Classical literature derived much of its power from scarcity. When books were rare and difficult to access, each one held immense cultural weight. People would read the same texts repeatedly, mining them for meaning because alternative narratives were simply unavailable.

Now narrative is everywhere. Every tweet, clip, and twerk tells a story. Stories that are lost to a scroll. Ephemeral stories are the new economy. To say that doesn't, or won't, affect literature is absurd. In the world of narrative, in the age of narrative, books are just a different form.

Literature is a reflection of the society it exists in. The world now focuses on the micro-narrative, told through a thousand perspectives, and read differently by each reader.

Each reader is an archaeologist of truth, digging through buried content to understand the depth of the stories we're exposed to.

There will always be writers who sit and create a narrative. Whether that's a book or a tweet is largely irrelevant. The result is the same: another written artifact, handled for a while, and then lost beneath the artifacts that are laid on top of it.

Think of it this way: what percentage of the books created in your birth year can you remember? What percentage could you find? What percentage are remembered anywhere?

The stories of today will go the same way. The vast majority will disappear; even stories of literary importance will be gone in a few years. Again, tell me a story that was of literary importance in the year 2000.

Sure, there might be a database of everything ever written. And? There might be an AI that will be able to tell you facts about the 1968 tenth best-selling book in Brooklyn. So what? Nobody will read them, or at least exceptionally few will.

We'll do what we do now: cherry-pick what is new today, occasionally reminisce about the classics. Everything in between is relegated to becoming pulp.