New essay: The King And The Swarm

The digital revolution is really a putsch

I’m immensely grateful to the support of First Things in enabling me to spend time on this new, extended essay exploring the cognitive side-effects of the digital revolution within wider politics and culture. In it, I argue that what was greeted by early tech utopians as an extension of the print revolution, with its attendant assumptions concerning freedom of information, intellectual emancipation, and the expansion of democracy, in reality the effects of digital are counter-revolutionary:

Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over—a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made bythe printing press to their story, most assumed theadvent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch—one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.

The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI.

Far from broadening political participation, digital stratifies it; far from freeing our minds through literacy, digital tends toward post-literacy. The net effect, I’ve argued, will be to replay the political tumult of seventeenth-century England, just this time in reverse.

In the essay, I ask the question: in what does just rule consist, for a predominantly post-literate people? The answer, as you will see, is a provocative one.

Read the whole thing here.