Stephen Harrison

Tech journalist Stephen Harrison, who covered Wikipedia on Slate for years, told Vox that he sees the LLM partnerships as “recognition” by tech companies that “their long-term future depends on nurturing projects like Wikipedia.” He’s more concerned about the political attacks the platform has faced recently from people like Elon Musk. (Last year, Musk criticized and called to defund Wikipedia after his entry was updated to note a gesture he made during Trump’s inauguration that was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute. He’s since launched the rival website Grokipedia, with entries edited by his company xAI.) Harrison is also concerned about internet users “forgetting” about Wikipedia if they’re mainly consuming the site’s content through AI summaries.

Harrison, meanwhile, sees independent creators, like Depths of Wikipedia, as crucial in keeping Wikipedia’s brand alive. “Social media influencers rely on Wikipedia as a sort of invisible foundation for their knowledge,” he said. For now, all the “old internet” nostalgia on TikTok gives him some hope for a revival. “I grew up when Wikipedia was considered the Wild West of the internet,” he said. “It’s really remarkable how Wikipedia has, in a lot of ways, become this storied institution that people have all these feelings of nostalgia and affection toward.”

*sigh* There comes a time in every millennial’s life when you’re officially recast as the old guy.

Thanks to @vox.com for making me sound ancient in this otherwise fantastic piece about Wikipedia’s role in the age of AI.

www.vox.com/culture/4787...

Screenshot of a Cybercultural article titled “Preserving Media: A Visit to the Physical Internet Archive.”

Screenshot of a Futurism article with the headline “Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal.”

The Internet Archive stores physical books, preserving them as a back-up to digitization.

Whereas AI companies despise the physical world so much they’ve shredded millions of books and tried to hide the evidence.

An Old-School Pizza Chain Is Fast Becoming a Cultural Obsession. I Spent a Day at One to Find Out Why. People travel from all over for the gleeful novelty of pizza ordered from real menus, served by real people, and eaten off checkered tablecloths.

Pizza Hut is a core memory for me, the spot where we had so many class pizza parties. They were special, yes, but also just a normal part of mid-’90s childhood life. Now it’s a place of pilgrimage for anyone desperate enough to be “swaddled in a warm 20th-century embrace.”

This one is for the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman fans:

“The medium is the metaphor” > “The medium is the message”

To take a simple example of what this means, consider the primitive relatively recent technology of smoke signals short-form video. While I do not know exactly what content was once is carried in the smoke signals of American Indians typical TikTok post or Instagram reel, I can safely assume it did does not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke One minute shorts are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher short-form content creator would run short of either wood or blankets lose the audience’s attention long before he they reached his their second axiom. You cannot use smoke short-form video to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.

Book cover: Amusing Ourselves to Death

As a thought experiment, I’ve been updating the references in a few passages from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). What do you think?

Book cover: The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction

Some forms of intellectual labor are worth the trouble. In those times when Whim isn’t quite enough [to read deeply], times that will come to us all, we discover this. Such work strengthens our minds, makes us more capable of concentration, teaches us patience—and almost certainly a touch of humility as well, as we struggle to navigate the difficult (if elegant) terrain of Hume’s prose. But what do we have more need for, in our whirling mental worlds, than strength and concentration and patience and humility? These are virtues worth aspiring to, especially because they lead to new and greater delights.

Most writing about the Attention Crisis is gloomy, for good reason. But I appreciate this little book by Prof. Alan Jacobs because he highlights the rewards that come from the struggle of deep reading, as in this passage:

the ONION America’s Finest News Source Monday, February 2, 2026 29° Menu Dispatch Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

Published: March 9, 2010 WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words. “Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked

the Onion needs to update this for 2026 to mention AI summaries & give us one cause it’s too long

Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring In an age of endless low-quality information, it’s time to fight our instinct to seek out and absorb all we can. It takes practice.

I love this new term “critical ignoring” because it points to yet another benefit of print. Our phones flood us with an endless amount of low-quality info that’s incredibly hard to ignore. By contrast, a physical book is a single-purpose device that excludes the background noise and lets you focus.

RELEVANT: Gen Z Is Cutting Back on Screen Time More Than Any Other Generation A new survey reveals that 63% of Gen Z limit their screen time, the highest rate of any age group.

Eighty-four percent of Americans say they’ve adopted analogue habits to create boundaries with screens. Writing in notebooks leads the list at 32%, followed by reading printed books at 31% and using paper calendars at 28%.

Taken together: the disappearance of MMPs could reflect an increased consumer interest in *reading as an elevated experience* that intentionally contrasts with the cheap shallowness of scrolling. 5/5

But when someone wants a more focused & pleasurable experience than they can get on their phone, they are more likely drawn to the high-quality paperback or hardback version of a book. 4/5

Nowadays when people are opting for a cheap entertainment experience, they are more likely to swipe through content on their phone. That is, we get our cheap thrills through our phones, not MMPs. 3/5

MMPs became popular as the cheap option to buy books through grocery stores and news stands. They were an intentionally low quality product with weak spines and low-grade paper. 2/5

Headline: Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks

While a lot of folks are understandably concerned about the loss of mass market paperbacks, there’s perhaps a more positive interpretation of this story. 🧵 1/5

Thanks so much, Laura! And if I get to go on tour for the book, I’d definitely like to make a stop in 🇪🇸

Oh man, extremely interested in this one 👀

Thanks so much, Ally! I’m hopeful that it appeals to writers and bibliophiles, especially

Among the many topics missing from this piece is any discussion of the medium. Harry Potter was a print phenomenon, with most readers encountering the books in physical form, and huge in-person launch events. It’s not only that politics have changed. It’s that we’ve become increasingly disembodied.

Thank you, Kyle!!

If ever a book called for wood pulp and ink, it’s this.

Journalist and tech insider with bylines in the NYT and WP Stephen Harrison's THE POWER OF PRINT: THE CASE FOR PAPER & INK IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY, pitched for readers of Jonathan Haidt's THE ANXIOUS GENERATION and Johann Hari's STOLEN FOCUS, with a foreword from Master Class founder Aaron Rasmussen, a science-backed case for why paper and ink—not screens—are humanity's most powerful tools for focus, memory, and clear thinking in the age of AI, to Peter Wolverton at St. Martin's, by Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group (NA).

This news means a lot to me. I'm writing my first nonfiction book, THE POWER OF PRINT, about why we think differently with paper versus screens, and why we should all aspire to reclaim our print brains. Coming 2027 from St. Martin's Press. @stmartinspress.bsky.social

“Although it once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own device, it’s clear that those policies have been a failure. It may be possible to harness the power of school devices more judiciously, with little to no device use in lower grades, and high school students given laptops strictly limited to relevant apps. We could go further, creating completely device-free schools with rare exceptions for students with special needs. It would be back to the textbooks, paper and pencil of previous eras — when the most significant classroom distraction was students passing notes. Many adults struggle to concentrate on work when social media, shopping and movies are just a click away. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a 16-year-old, much less an 11-year-old, to focus in the same situation. Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions isn’t just bad for test scores; it is inimical to learning. And it is fundamentally unfair to our children.”

Worth reading the whole piece but here is Twenge’s conclusion

Opinion | The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

How can we expect 13-year-olds to focus on their assignments when a glut of entertaining video content is just a tab away?

Digital tools have their place, particularly for student research, but sometimes a paper worksheet or handwritten response are simply better tools for deep learning.

Anyone marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary today can believe it’s an incredible success story for commons-based peer production and that there're aspects of the site that sometimes piss them off. Let's hope it lasts a while longer.

My latest for WIRED:

Microblogging is just a catastrophically bad form of human interaction. If you sat down to design a system specifically meant to make people act out and create harassment mobs, you'd be hard pressed to build something more effectively toxic.

Reading Is a Vice Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.

Anyone else conflicted by this Atlantic essay? I agree with the author that the “democracy depends on reading” line won’t be effective.

Then again, promoting reading as a “vice” seems like a mistake, especially now as so many folks are starved for wisdom/virtue/healthy pleasures.

“Nor can the ‘stories’ shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation and self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis.”

The Crisis of Narration, book by Byung-Chul Han

As we start 2026, I’m grateful for the sharp, thoughtful people I’ve met on Bluesky, but I also want to keep in mind what my favorite contemporary philosopher says about posting:

Gotta love the do-it-yourself gumption in Adler’s 1940 guide How to Read a Book.

“With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.”

One of the underrated benefits of print is the variety of forms. Heavy textbooks, faintly musky paperbacks, pocket-sized primers…

Whereas digital tools tie the experience to a single, uniform environment. The knowledge sticks less, and we struggle to transfer what we’ve learned to other contexts.

The rise of AI art is spurring a revival of analogue media It is not just vinyl. Film cameras and print publications are trendy again, too

We all know McLuhan’s, “The medium is the message.”

He also said, “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation.”

By his logic, AI was always going to flip the framework, producing new appreciation for analogue forms.

Let’s hope we make the most of the reversal.