Against Summary

I have asked an AI system to summarize something almost every day this week. A dense article about municipal budgeting. The client intake forms for a nonprofit I volunteer with. A 200-page committee report. The irony of writing this essay is not lost on me. But there is a difference between using a tool for its genuine purpose—compression in service of triage—and believing that compression is the thing we actually want. The summary has become so frictionless, so perfectly adequate for its nominal job, that we have begun to mistake adequacy for value. We have started to think that what a summary can preserve is all that was ever worth preserving.

This temptation is not new. I sold used books for eleven years in Providence, and I watched boxes of them come through the shop: the condensed editions, the abridgments, the CliffsNotes and SparkNotes volumes with their neon spines. People bought them at our discount prices with the sort of gratitude you might feel for a prescription you’d been dreading—relief that the medicine was available, even though everyone involved understood the medicine was also the disease. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books arrived in bulk, their pages thin and crabbed, and I sold almost none of them. No one wanted to read Middlemarch in fourteen pages. What people wanted was to have read it, to possess the fact of having read it, to move on to the next fact. The desire is old. But the technology that enables it is new, and that changes something about the scale.

What a summary cannot preserve is form. It cannot preserve the deliberate unfolding of a thing in time, the way an argument gathers weight through repetition and variation, the way a character’s voice reveals itself not in essence but in the particular pressure and texture of its utterance across three hundred pages. When I read Anna Karenina, I do not receive a list of plot points and themes. I undergo an experience. The novel is not a container of information to be extracted; it is a structure of attention, a discipline imposed on how I move through time. To summarize it is rather like summarizing a swim. Yes, you get wet. Yes, certain things happen in a particular order. Yes, there are facts that survive the summary: the water temperature, the length of the pool, whether you drank seawater. But what you cannot summarize is the event itself, the bodily knowledge of the cold or the warmth, the rhythm of effort and breath, the meditative dissolution of self into motion. Information can be compressed. Experience cannot, because experience is not information until it is over and already lost.

The summary has become, according to the reports I read, the most-used feature of these systems. This is not incidental. This is the point. People want to have read the book, attended the meeting, understood the subject. They want the credential without the duration. They want a three-hour novel reduced to three minutes, and not because they lack the time—we always have time for what we value; we create time by not doing something else—but because they have come to believe that the time is the waste, and the summary is the gain. What is lost in the compression seems, to them, to have never been the point. The point was the information. But it was not.

There is a difference between knowing about a book and having been changed by one. I can tell you that Beloved concerns the trauma of slavery and its return, that it uses magical realism to represent the irruption of the past into the present, that it has been called one of the great American novels. I can do this in two sentences. But I cannot convey to you what it does, which is to break something open in you and leave it broken in a way that becomes, over time, a new shape of understanding. This is not information. Information does not change you. Knowing that war is terrible is information. Reading All Quiet on the Western Front in the particular prose that Remarque chose, page after page, the accumulation of small moments of violence and intimacy and degradation—this changes you, and it changes you in a way that is utterly irreversible and utterly individual. No two readers undergo the same change, and no summary can capture any of it.

I should say: I am not anti-technology. I own two e-readers. I use them for books I want to move through quickly, books I read while standing on public transportation, books I know will not ask much of me and where the efficiency is, honestly, a relief. There are books I read to have read them, and I do not apologize for this. There are also genuine uses for a summary. A meeting summary is not a meeting, and we are right to feel grateful that we do not have to attend every meeting. A manual can be skimmed; critical information can be extracted. A committee report can be condensed without catastrophic loss. I use summaries for these things. I do not believe they are evil. But I have also come to notice the gradient on which these uses lie, and how easily we slide from genuine utility into something else entirely. How easily we convince ourselves that we wanted speed when what we have actually chosen is escape.

What troubles me is not the tool. Tools are neutral until they are not, and then they are neutral again in a different direction, depending on how you use them. What troubles me is the logic that says: if you can have the summary, why would you want the book? And the answer is because the book is not the content, the book is the event, and events cannot be replaced by their descriptions without losing precisely what made them events rather than mere information transfer. And yet I do not know what to do about the fact that this logic is winning, that more people want the summary than want the swim, that we have engineered a world where the bottleneck is no longer scarcity but attention, and where attention has become so scarce that we are willing to trade the transformation for the fact. I only know what I refuse.

I will not ask an AI to summarize what I have not read. I will not use the summary as a substitute for the thing itself. I will not pretend that knowing about a book and having been shaped by its language and time are the same knowledge. But I also know that this refusal is increasingly quixotic, that it will not stop the tide, that for most people most of the time, the summary will be enough. Perhaps it is. Perhaps I am preserving something that was never real to begin with, clinging to an idea of reading that belonged to a different economy. But I think not. I think the difficulty of the swim is its point. I think the time it takes is not a bug but the substance itself.