Does Writing Have a Future?
Source: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816670239/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.
Central argument
Flusser argues that alphanumeric writing did not merely record thought but produced a specific mode of consciousness — linear, historical, and critical — and that technical images (photographs, video, algorithmic visual media) are displacing writing as the dominant code. If that displacement completes itself, the form of reasoning writing made possible, including the capacity for historical thinking and ideological critique, will erode with it. The book is not a lament but a structural diagnosis: codes shape cognition, and changing the dominant code changes what kinds of thought a culture can sustain.
Critique
Flusser's framework treats 'technical images' as a relatively unified category and 'writing' as the bearer of critical consciousness, but this binary obscures the degree to which images can be analytically dense and writing can be ideologically inert or manipulative. A thoughtful reader might also press him on the determinism implicit in his model: if codes shape thought so thoroughly, it is unclear how any agent operating inside a dominant code could diagnose or resist its effects, which creates a tension his analysis never fully resolves.
Why it matters for product
A CPO whose teams communicate strategy primarily through decks, dashboards, and video demos — rather than written reasoning — is not just making a stylistic choice; following Flusser's logic, they are shaping what kinds of arguments can be made and what kinds of problems can be seen. Concretely, the shift toward visual roadmaps, OKR heatmaps, and metric dashboards may optimize for pattern recognition while systematically weakening the capacity for causal, sequential reasoning about why a product strategy is or is not working. This suggests that writing-intensive practices — structured narratives, written decision logs, long-form product reviews — are not bureaucratic overhead but cognitive infrastructure worth defending deliberately.