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.
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.