Walter Ong defined Primary Orality as the communication of pre-literate cultures, reliant entirely on memory, physical presence, and the spoken word. Secondary Orality emerged with electronic media, creating a global village where spoken communication was backed by written scripts and broadcast technology.
Tertiary Orality, which is just beginning, is the paradigm where human communication returns to a continuous, spoken, and screenless interface. OpenAI placed a big bet on Tertiary Orality. The project, called in the press a "screenless phone" began as a collaboration between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jony Ive's hardware startup, io Products. In mid-2025, io Products officially merged with OpenAI to deeply integrate the hardware engineering and AI research teams. The goal is to create an "anti-phone" that moves away from traditional screens and app grids. It aims to leverage ambient computing, where the AI serves as a context-aware, voice-driven assistant that interacts seamlessly with your environment.
So maybe there's a piece of the future in which people don't read books anymore. Book reading is already in decline. Children will grow up asking questions to thin air, and, as if magic, thin air will respond. Prayers might more often come true. Whims maybe more so.
While Tertiary Orality promises a seamless, frictionless interaction with our environment, blindly regressing into a purely spoken, screenless paradigm risks plunging us back into the volatile dynamics of a pre-literate world. Walter Ong warned that primary oral cultures, lacking the structuring and distancing technology of writing, are sometimes inherently combative and reactive.
But literacy has also brought combative dangers. This has been well documented with many forms of organized religion. Religions built on scripture have sometimes become "persecuting societies". The term comes from "The Formation of a Persecuting Society" by R. I. Moore. So this is also a risk we must navigate.
But let's assess the risks of tertiary orality. We are already witnessing the regression into this "electronic jungle." The modern digital sphere, saturated with generative deepfakes, synthetic voice cloning, and sophisticated cybercrime, has become an environment where ambient deception thrives. In this space, fraud relies precisely on the erasure of analytic distance—manipulating the immediacy and intimacy of spoken interaction to bypass critical thinking. When the environment speaks back, and every synthetic interaction mimics human emotion, the protective skepticism cultivated by literacy dissolves. We are left vulnerable to an unseen, omnipresent wilderness of bad actors where truth is indistinguishable from manipulative noise.
The solution to surviving this reversion lies in the development of perimeter ecosystems. Rather than entirely abandoning the screenless future, we must structure it through decentralized networks that act as localized, intelligent boundaries. By integrating ambient AI at the edge of these networks, a perimeter ecosystem filters the chaos and malicious actors of the electronic jungle before they can reach the individual.
Crucially, these network nodes must be grounded in principles of fundamental balance—functioning much like the Navajo concept of Hózhó (harmony, beauty, and balance)—where the technology actively stabilizes the environment. In this decentralized model, ambient AI does not merely interpret semantic intent; it serves as a protective, harmonizing layer that discerns between authentic connection and synthetic fraud. The perimeter ecosystem essentially restores the necessary boundary and safety that literacy once provided, transforming the chaotic electronic jungle into an ordered, secure, and balanced lived experience.