The Monster That Began As A Typo

Previewing The King and the Swarm, week 4

The Demogorgon, as envisaged in Stranger Things

Over the coming weeks, as I bring book-writing to its close, I’ll be previewing my forthcoming book The King and the Swarm here, in chapter-by-chapter summary form.

Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 30 July at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I promise I’ll do a video one in August…!)

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 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.

Now we need to dive a bit deeper into the print Singularity. In this week’s preview we’ll touch on some general features of this momentous transformation. Then we’ll look more deeply in future chapters at three facets of the culture it created - secularism, nation-states, and democracy - before I argue that the recent Singularity is on its way to reversing all these attainments of the print era.