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Stephen Harrison

@stephenharrison.com
1.2K followers 472 following 321 posts

Print advocate and journalist. Writing a book about the value of paper & ink for St. Martin’s Press. Rep’d by Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. stephenharrison.com

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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 26/09/2026
Been reading reviews of James Marriott’s new book, “The New Dark Ages,” on the passing of the print age. It’s been covered by the leading British newspapers, but I think the best piece has come from the Cherwell, Oxford’s student newspaper. Smart to make it a bit more personal.
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Émna Mizouni ~ آمنة الميزوني @emnamizouni.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
There are a lot of similarities between real life Wikipedia editors and the characters of the techno-thriller "The Editors" by @stephenharrison.com youtube.com/shorts/kiK9i...
youtube.com
Paid, Banned, Jailed, the other face of #Wikipedia | Optics Podcast
YouTube video by Emna Mizouni
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Émna Mizouni ~ آمنة الميزوني @emnamizouni.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
@stephenharrison.com shares his journey from a tech journalist covering @wikipedia.org to a techno-thriller author of The Editors. Full Optics Podcast episode will be live on Saturday 05 at 10 AM EST , 2 PM GMT youtube.com/playlist?lis...
youtu.be
The journey from a tech journalist to a techno-thriller author
YouTube video by Le Salon
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Émna Mizouni ~ آمنة الميزوني @emnamizouni.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
It's finally here! This Saturday, we will premiere our Optics Podcast episode with @stephenharrison.com. In this episode, we will dive into @wikipedia.org , the aim for neutrality, and the editing wars. Tune in on Saturday at 10 AM EST / 2 PM GMT. Link: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
Poster of Optics podcast with the title in the top middle "The hidden world of Wikipedia, a deep dive in The Editors with Stephen Harrison", then the podcast logo of then the novel "The Editors". On the right a photo of the guest Stephen Harrison, an American author and tech journalist, and to the left Emna Mizouni, an entrepreneur and the Optics Podcast host
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 09/05/2026
Worth noting that Pope Leo’s background is Augustinian. St. Augustine is the patron saint of printers. www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-leo...
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 08/05/2026
This story is one of Lovett’s best. It’s rare that anything on Wikipedia gets a true conclusion, much less a relatively happy one where the parties agree they both made honest mistakes. Sometimes “assume good faith” works.
edithistory.substack.com
What's going on with Evan Spiegel's Wikipedia photo?
A weird little Wikipedia story from recent days
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 19/04/2026
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. —Marshall McLuhan, 1964
arstechnica.com
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
Company hired Google's book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize "all the books in the world."
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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 01/04/2026
new from me (and not an April Fools thing): I spoke in depth with @ilyaslebleu.bsky.social, the Wikipedia editor who first proposed the ban on A.I.-generated text in English articles. we talked about the idea-to-policy process, the disagreements along the way, and what other platforms can learn:
slate.com
One of the Internet’s Most Iconic Websites Just Took a Bold Stand. The Rest Should Follow.
The fight to keep the internet’s encyclopedia bot-free scored a big win.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 11/03/2026
One lovely part of book research is reading these deep cuts
Screenshot of an old news article with a yellow banner reading “This article is more than 22 years old.” The headline reads “Audible revolution.” The subheadline says: “Online radio is booming thanks to iPods, cheap audio software and weblogs, reports Ben Hammersley.”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 22/02/2026
*sigh* There comes a time in every millennial’s life when you’re officially recast as the old guy. Thanks to @vox.com for making me sound ancient in this otherwise fantastic piece about Wikipedia’s role in the age of AI. www.vox.com/culture/4787...
Tech journalist Stephen Harrison, who covered Wikipedia on Slate for years, told Vox that he sees the LLM partnerships as “recognition” by tech companies that “their long-term future depends on nurturing projects like Wikipedia.” He’s more concerned about the political attacks the platform has faced recently from people like Elon Musk. (Last year, Musk criticized and called to defund Wikipedia after his entry was updated to note a gesture he made during Trump’s inauguration that was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute. He’s since launched the rival website Grokipedia, with entries edited by his company xAI.) Harrison is also concerned about internet users “forgetting” about Wikipedia if they’re mainly consuming the site’s content through AI summaries.Harrison, meanwhile, sees independent creators, like Depths of Wikipedia, as crucial in keeping Wikipedia’s brand alive. “Social media influencers rely on Wikipedia as a sort of invisible foundation for their knowledge,” he said. For now, all the “old internet” nostalgia on TikTok gives him some hope for a revival.

“I grew up when Wikipedia was considered the Wild West of the internet,” he said. “It’s really remarkable how Wikipedia has, in a lot of ways, become this storied institution that people have all these feelings of nostalgia and affection toward.”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 18/02/2026
The Internet Archive stores physical books, preserving them as a back-up to digitization. Whereas AI companies despise the physical world so much they’ve shredded millions of books and tried to hide the evidence.
Screenshot of a Cybercultural article titled “Preserving Media: A Visit to the Physical Internet Archive.”Screenshot of a Futurism article with the headline “Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal.”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 14/02/2026
Pizza Hut is a core memory for me, the spot where we had so many class pizza parties. They were special, yes, but also just a normal part of mid-’90s childhood life. Now it’s a place of pilgrimage for anyone desperate enough to be “swaddled in a warm 20th-century embrace.”
slate.com
An Old-School Pizza Chain Is Fast Becoming a Cultural Obsession. I Spent a Day at One to Find Out Why.
People travel from all over for the gleeful novelty of pizza ordered from real menus, served by real people, and eaten off checkered tablecloths.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 10/02/2026
This one is for the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman fans: “The medium is the metaphor” > “The medium is the message”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 06/02/2026
As a thought experiment, I’ve been updating the references in a few passages from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). What do you think?
To take a simple example of what this means, consider the primitive relatively recent technology of smoke signals short-form video. While I do not know exactly what content was once is carried in the smoke signals of American Indians typical TikTok post or Instagram reel, I can safely assume it did does not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke One minute shorts are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher short-form content creator would run short of either wood or blankets lose the audience’s attention long before he they reached his their second axiom. You cannot use smoke short-form video to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.Book cover: Amusing Ourselves to Death
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 04/02/2026
Most writing about the Attention Crisis is gloomy, for good reason. But I appreciate this little book by Prof. Alan Jacobs because he highlights the rewards that come from the struggle of deep reading, as in this passage:
Book cover: The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction Some forms of intellectual labor are worth the trouble. In those times when Whim isn’t quite enough [to read deeply], times that will come to us all, we discover this. Such work strengthens our minds, makes us more capable of concentration, teaches us patience—and almost certainly a touch of humility as well, as we struggle to navigate the difficult (if elegant) terrain of Hume’s prose. But what do we have more need for, in our whirling mental worlds, than strength and concentration and patience and humility? These are virtues worth aspiring to, especially because they lead to new and greater delights.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 02/02/2026
the Onion needs to update this for 2026 to mention AI summaries & give us one cause it’s too long
the ONION
America’s Finest News Source

Monday, February 2, 2026 29° Menu

Dispatch

Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted TextPublished: March 9, 2010

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 01/02/2026
I love this new term “critical ignoring” because it points to yet another benefit of print. Our phones flood us with an endless amount of low-quality info that’s incredibly hard to ignore. By contrast, a physical book is a single-purpose device that excludes the background noise and lets you focus.
wsj.com
Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring
In an age of endless low-quality information, it’s time to fight our instinct to seek out and absorb all we can. It takes practice.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 01/02/2026
Eighty-four percent of Americans say they’ve adopted analogue habits to create boundaries with screens. Writing in notebooks leads the list at 32%, followed by reading printed books at 31% and using paper calendars at 28%.
RELEVANT: Gen Z Is Cutting Back on Screen Time More Than Any Other Generation

A new survey reveals that 63% of Gen Z limit their screen time, the highest rate of any age group.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 29/01/2026
While a lot of folks are understandably concerned about the loss of mass market paperbacks, there’s perhaps a more positive interpretation of this story. 🧵 1/5
Headline: Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks
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Ally (in Euroskyland) @allybfraz.eurosky.social · 29/01/2026
Oh man, extremely interested in this one 👀
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 28/01/2026
Among the many topics missing from this piece is any discussion of the medium. Harry Potter was a print phenomenon, with most readers encountering the books in physical form, and huge in-person launch events. It’s not only that politics have changed. It’s that we’ve become increasingly disembodied.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 27/01/2026
This news means a lot to me. I'm writing my first nonfiction book, THE POWER OF PRINT, about why we think differently with paper versus screens, and why we should all aspire to reclaim our print brains. Coming 2027 from St. Martin's Press. @stmartinspress.bsky.social
Journalist and tech insider with bylines in the NYT and WP Stephen Harrison's THE POWER OF PRINT: THE CASE FOR PAPER & INK IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY, pitched for readers of Jonathan Haidt's THE ANXIOUS GENERATION and Johann Hari's STOLEN FOCUS, with a foreword from Master Class founder Aaron Rasmussen, a science-backed case for why paper and ink—not screens—are humanity's most powerful tools for focus, memory, and clear thinking in the age of AI, to Peter Wolverton at St. Martin's, by Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group (NA).
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 24/01/2026
How can we expect 13-year-olds to focus on their assignments when a glut of entertaining video content is just a tab away? Digital tools have their place, particularly for student research, but sometimes a paper worksheet or handwritten response are simply better tools for deep learning.
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 15/01/2026
Anyone marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary today can believe it’s an incredible success story for commons-based peer production and that there're aspects of the site that sometimes piss them off. Let's hope it lasts a while longer. My latest for WIRED:
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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 05/01/2026
Microblogging is just a catastrophically bad form of human interaction. If you sat down to design a system specifically meant to make people act out and create harassment mobs, you'd be hard pressed to build something more effectively toxic.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 05/01/2026
Anyone else conflicted by this Atlantic essay? I agree with the author that the “democracy depends on reading” line won’t be effective. Then again, promoting reading as a “vice” seems like a mistake, especially now as so many folks are starved for wisdom/virtue/healthy pleasures.
theatlantic.com
Reading Is a Vice
Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 03/01/2026
As we start 2026, I’m grateful for the sharp, thoughtful people I’ve met on Bluesky, but I also want to keep in mind what my favorite contemporary philosopher says about posting:
“Nor can the ‘stories’ shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation and self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis.”The Crisis of Narration, book by Byung-Chul Han
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 31/12/2025
Gotta love the do-it-yourself gumption in Adler’s 1940 guide How to Read a Book. “With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 31/12/2025
One of the underrated benefits of print is the variety of forms. Heavy textbooks, faintly musky paperbacks, pocket-sized primers… Whereas digital tools tie the experience to a single, uniform environment. The knowledge sticks less, and we struggle to transfer what we’ve learned to other contexts.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 27/12/2025
We all know McLuhan’s, “The medium is the message.” He also said, “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation.” By his logic, AI was always going to flip the framework, producing new appreciation for analogue forms. Let’s hope we make the most of the reversal.
economist.com
The rise of AI art is spurring a revival of analogue media
It is not just vinyl. Film cameras and print publications are trendy again, too
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 24/12/2025
Does anyone else bristle at this framing? WSJ says blue books are “torturing” students with hand cramps, and “nobody likes them.” Listen, students have been outsourcing everything to AI and cheating their way through college. Blue books should be celebrated as a return to authentic human learning.
wsj.com
They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back.
Cheating with ChatGPT has become a huge problem for colleges. The solution is painfully old-school.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 22/12/2025
We can form intense ties with analog objects over years of use. That’s why Flaubert asked to be buried with his inkwell. But digital tech is mostly disposable. We value its connection to the infosphere, not the thing itself. No one’s dying wish is to be buried with AI glasses.
Bright image with text: “Last Minute Shopping Tips”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 21/12/2025
Looking to talk to people who bought a reMarkable tablet, or similar digital notebook with e-ink, and stopped using it after a few weeks or months.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 19/12/2025
Víctor Hugo, born 1802 in Eastern France, spent his teenage years filling notebooks with poetry and sketches. Eruptions from his restless mind. He developed a two-handed approach—one hand writing, the other drawing—that he’d later use while writing classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (cont.)
Sketch with writing by Victor Hugo
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 18/12/2025
Engagement is not the same as learning. As a former DuoLingo user, I can attest that it’s a fun addictive game, but you don’t learn much. One independent study found DuoLingo users scored lower on a standardized language test than Babbel users, despite spending significantly more time on the app.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 15/12/2025
Intellectualism is the new counterculture.
latimes.com
Academic lectures have invaded L.A. bars and tickets are selling out in minutes
Attendees can geek out on topics from the use of AI in medicine to the psychology of deception, all in a fun, low-stakes environment.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 11/12/2025
Today I learned that Albert Wenger, head of the VC firm that originally backed Twitter, has this sticker on the back of his phone
A close-up of a person’s hand holding a black smartphone with a large white sticker on the back that reads “SCROLLING KILLS” in bold black letters.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 10/12/2025
Case study in the enduring power of print: BookTok creator Jack Edwards reaches millions of readers with his online videos, but always dreamed of seeing his work in physical form. He's now a books columnist for British Esquire and made a video about the thrill of tracking down a copy of the magazine
Jack Edwards, BookTok creator, at the news agentJack Edwards, BookTok creator, at the news agent
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 09/12/2025
@404media.co is making a zine. “Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms... It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world... we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products."
404media.co
404 Media Is Making a Zine
We are publishing a risograph-printed zine about the surveillance technologies used by ICE.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 08/12/2025
“The medium is the message.” Johann Hari on the message of printed books:
After thinking all this, I would return to the printed books I was piling up against the wall of my beach house. What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.I realized that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they are true. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature—that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me. And I don’t agree with the messages in the medium of social media. I think they primarily feed the uglier and shallower parts of my nature. It is why spending time on these sites—even when, by the rules of the game, I am doing well, gaining likes and followers—leaves me feeling drained and unhappy. I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 08/12/2025
If you ask AI to describe its own writing style, it’ll say it’s too smooth, too neutral. “In fact, this is not even remotely true. A.I. writing is marked by a whole complex of frankly bizarre rhetorical features that make it immediately distinctive… It’s not smooth or neutral at all—it’s weird.”
nytimes.com
Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 05/12/2025
When I argue for the benefits of physical books, people tell me that every generation misses the old ways. But no, this isn’t pure nostalgia. Yes, my dad used to complain about decline back in the 90s, but the scores weren't plummeting then. Today they're in a free fall.
Test scores across OECD countries in decline
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 03/12/2025
-How to avoid the Redditization of Wikipedia -Jimmy Wales wrote a pretty good book about bipartisanship & Wikipedia -56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion -GASP Talked about these topics and more for the latest "Between the Brackets" pod
youtube.com
Talking with Stephen Harrison about Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and Elon Musk
YouTube video by Between the Brackets
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 03/12/2025
1. Grokipedia borrows extensively from Wikipedia (more than half the time). 2. When Grokipedia doesn't copy Wikipedia, things get weird fast (hallucinations, citing Infowars). 3. Grokipedia seems to prefer first-person sources like LinkedIn to traditional, independent news organizations. (cont.)
stephenharrison.com
Nine Based Takes on Grokipedia
What's the point? Plus Jimmy Wales's book, Larry Sanger's Nine Theses
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 01/12/2025
At first I avoided O’Dell’s book, assuming it was mostly about chilling out. It covers that, yes, but it’s really a defense of *all* activities that aren’t commercially productive but “produce” value which can’t be measured or exploited. Bird-watching, contemplation, wandering through a labyrinth…
Cover of “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny O’Dell
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 01/12/2025
It’s no coincidence that people are turning to handwriting on paper more and more. A.I. models regularly steal writers’ work. Anything posted online can be ingested without consent by the machines. The physicality of handwriting is a defensive maneuver, a strategy to protect the human voice.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Paper-and-Pen Diaries Are Forever
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 23/11/2025
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has been helping me think through why we identify with certain types of things (in my case, physical books) more than others. For Han, we are living in “the age of non-things,” in which “there is something almost utopian about the notion of possession.” 1/5
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 22/11/2025
At the local coffee shop this morning, reading “Non-things” and thinking about why sitting with a physical book feels so different from scrolling. There’s a calmness to print that the feed can never give you.
Photo of Han’s book “Non-things”Quote from Han’s book “Non-things”
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 20/11/2025
Needed a break from thinking about Wikipedia so I’m reading this. The author is a rare books librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian and her little guidebook is delightful.
Looking After Your Books by Francesca Galligan
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Stephen Harrison @stephenharrison.com · 17/11/2025
Why do some parts of the internet seem more robustly democratic than others? "A big piece of it is that they have a higher purpose. Wikipedia editors, at their best, they really do believe that there’s something more than partisan politics—and that’s the accurate reflection of reliable sources."
slate.com
Elon Musk Has His Own Encyclopedia Now. Well, We Read Some of the Entries …
He tried to buy Wikipedia. When that didn’t work, he made his own version—and it’s a mess.
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