I’m both pleased and nervous to tell you all I’m writing another book! This one isn’t about feminism: its provisional title is the same as my recent long essay at First Things, The King and the Swarm, and it explores some of the same territory: namely, the political side-effects of the digital revolution.
My thesis is that the Singularity already happened. Merging with our machines isn’t some sci-fi possibility that’s coming a few years down the line. Rather, it already happened, via the smartphone interfaces all but a few hold-outs now own and in many cases use for literally hours every day. But really this isn’t the first such Singularity. In fact we’ve experienced information revolutions on a similar scale, at least twice before. The last such revolution was the printing press, a technology first developed in the 15th century and with such profoundly revolutionary impact that historians link it to world-changing events including the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War and, in time, the founding of the United States.
My starting-point for The King and the Swarm is a conclusion I’ve arrived at having spent the first two decades of my life obsessed with books, and the second two obsessed with the internet: that the internet is not an extension of print literature. Not at all. This isn’t an original conclusion, but the argument I want to set out at length in The King and the Swarm is as follows: not only is the internet different in kind, but at scale it reverses many of the critical cognitive shifts long since linked to print reading.
What would it mean to reverse the print revolution? At scale, we might find ourselves running seventeenth-century history again, but backwards. If that happened, you might expect to see Protestants turning back into Catholics; nation-states coming apart into their ethnic and geographic components; and, in England at least, the re-capitation of the monarch. Now, none of this is happening in quite the way it did in the 17th century, but in The King and the Swarm I want to make the case that a slew of contemporary phenomena make sense when seen in these over-arching terms. These phenomena span questions of religious faith, of national and international politics, and of how we believe states should justly be governed, and all are downstream of the transformative impact of the internet on the way we think.
There’s a great deal more to say about all this. My hope is to go on publishing this newsletter with my usual frequency, and as I write I expect the book’s themes will colour my work here, along with interesting tidbits and sidebar trains of thought that spin off that central enquiry. This shouldn’t be too different from what you’re used to seeing, as the book brings together ideas I’ve been working through for some time now, including in these pages.
I’m so grateful for all your support here, and don’t want you paying for no newsletter. So I want to reassure you all that if there comes a point in book-writing where I need to pause publishing here, in order to get the book done, I’ll suspend subscription payments on Substack until I’m over the line. For now, though, I’m going to try and keep both going. Let’s see how it goes.
The King and the Swarm be published by Swift in the UK, and Basic Liberty in the US. If all goes well it’ll be available in early 2027. With that: deep breath, and down the rabbit hole. Wish me luck!
God speed your way! I think this book will help us understand the opportunities and dangers before us.
I’m especially interested in how we can rediscover visual symbolism as “the language of creation” (M. Pageau) for the re-enchantment of our world.
Good luck Mary! I’m very much looking forward to reading the new book when it’s published x