Does Writing Have a Future?

Flusser asks whether alphanumeric code — and with it, the linear, historical, critical thinking that writing made possible — will survive the age of technical images. His answer is not nostalgic but analytical: writing produced a specific mode of consciousness, and if technical images replace writing as the dominant code, that consciousness will be replaced too. The book appeared in German in 1987 and in English translation only in 2011, which means its arguments arrived in the Anglophone world just as the shift Flusser described was becoming visible in the form of image-based social media and algorithmic feeds. His framework — that codes shape thought, not merely transmit it — parallels Ong and McLuhan but pushes further into the consequences for political and scientific reasoning. More relevant in 2026 than when written, precisely because the transition he diagnosed is now well underway.