I’ll so you one better. People who got into reading because it was trendy also fucked up the publishing industry to the point that commercial books are geared towards them as the default now and that’s why we’re getting slop after slop and publishers aren’t picking up historicals
the unfortunate truth is that a smartphone is a swiss army knife that you can play games/listen to music/browse the internet on. the brainrot comes from what you look at and do on the phone. if you're reading books on a phone you're probably not going to have brainrot.
Another side effect of our literacy crisis is that artists can no longer embed meaning in metaphors or communicate through nuanced visuals—consumers now demand everything be literal, or they simply won’t get it.