Summarize this
Nobody really reads anymore
Reading time: 8 min
There was a time when you read an article from start to finish. You settled in, followed the thread, let the author take you somewhere. That time is fading. Today, we skim. And more and more often, we don't even skim: we ask a machine to do it for us.
The gesture has become ordinary. You copy an article's link, paste it into an artificial intelligence, and type three words: "summarize this." In seconds, you get the gist. Sometimes you go further, an audio version, a bullet list, a one-sentence summary. The article itself, you'll never open.
It isn't laziness, or not only. It's arithmetic. Our attention is limited, the amount to read is not. Faced with that imbalance, the machine decides: it hands us the heart of a text faster than we'd read its introduction. At that game, the reading time shown at the top of the page looks less and less like a promise, and more and more like a threat.
For those who write, the question turns uncomfortable. Why polish two thousand words, weigh every transition, hunt for the right phrase, if all of it ends up swallowed and spat back in three lines by a piece of software? The article, as a form, is losing ground. Not because it's bad, but because no one has time to live it anymore.
So maybe text isn't dying. Maybe it's simply changing readers.
Did you see what just happened?
You didn't read this article to the end. You clicked a button, and a machine chewed it for you. Three lines. That's all that's left of it in your head now.
We just did, together, right here, exactly what everyone does a hundred times a day without thinking. And it cost nothing. That's the unsettling part: it worked. The summary was true. So why does it sting a little?
Because a summary gives you what a text says. Never what it does to you.
And that, this small thing you're feeling right now, no AI will ever summarize for you. You had to live it. So let's try another way. No more text to skim. One question, and you're the one who answers.
What do you take away from all this? Choose. Your answer writes the end of this page.
A little vertigo. I won't look at a summary the same way again.
Good. Keep that vertigo. It's the one thing on this page no machine could summarize for you.
I make things. And I just understood I have to change format.
Then stop writing to be read. Build to be lived. That's where you become irreplaceable.
Honestly? I'll keep asking for summaries.
Fair. Keep going. But now you know what you trade each time: depth for time. And sometimes, it's worth reading.
One last test. Take this page, the one you just lived. Copy it, paste it into an AI, ask it to summarize. It'll hand you a clean, tidy text, probably accurate. But it won't hand you back the choice you just made. Nor what you felt when your article got devoured. That meaning was never in the text. It was in what you did. And that doesn't summarize.
You can't summarize what you just lived.
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Questions
Why are web articles losing relevance?
Because people no longer read them: they ask an AI to summarize, or paste the link for the gist. The article isn't banned, it becomes skippable: the machine serves the essence instead of the reader.
What replaces the classic blog article?
The format an AI can't summarize: the experience. You don't read it, you move through it. Its meaning isn't in the text but in what the visitor does and feels.
Does written text disappear entirely?
No. It changes reader. Machines need text to read and cite a page; humans want the experience. A well-designed page serves both at once.
What is a "web experience"?
A page where the visitor isn't a spectator of text but an actor: they act, their gestures count, the page responds. That's what makes it alive for a human and impossible to reduce to a summary.