Books are still the best tech for thinking

How should I use the Internet? This is a question newly refreshed in my mind. I’ve gotten most of my jobs and internships because of the Internet. I’ve gotten a lot of my learning from the Internet. I’ve earned degrees on the Internet, and found scholarship money from the Internet. I’ve networked through the Internet. I work on the Internet — full time. I’m in daily contact with the Internet. It hums in my pocket, never far from my thoughts. It has caused almost a hunger to be back on when I’m not on it. I wonder what that hunger feeling does to my thinking.

What I read/watch/listen on the Internet shapes how I think and create. The medium is the message; you become the medium through which you communicate. If you are what you eat, you are what you read (watch and listen), too. Television makes people more visual and crave more entertainment; social media makes posters hungry for external validation and hooking in an audience with frequent bursts. These are extremes of course, and not every variation of every medium does this, but the medium where someone spends their time does start to shape your rhetoric. The medium shapes your thinking framework — the fundamental way you communicate. Most importantly, how you communicate to yourself.

Thinking for myself has always been a precious ability. Usually, this has meant I talk things out with myself, usually on a walk, or a bike ride, if I can. I still do this, but I might now test it out on an A.I. chatbot to get a response. Think time has been vital for crystalizing an idea or in creating something new. It’s a combination of new information with the old information that creates a new thought — a push into the unknown.

To get to that unknown place, it’s about gathering new information. Getting information — digging for it, researching — has always felt like a form of power, particularly for someone like me who hasn’t had a lot of power. I grew up small and full of surgeries, absent and sick parents. I moved across states, and as I got older my family went from middle class to lower class. We were broke by the time I got to high school. It was in these circumstances where information — research — felt like power. I paid for college because I asked questions, and because I applied for scholarships I found online. Networks didn’t give me the money, information did.

In addition, there are two moments that stand out to me. Both are from high school. I wouldn’t have called each of them power or recognized them as power then, but I do now.

First, knowing more about sports than the best athletes at my school. One basketball coach called me “the book” because I knew the history, the stats, and could, at one time, name the starting lineup for every professional basketball team. Sports were a refuge, and there was no way my 5-foot frame, crooked spine, skinny and non-bendable ankles were going to compete on the hardwood or field. I got a spot on the bench because I knew the plays better than most.

Sometimes I wish I learned a second language or something rather than sports. But at the same time, all that time reading and watching created a balm for my home situation. Sports information was a constant warm fire pit I could visit during the tumultuous years of a sick single mother in the hospital.

Second, I once did the research work for a friend during a research assignment in English class. We had to trudge into the library and engage with books, and a young Google. I did a report on blindness in Tanzania. My friend picked (or was given) the My Lai Massacre. (Perhaps it’s a divine coincidence that I remember this moment on the week Henry Kissinger died).

My friend knew nothing. “How do you do it?” I remember him asking. My friend was more than capable of reading, but finding good information — and know how to organize and contextualize it — is about persistence and patience: You have to sit, find, and connect with the material.

I found a book on this horrible massacre and sat there and connected. I found Seymour Hersh’s reporting. I was forever changed — my whole idea of the Vietnam War was spun in a new direction. I was an average, middle-America high school male growing up in 90s and early 2000s: my Vietnam War info came from movies and movie references. I didn’t even know we lost that war, or why we were fighting it in the first place. I read and told my friend what to write. I also felt this whole new window opening up in my mind: U.S. Military, the people of Vietnam, pain and suffering, atrocity, history. In the case of My Lai, it felt sickening, but knowing this history also felt like a vitamin — a intense realization of truth.

In hindsight, I think my friend manipulated me to do the work. I do remember literally pointing at the book and a paragraph that explained what happened, and how he might go about turning this information into a written report with a thesis.

What I think my friend didn’t do was the work of taking in the information. That means surrendering to it. Actually reading some graphs, some pages — and letting it soak in there. Let it rewire your brain a bit. Walking away and trying to figure out what it means.

What does this have to do with the Internet? These two moments signal to me how information can do good. How it can serve a purpose to make your life better, to understand the world, and offer comfort, feed curiosity. The Internet can provide this, but books I think are still the sharpest tool for creating your own thinking. They cure that hunger I feel from too much Internet time (too much of the wrong type of Internet at least e.g. social media).

This idea was reinforced when I heard columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein chat with podcaster PJ Vogt: “Books are great — they are an unsurpassed technology for thinking. Not just learning, but thinking. That is where I get most of my good ideas — while I am reading a book about something else.”

I agree. Books are great because they create a space for what Ezra might call, or what I’ll call, “thick attention.” Once you’re drumming along, clocking in significant minutes with one book, distraction free, you’re thick with attention. Some magical force is going on between you and the material — you are beginning to have thoughts you would’ve never would have had otherwise. This only comes when you connect with material, when you surrender to it; when you get thick with it.

And this can happen with not just a book, but a film, articles, a podcast, music, a report. In fact, this is the Internet's great promise: to provide more people with access to more information. You might just have to print it out or go get the book version of the idea or subject to really get the benefits to your thinking. Your best thinking can't be achieved with just a click, a quick A.I. generation, or by opening another tab.

So, I am going to start a column in this newsletter that’s going to feel more like a letter. It’s going to be about something I read in a book. That beautiful phrase that feels like one word: Ireaditinabook. It’s where I get ideas and create new understandings.

A recent trip to Wyoming reminded me of the beloved book by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s a sci-fi classic with feminist themes that takes place in the future on a distant planet called Gethen, which means “Winter.” The two main characters at one point must trek nearly a 1000 miles over ice and snow covered wilderness in order to avoid detection and capture.

This past November in Wyoming, the snow-covered landscape of hills, plateaus, and basins resembled the 'Winter' I imagined. Unobstructed space — not one wire or piece of metal in the way — wide open in every sense. Wisps of snow snaking across a road. A huge bruiser of a cloud mass hanging over a river with strings of gray tendrils spilling out of the bottom. A world of gray, white, midnight blues with a bright sun popping off the freshly dumped snow covered landscape. The frozen water and coolness smelled quiet. All you could hear was tiny whispers of the wind galloping across the flakes.

Ursula wrote:

“All the night and day and night…it must have snowed, no blizzard, but the first great snowfall of the winter. When at last I roused and pulled myself up to look out, the tent was half buried. Sunlight and blue shadows lay vivid on the snow. Far and high in the east one drift of gray dimmed the sky’s brightness: the smoke of Udenushreke [a volcano], nearest to us of the Fire Hills. Around the little peak of the tent lay the snow, mounds, hillocks, swells, slopes, all white, untrodden.

That book opened up possibility — in more ways than one. Like stepping into an open landscape. Like a character in another sci-fi book I am reading now, Benjamin Percy’s Sky Vault, the third in the Comet Cycle Series. The character says: “There’s a million other worlds out there, if you just listen.”

There’s a million other stories and worlds out there. Every book has a world in it, a world of thoughts and experiences, fictional as imagined galaxy, and as true as the worst known crimes. Picking one up feels like giving the brain allowance to think. Let the mind work and tune like a terrestrial radio: turning the dial, hearing the crackle and blubbering of another world.

I am also hoping to write a column about A.I. to help work out and understand this new technology that is unleashed in our everyday lives. It’s a smartphone, a search engine, the Internet. Does it work? Or is it a fancy model airplane that can speak poetry? Or is it something that will actually save me time and money? Does it amplify my ability to make stuff? Where does it come from? All questions I want answers to, which will likely feel like the opposite to reading a book, but I would like to understand. More soon.

Let me know in the comments — or in a replied email — what you’re reading, watching, listening to. What are you digging? What did you find with that dig?

A few good pieces and things I’ve been reading.

• The Search Engine Episode with PJ Vogt and Ezra Klein.
• Ezra’s writing on medium is the message and his recent piece on OpenAI’s interesting month with firing and re-hiring Sam Altman and what it means for A.I. in general. Tech journalist Kevin Roose declared that the capitalists beat the catastrophists. “Capitalism is itself a kind of artificial intelligence,” Ezra writes, “and it’s far further along than anything the computer scientists have yet coded.”
• It’s also worth checking out Zvi Mowshowitz’s thoughts on Biden’s executive order meant to regulate A.I.
• Check out Viet Thanh Nguyen’s award-winning fiction and writing on Vietnam.
• Because I lived on a cruise ship once, and I am at once horrified and in awe of such human creations, this WSJ article breaks down the newest behemoth and the economics of pulling it off.

Dig hard, Tucker

ENDIT.