Another thing supporting oral culture revival: a person's writing doesn't say as much about them anymore. Someone with half-baked ideas can publish mostly-baked text. Someone with shallow insight can present somewhat deeper insight. I.e. if someone published their first substack essay after GPT, and that's my first impression of their work, I can't know much about them. Which elements of style are theirs? Which thoughts, analogies, connections? How deeply have they considered what they're talking about? A coin toss, really... That's fascinating and still a shock to me, tbh. Someone's writing used to carry strong signal about how they thought, felt, paid attention! As a word fan, I used to put so much weight in this. Someone's text and expression revealed so much. So yes, oral culture. In many domains, it's no longer sufficient to write compelling things. You will need to defend your ideas in dialogue. You will need to show live embodied knowledge. On video, and IRL only if deepfakes become predominant in your domain. The principle of oral defense, of EU and UK academia, is now relevant to pop culture.