I recently watched “Anora,” and what irked me most was how everything was overly explained. You could’ve caught it on your own, but you are told anyway.

Film, books and media have quietly decided their viewers cannot be trusted with ambiguity. But books have never been neutral, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. Neither idea is new, but both have become obvious at the same time.

Everybody is writing in third person, present tense. It’s almost as if the whole industry has decided to narrate itself live. A character slams a door. She was furious. Someone looks away. He couldn’t meet her eyes. The scene gets the point across, but the next sentence insists on repeating it, just in case. Critic Namwali Serpell calls this “the new literalism” in her essay for The New Yorker, describing how prestige films announce their own themes instead of trusting their audience to arrive at them.

Literary scholar Anna Kornbluh adds another layer beyond “bad writing.” Her 2024 book “Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism” frames it as a cultural style built around cutting out the middleman, collapsing the space between feeling something and saying it until art merely impersonates rawness instead of shaping it into anything. Underneath it all sits an economic logic: a culture obsessed with instantaneous, frictionless circulation will always produce art that refuses to slow down long enough to really mean anything.

Nobody agrees on whose fault this really is. BookTok blames publishers for chasing an algorithm, while publishers blame readers for losing their patience. Is media illiteracy making books dumber, or are dumber books making us media illiterate? Nobody wants to answer that question, because right now both sides get to keep being right without changing anything.

This isn’t something the algorithm invented — it’s just made it harder to ignore.

Picture books used to let a kid sit with a villain that wasn’t fully defeated, but now everything gets spelled out before the last page, because somewhere along the way “letting the reader sit in it” stopped being worth the risk.

Not knowing something has always been uncomfortable. What’s changed is how we respond to that discomfort. Instead of letting the reader linger there, the media chooses to close the gap before anyone gets a chance to think.

But a culture that removes discomfort removes the exact space where independent thought used to happen. If a book can decide how much discomfort you’re allowed to sit with, it can also decide which discomforts you never get shown in the first place. And removing readers from discomfort is not a neutral writing choice; it’s political.

Books have been political since before “political” meant what it does now. When I say political, I am talking in terms of whose story gets told, in whose language, handed to whom and kept around for whom to read later. A “must-read books” list is just an argument about whose experience counts as universal and whose gets shelved as a niche topic, but it gets dressed up as a curriculum so it doesn’t look like an argument.

To see how old this move is, look at the earliest surviving texts, which make the same point with zero subtlety. Grain tallies, king lists and legal codes were carved into stone, so one man’s version of justice would outlive him. “The Code of Hammurabi” wasn’t art for art’s sake — it served as propaganda with permanence as its backing. Permanence is exactly what power wants, and it can never quite secure it on its own. In other words, deciding what gets remembered has always been a form of deciding what gets believed.

The impulse doesn’t disappear once texts stop being carved into stone, it just changes shape and scale as the technology for spreading a text gets faster. The printing press is one example: it spread the Bible, but it also broke the Church’s monopoly on interpretation, which is precisely why the Reformation and the printing press show up at the exact same point in history. Once anyone could put a version of the truth into print, controlling which version survived became the whole game. That’s the same instinct behind every regime that has ever burned a book — they understood something people forget daily: while the object is just paper, the choice of what gets printed, taught, translated and kept around forever is never random. It’s a deliberate decision about whose version of reality gets passed on.

These aren’t two separate problems. They’re just the same two things in disguise. A book that won’t let you sit with ambiguity is a book perfectly built to hand you a conclusion instead of a question, and that is precisely the kind of text easiest to manipulate politically without anyone noticing. Underestimating a reader and manipulating one aren’t opposites.

This doesn’t mean that every clear sentence is hiding an agenda, or that you’re a bad reader for liking a book that spells itself out sometimes. Plenty of “difficult” writing is just poorly written, and plenty of simple books respect you when they trust silence to do the heavy lifting. It’s not about whether a book is simple or dense — it’s about whether it assumes you are capable of holding an idea before you’re handed the answer to it.

This isn’t an argument to distrust every book on your shelf or to read everything like it’s hiding a secret code. It’s something smaller and harder: noticing when a piece of media explains itself before you need it to, and asking what that assumption, about you and what you can handle, is actually doing there.

Nothing on the page got there by accident. Not even the parts it decided not to say.

Shruthika Gopinath is a junior majoring in economics.

Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.