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.