In recent days I’ve ended up discussing LLMS with several intelligent, high-flying professionals, working in roles where LLM use is matter of routine. They all told me, independently, that on principle they refuse to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the models with which they interact. The common theme in their reasoning is that withholding politeness is an important way of maintaining the mental distinction between an LLM and a human.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since. Because I do say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to LLMs, also on principle, even though I agree that an LLM isn’t and never will be conscious.

Which of us is right?

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The individuals I’ve discussed this with are all Christians, which means taking as read that humans have immortal souls, that participate in the divine. (I don’t think it’s possible to be a Christian without believing humans have souls.) Whether or to what extent other living creatures have souls has been a subject of lively Christian debate for a long time. But if you start from the view that both life and consciousness derive ultimately from God, that more or less forecloses the possibility of humans being able to create machines that can think.

Christian professionals who are expected to use LLMs at work are thus in an odd position. Here is a technology that your paradigm says isn’t conscious, won’t ever become conscious, and definitely doesn’t have a soul. But to get the best results from it, you need to interact with it in a way that closely resembles the way you would interact with a human being. How should you think about this?

I’ve been pondering this since my recent visit to Anthropic, not least because I decided, in the course of preparing for that meeting, to spend a bit of time with their LLM, “Claude”.

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Elsewhere this week, my remarks at the Women’s Conference in Rochester, NY are now online at ! Read now. Continuing the reprotech theme, today’s newsletter is a public service broadcast reminding you all: don’t buy spaff off the internet.

Does anyone actually need to hear this? It beggars belief that this should be the case, and yet: scarcely a month goes by without another story emerging, of someone who obtained human genetic material online and later regretted it.

There was all those women who obtained spaff off a man who fathered 15 children despite having an inherited genetic condition, Fragile X. The man in question knew about his heritable condition, but still advertised his sperm for use by lesbian couples, via social media. More gothic still is the fascists spaff super-spreader: Clive Jones, a former BNP member who is one of Britain’s most prolific sperm donors, claiming to have fathered more than 140 children.

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According to the Times, Jones also advertises via social media. Then, having made contact, he’ll drive to the house of any woman who requests it and hand over a pot of, er, himself. For free. Why? Is he trying to do a budget Elon? Is this a fetish thing? Is he just a nice man who wants to help? I don’t understand anything any more, and I hate this timeline.

But though I’m taking a slightly flippant tone here, the theme is serious. A world in which people are buying and selling (or exchanging, for whatever other baroque motivation) human gametes, of either kind, that could become new children, is a world in which we’re already so far down the Meat Lego chute it’s hard to see how we scramble back up. And yes I know that sounds disgusting as well. It’s meant to, because it is.

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This message comes to you from San Francisco, where I have stopped for a very brief visit in a very busy few weeks. A couple of the sessions I recorded Stateside on my last trip a couple of weeks ago (I know) are now live! For Socrates in the City, I spoke to UNC Wilmington professor of religious studies, Diana Pasulka, about her absolutely wild new book on “UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny” - and about the time the Men In Black came calling at her house.

This is one of the most head-spinning interviews I’ve done to date. Take a look:

Also while I was in NYC I had the opportunity to guest-host the New York Times podcast, Interesting Times, where I spoke to author and fellow book-lover James Marriott about his concern that short-form online brainrot risks taking us back to a “New Dark Ages”. We talked TikTok, McLuhan, medieval monks, and Nayib Bukele as the first truly net-native autocrat. Watch here.

Now, on to a rant that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a little while. It partly crystallised today, writing this short comment at UnHerd on the announcement by the Pentagon that the execution by firing squad of former US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 14 people and injured more than 30 others at a Texas military base in 2009, will be livestreamed. That set me to thinking about the online economy of spectacle, in short-form video, and especially the way gore videos have become increasingly ubiquitous, in the context of political activism and propaganda, sometimes bizarrely juxtaposing snuff from both sides of the same conflict in a single newsfeed. The result is both horrible and, cumulatively, weirdly numbing.

But this is only one of the more extreme variants on a form of content now ubiquitous in the digital public realm: in fact, one of clickbait’s most seductive registers. But while it’s a kind of content that mimics political engagement, I’m coming to think it’s not just antithetical to political organising, but actively malign: a product that delivers profit for the maker, but - for the audience - not action but apathy, depression, and alienation. I call this type of content Despair Pornography.

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Baudrillard said it’s not possible for anywhere in Europe to be truly modern. Only America, he said, can do that. Having spent the last three nights in New York City, I’m minded to agree with him.

New York is so photographed, filmed, and mythologised that there’s surely nothing left to say. But honestly: it should be recognised as a wonder of the modern world, just as the Lighthouse at Alexandria was a wonder of the ancient one.

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The other day, on a rooftop at UnHerd’s just-opened event space in Midtown, chatting to someone I absently registered the vertical canyons of plate glass behind me like: “oh this must be painted on some huge canvas, nothing like that could possibly be real.” But it’s real. The same sense at 0530 this morning, running through Central Park. Now and then I’d glance up and there, in the gaps between trees, is this totally sci-fi backdrop, again just impossible and yet definitely there.

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It was a busy trip! I was in town to interview several wonderful guests for Socrates Dialogues. I spoke to Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies who specialises in UFOlogy, the theologian Carl Trueman, and the economist and author Catherine Pakaluk. They were all so great! I also guest-hosted an episode of Interesting Times at the NYT, where I spoke to James Marriott about The New Dark Ages, his bestselling new book on the coming age of post-literacy.

The looming theme of several conversations was the intersection of print, image, and religiosity. (James and I laughed at the irony of taking to video podcast, to discuss the cultural impact of abandoning reading for the moving image.) Diana’s work focuses on the way digital media transforms our consciousness, and the new forms of religious experience this is mediating. Both those conversations will be released next week: the Marriott one at NYT Opinion, and the Pasulka episode at Socrates.

Continuing the theme of image, enchantment, print, and post-print, in a brief hour of downtime I had the opportunity to visit the Morgan Library, founded by Gilded Age banker JP Morgan. Now it’s a whole cultural centre with several galleries, but I wanted to see the historic collection. In particular, having spent most of the last year writing about the beginning and end of the print revolution, I felt compelled to see the Gutenberg Bible on display there: the text that really started it all.

That artefact gave me chills. But the whole library gave me chills! I ended up just sitting there, for ages, taking in the beautiful lines and atmosphere.

The room itself is an artefact, where every inch that’s not shelved is covered in beautiful detailing, and exquisite frescoes depicting literary genres. The collection is astonishing too. Just this one short section of shelves holds crucial artefacts from England’s early modern wars of religion:

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Display cases show works from Morgan’s collection of pre-print, illuminated manuscripts…

…and others held jewelled medieval book covers, that look like they’re lit from within by sacred fire:

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Do we still treasure books like this? Well, kind of, but in a muted and ambivalent way. One of the features of the AI revolution that’s prompted the most angry public reaction is the discovery that AI companies are buying up printed books for “destructive scanning”, which is to say cutting the spines off, scanning the pages for training data, then shredding the remnants. The outraged response surely has its deep roots in the reverence that, all the way back in premodern times, prompted bookmakers, scholars, religious, and artisans to lavish effort, skill, and treasure onto devotional book-treasures such as this one.

The mechanically printed books now being shredded by AI are a dim shadow of such artefacts. You might even argue that it was print - the technology of Gutenberg - that first de-mystified and in a sense tore apart those older, hand-written sacred objects ,just as AI is now de-mystifying and tearing apart the printed kind.

My question as ever is: what comes next? The sense I’ve hatched all through The King and the Swarm (which, by the way, has now GONE TO THE PUBLISHER!!!!) is that the result will be bringing us out the other end of a long stretch of disenchantment, into someplace very much weirder.

On that note! Also at the Morgan Library was an exhibition of Tarot cards. In one gallery was a display of Renaissance cards, some hand-painted and gilded and some exquisitely drawn:

In an adjacent gallery was a display of more recent interpretations of the Tarot, including originals for the famous deck created by British occultists Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943 drawing on a host of mystical traditions plus the projective geometry of Rudolf Steiner:

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I didn’t have very long and was very tired, so lingered in the library only about an hour, most of which I spent with Gutenberg. But I was struck by just how much more crowded the Tarot exhibition was, than the historic library. Are we just more at home with emblems, images, and enchantment now, than with the written word? As the machine continues busily shredding our printed legacy, and digesting it for whatever comes next, perhaps the relative popularity of the exhibits is a sign of things to come.

What a whirlwind! This message comes to you from the Acela corridor, where I’m en route to a few more engagements in Washington, before zooming home again on Monday. After that I think I’m going to need a couple of days in a darkened room, breathing into a paper bag. More reflections to follow when I’ve had a chance to catch my breath…

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Tomorrow (Thursday 24 September) I’ll host a salon chat at the same time(s) as previously: 7pm UK / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific.

To recap so far: I’ve argued that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times, in the ways we’ve been recursively shaped by our information media. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed in the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

After that, I sketched the role print played in delivering “secularism”, and then last week the way the internet is helping to reverse those shifts, producing a world growing rapidly stranger and more enchanted. Then I’ve argued that print played a central role in the formation of nation states, along multiple axes: strengthening vernaculars over the lingua franca, changing the possible scale of governance, and weakening the power of the Church. But, again, that world is coming undone - and it turns out there’s a plot twist. This didn’t just begin with the internet. Nation states have been unravelling for a while, beginning with the advent of what Marshall McLuhan called “electric simultaneity”.

Then we stepped back to the 17th century, how print contributed to the end of absolute monarchy, to the formation of parliamentary democracy, and - in time - to the foundation of the American republic: more than any other polity, the nation that print built. We saw how print helped to dissolve the medieval notion of “corporate” life in favour of a new individualism, undermining the legitimacy of monarchs even as it fostered a vision of just government as emerging from the bottom up. In this final preview instalment I’ll sketch how the first the electric and now, latterly, the digital age has intensified that democratic vision to the point where it’s inverted into “Our Democracy”: political representation thinned and hollowed to representation in media, and almost entirely cut adrift from political agency.

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To recap so far: I’ve argued that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times, in the ways we’ve been recursively shaped by our information media. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed in the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

After that, I sketched the role print played in delivering “secularism”, and then last week the way the internet is helping to reverse those shifts, producing a world growing rapidly stranger and more enchanted. Then I’ve argued that print played a central role in the formation of nation states, along multiple axes: strengthening vernaculars over the lingua franca, changing the possible scale of governance, and weakening the power of the Church. But, again, that world is coming undone - and it turns out there’s a plot twist. This didn’t just begin with the internet. Nation states have been unravelling for a while, beginning with the advent of what Marshall McLuhan called “electric simultaneity”.

Now we’re back in the 17th century again, this time to see how print contributed to the end of absolute monarchy, to the formation of parliamentary democracy, and - in time - to the foundation of the American republic: more than any other polity, the nation that print built.

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Yes yes late again this week and I am sorry but also: the book is done!!! There’s some tuning and polishing still to do, but it’s all there, all the way to the end. The last chapter was even madder than the penultimate one: it’s either the best or the most bonkers work I’ve ever done, or perhaps both. Either way, it’s done.

And so to our previews. To recap so far: I’ve argued that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times, in the ways we’ve been recursively shaped by our information media. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed in the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

After that, I sketched the role print played in delivering “secularism”, and then last week the way the internet is helping to reverse those shifts, producing a world growing rapidly stranger and more enchanted. Then I’ve argued that print played a central role in the formation of nation states, along multiple axes: strengthening vernaculars over the lingua franca, changing the possible scale of governance, and weakening the power of the Church. Now, it’s time to see how, and why, that world is coming undone again - and it turns out there’s a plot twist.

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Louise and I discussed the intense mimetic storms that have swirled around the Lindsay Clancy trial.

I don’t normally post trigger warnings but: this one contains some dark themes.

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First off: I know, I promised a preview every week but I skipped last week. I had, unexpectedly, a chance to give four consecutive lo o o o ong days to the penultimate chapter of the book, and once I started I couldn’t stop.

The chapter itself has shaped up to be much madder than I expected, in a way I’m pleased and excited about. So I’m not sorry for having taken the time. But I did renege on my promise . For those who stuck with me regardless: I’m grateful for your support as I claw my way to the finish line. By way of thanks for sticking around, I have an audio episode with the marvellous Louise Perry coming up for paid subscribers next week, plus I’m also back to weekly King and the Swarm previews.

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And so to this week’s chapter preview. So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed in the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

After that, I sketched the role print played in delivering “secularism”, and then last week the way the internet is helping to reverse those shifts, producing a world growing rapidly stranger and more enchanted. Now, this week, we’re back at the second Singularity again, to revisit the story from the perspective of nation states.

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Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 13 August at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I’ll try and keep the thread questions from proliferating this time.)

So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed in the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

Last week, I sketched the role print played in delivering “secularism”: that is, the belief that sets of propositions about moral and supernatural matters exist, called “religion”, which are entirely optional and which we can stand outside and comprehend objectively. This assumption is so foundational to being “modern” most simply take it for granted, but it could never have come about without the printing press. And since print has been overtaken, first by broadcast media and now by the digital kind, secularism has begun coming undone. That’s the subject of this week’s preview…

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Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 13 August at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I’ll try and keep the thread questions from proliferating this time.)

So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud. Then we looked at the revolutionary effects of improving the scale and fixity of book production with print, even though people didn’t start out using it for anything very revolutionary (that came later).

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This chapter summary looks at those revolutionary effects of print from the perspective of religious faith. Here the impact of print was paradoxical: it both intensified religious feeling, and also, eventually, gave rise to the “secularism” we now think of as distinctively modern.

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If you’re free, have a question, want to harangue me about the KATS summaries so far, or anything else, now’s your chance…! See you there. Link:

https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/chat

Over the coming weeks, as I bring book-writing to its close, I’ll be previewing my forthcoming book The King and the Swarm here, in chapter-by-chapter summary form.

Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 30 July at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I promise I’ll do a video one in August…!)

So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud.

Now we need to dive a bit deeper into the print Singularity. In this week’s preview we’ll touch on some general features of this momentous transformation. Then we’ll look more deeply in future chapters at three facets of the culture it created - secularism, nation-states, and democracy - before I argue that the recent Singularity is on its way to reversing all these attainments of the print era.

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Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 30 August at 19.00. Link to follow!

Week 1 is here, in which I set out the book’s over-arching thesis. In week 2, I previewed the chapter which explores the very first Singularity: the Greek alphabet. Now, it’s time to delve into the hybrid cultures of literacy, memory, and the spoken word that took hold in the long stretch between the ancient world and the printing press.

The next Preview Salon will be on Thursday 30 July at 19:00 UK time, 14:00 EST / 11:00 PST.

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Link is here. See you there?

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Reminder to anyone that I’ll be hosting a salon later today for supporters, to discuss the preview posts so far on The King and the Swarm (or anything else that’s on your mind).

We’ll start at:

11:00 Pacific

14:00 Eastern

19:00 UK

I'll share a link when we kick off but it’ll be a thread in subscriber chat. I’ll send another link when we kick off. Hope to se…

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Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the book or any other themes you want to bring. Thank you for your poll responses last week on date and time! More of you opted for the later time, so the first AMA will happen at 19.00 UK time (1400 EST / 1100 PST) this coming Thursday, 16 July. Link to follow!

Week 1 is here, in which I set out the book’s over-arching thesis. This week, the deep context for the book: how the Greek alphabet was the first information revolution in “the West”, what was unique about this technology, and how it sets the stage for much that we’re facing today.

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Yesterday, a cover story published in The Atlantic headlined “The End of Reading is Here”. It caused quite a stir! The author, Rose Horowitch, mentions a number of the touchpoints in early chapters of The King and the Swarm; it’s exciting to see these issues coming more generally to the surface.

But while I think Horowitch’s article documents the change pretty compellingly, we need to get beyond “oh no long-form reading seems to be over, and maybe it’ll take modernity with it”, to how is it over? Through what mechanisms? What can we learn from how it arrived, about the manner of its departure? And what does life look like in the aftermath? That is: less “can this be reversed” than “what comes next?”.

So this is what I’ll be exploring in The King and the Swarm, and previewing here in chapter-by-chapter summaries, while I work on the final section and wrap the draft up for my publisher’s September deadline. A couple of times a month I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the book or any other themes you want to bring.

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This week, the book’s overarching thesis: the Singularity already happened. Not once, but three times.

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Marathon preparations are all-cons…

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