This is the 10th and final instalment in a serial preview of The King and the Swarm, my book in progress. I’m sharing previews for paying subscribers, as I drag the manuscript over the line.
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.