Modern culture treats knowledge as a consumable.
Something to be acquired, compressed, stored, and moved on from.
Books then become no more than bullet points. Educational courses become no more than certificates. And experience becomes no more than just content.
The dominant question is no longer
“What does this do to me?”
but
“How fast can I extract the gist?”
Is this learning? I think it is throughput optimization.
The Role Of Compression In The Age Of Information Overload
To me, the pressure to compress is not accidental. Information volume has exploded in an unprecedented manner. And we can agree that the attention which is required to grasp that information is in fact becoming scarce.
In response to that, and let me summarize here, that the culture favors:
- summaries over authentic encounters
- frameworks over development of genuine views
- outputs over transformation process
The assumption is very simple here:
Meaning survives reduction.
Well, does it? I am sure it does not.
Knowledge Can Never Be Transferable And It Wasn’t
Knowledge is now treated as if it were a substance:
- that can be extracted from books
- that can be transferred between minds
- that is accumulated over time
I believe that the knowledge is not an object. It is an event. An interaction. An encounter.
It happens when: first, material meets a particular reader; second, at a particular moment, and third, under particular constraints.
Remove that encounter, and the event never occurs.
What can then a summary do? A summary can replicate information.
However, can it replicate transformation?
The Illusion of Having Read
Summaries, highlights, and second-hand explanations produce a powerful illusion:
“I have this now.”
But what is possessed doesn’t get processed. It can’t be understanding — it is at the most, a familiarity with conclusions (if I may say so, void of essence).
What the reader misses on are confusion, the resistance to bend, the boredom which is like a pause, the re-reading that reinforces and the slow restructuring of intuition.
What then remains is confidence without depth. This is why modern discourse seems rich in opinions and poor in judgment.
LLM Summaries Feel Dangerous (But Aren’t the Cause)
LLMs did not create the problem. They only exposed it.
They make compression explicit, fast, and frictionless.
They perform openly what culture already demanded silently.
The risk is not misinformation. The risk is mistaking output for encounter. It’s like I know sugar without having tasted it.
When summarization becomes the primary mode of engagement,
learning collapses into pattern recognition only. And an integration becomes often the first casualty.
Need For Speed
Knowledge consumption culture optimizes for speed, coverage, and efficiency. But view formation demands time, repetition, partial understanding, and many unfinished questions.
Velocity rewards those who move on quickly.
Depth belongs to those willing to stay.
Modern culture thinks:
having moved through material is same as having been changed by it.
What Is Actually Being Lost Here?
Facts?
access?
Intelligence?
No.
It is the contact.
Contact with difficulty, ambiguity, ideas that do not resolve cleanly, and most importantly, the insights that take time to metabolize.
This is what separates Consumption from an Encounter.
A Different Question to ponder
The corrective is not to reject summaries, tools, or models. Cerytainly not.
It is to change the question we ask of them.
Not:
“What does this say?”
But:
“What is this asking of me?”
If the answer is “nothing,”
then no amount of consumption will produce understanding.
The Cultural Cost
A culture trained to consume knowledge:
- speaks confidently
- listens poorly
- argues fluently
- changes rarely
It knows many things and is shaped by very few.
Closing Constraint
Information can be compressed.
View Formation cannot.
Summaries can inform.
They cannot initiate transformation.
Understanding is not acquired.
It is undergone.
Any culture that forgets this will mistake motion for growth and familiarity for wisdom.
Again to SUMMARIZE:
Be TRANSFORMED. Not just INFORMED!
Reinvent The Self! 