The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults' literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection. In this essay the author examines literacy's interventions in cultural perspectives of aging through the published discourses of AARP, a group that openly attempts to shape perceptions and consumer behavior of older adults, which the group currently defines as adults aged fifty and up. By examining the rhetorics repeatedly circulated by AARP, the author further captures some of the values that are associated with older adults and literacy technologies in texts targeted directly, and repeatedly, toward older audiences. Throughout this essay, the author draws from John Duffy's "rhetorical conception of literacy development" (7, 17) which not only understands literacy as a social practice, but also acknowledges that social worlds cannot be divorced from rhetorical symbolic worlds. Deriving his conception of rhetoric from Kenneth Burke, Duffy views rhetorics--to which literacy might grant access and membership--as symbolic worlds in which ideologies are "imposed, shared, understood, and overthrown". For the purposes of the author's study, then, literacy is a way into age-based rhetorics: the symbolic worlds that circulate ideologies of aging. The rhetorics detailed here are only a small part of the symbolic worlds in which older adults participate, but the presence of these rhetorics, and the ways by which they are made available to aging audiences, might have something to say about the rhetorical choices that older adults can make and the ways they identify themselves as literate elders (Contains 1 figure and 10 notes.)