a dark cavern, condemned to see only the shadows projected onto the wall before them, mistaking those shadows for the only reality that exists.

Today, that brilliant prophecy has become a digital reality. The smartphone screen is our modern cave. Plato’s shadows have been replaced by short-form videos—Reels and TikToks—manipulated, rapid, and superficial fragments of a prepackaged reality. The modern user, nailed to the glow of the blue screen, no longer has either the time or the will to turn their head toward the true light of knowledge. We are no longer looking at reality itself, but at a simulation, a copy without an original, an illusion projected by algorithmic code that keeps us imprisoned by our own free will.

Unlike watching a video, where the brain functions as a passive consumer, reading the written word is an act of neurobiological creation. When we read, the brain does not simply receive information; it activates what neuroscientists call the “reading circuit” and the “mirror neuron system.”

The renowned cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, in her studies of the reading brain, explains that deep reading activates many of the same cortical regions that would be engaged if we were actually living through those experiences ourselves. When we read about a character’s suffering, love, or moral dilemmas, our brain performs a complete emotional simulation. This process develops what is known as cognitive empathy—the capacity to step into another person’s inner world.

And what happens with short-form videos? They bombard the brain with rapid bursts of dopamine. This constant visual stimulation leaves no room for associative thought to develop. The brain has no time to build emotional bridges; it simply reacts to light and movement. As a consequence, our capacity for deep empathy is gradually fading, replaced by a kind of apathy or “emotional numbness,” where nothing leaves an impression on us for more than five seconds.

What we are experiencing is a technological advance that alienates us and, at the same time, a cultural regression that manipulates us.

This is not simply a matter of progress or decline. It is an anthropological mutation. For the first time in history, humanity is creating an environment—a digital environment—that is rewriting its own brain and consciousness, stripping away the millennia-old mechanisms of spiritual survival that flowed from papyrus and paper.

That is why the act of writing and reading today is no longer merely a cultural choice or a hobby. It is an act of pure political and existential resistance against a machine that seeks to transform us into passive consumers of shadows on a screen.

What do you think? Is there still room for this technology to become a bridge that leads us back to the depth of the written word, or has it already passed the point of no return?