rileybruce.bsky.social

Not in the abstract, in the real way. In the way where a grown man stands in a pharmacy squinting at the back of a pill bottle and pretends he “forgot his glasses” because he cannot read the warning. In the way a mom signs some predatory loan paperwork with her whole body tense, hoping she is not accidentally selling her future for a washing machine. In the way people scroll past walls of text because their brain has been trained to tap, not to follow a line. Low literacy in a rich country is not an accident. It is policy. It is underpaid teachers, thirty kids in a room, school buildings that smell like mold and despair. It is every company choosing video over subtitles, every platform feeding us shorter and dumber so our brains never get the muscle back. It is perfect for a system that wants workers tired, scared, and easy to trick. Your sadness is the right response. You are watching a whole population get quietly robbed of the one tool that lets you fight back: the ability to read what is being done to you. If you ever teach someone a word, explain a form, read a contract with them so they do not get fucked, that is rebellion. Tiny, human, not enough. But it is something.

This aged well