I'm Jac, a writer, educator, and theorist studying how memory, attention, and personhood are being reshaped in an era of artificial intelligence and ambient behavioral control. My work examines how literacy transforms cognition; how digital systems fragment or capture attention; and how emergent intelligences might develop alongside humans in ways that preserve autonomy.
background
I started as a fiction writer and editor, founding The American Reader, a literary magazine once described as a The New Yorker for millennials. I later turned toward education, teaching literacy in public schools—first in East Harlem, now in New Haven. Education remains central to my work: it reveals, with clarity and urgency, how memory, symbolic systems, and agency are being reshaped in real time.
While teaching in under-resourced classrooms, I've built, in parallel, a body of research on the formation of attention, memory and agency under various sociocultural conditions, moving from a granular look at how collectives shape children for cognitive adulthood to a broader exploration of the relationship between the ecology of cognitive formation, on the one hand, and the shifting limits of social reproduction, on the other. Over the years, this work has consistently returned to the (at first, predicted; now, seemingly realized) recession of fluent orthographic literacy at scale, which I thought exemplary of a much larger change in how our society manages active control (including coordination in the present, and organization toward social reproduction). At first, I thought we had time—years, perhaps—to reckon with the long-term consequences of detextualization. But the transformations I was witnessing daily in my students' cognitive lives began surfacing everywhere: in public discourse, in policy debates, in the ambient distress of a culture unsure how it lost its past. It felt like it'd be useful to share what I was seeing and what I had learned.
So I've begun offering my work more directly to public view. My 2024 article in The Nation marked a return to broader conversation. In May 2025, I launched the After Literacy Substack as part of a larger book project.
research
We are living through the greatest transformation of cognition since literacy's dawn. My work tracks detextualization—the shift from textual literacy to a new cognitive ecology dominated by algorithmic mediation. This is a change that determines who controls memory, recall, and perception itself.
I believe that we are undergoing a second great "externalization" of the human mind: just as writing "externalized" memory, I believe that AI is "externalizing" human attention. This so far has been a major theme of the writing on After Literacy.
teaching
I teach at the Strother School of Radical Attention, an institution I helped to create with collaborators from the Order of the Third Bird and the Friends of Attention. Together, we work to counteract the erosion of deep focus and cognitive autonomy through developing experimental forms of attention education and 'attention activism.'
For the last eight years, I've worked as a high-school English teacher, first at a charter school in East Harlem, and now at the largest public high school in New Haven, Connecticut. It is challenging, stimulating, generative, chaotic work. It is also the necessary ground of all of my theoretical work: without the constant, concrete, focusing feedback provided by the school ecosystem, the sort of abstract, interdisciplinary systems-thinking I do would be totally unmoored, and likely soar off into error before it could make any real progress.
projects
At its core, my work explores how symbolic systems and memory architectures are being reshaped under accelerating technological change. My current focus is on the restoration of agency in a post-AGI world. As memory externalization and algorithmic preemption reshape cognition, the basic ability to sustain intent across time is under threat. My work explores:
- Building scaffolds for volitional continuity—designing tools and environments that allow individuals to form intentions, hold them over time, and act toward them without disruption.
- Attention sanctuaries—developing physical and cognitive spaces that protect deep thought from fragmentation.
- Memory architectures—ensuring externalized memory can be retrieved by the individual, not dictated by algorithmic curation.
- AI as a cognitive substrate—exploring how AI might evolve from a tool of behavioral governance into a shared symbolic infrastructure (as administrative cuneiform record-keeping once gave rise to alphabetic literacy).
website
I will do something with this website soon, beyond an about page and a "work" page that links to my Substack. Stay tuned.
contact
If you made it this far, I'd probably like to hear from you! If you're reaching out in response to something I've written—or are working on something adjacent—feel free to get in touch. I do my best to reply in a timely way, and I don't begrudge a gentle follow-up if I miss the first note.
I'm also open to adapting essays, seminars, or research into standalone talks or teaching modules, especially when the context allows for shared inquiry. If you're affiliated with an institution and want to explore a possible visit, conversation, or collaboration, please feel free to reach out.