The Third Singularity

Rebuild the Monasteries, part 3

This is part 3 of Rebuild the Monasteries, first delivered at the 2026 Symbolic World conference themed on “Retelling the Cosmic Epic”. My topic is the cultural and spiritual implications of the digital revolution not just for reading, but also human memory.

In Part 1 I described how the “Singularity”, the moment of merger with our digital information technology, has already happened - but wasn’t the first such event. The first was literacy itself, circa 300 AD, which brought a new capacity for abstraction along with a new fear that writing would destroy memory.

Part 2 looked at what actually happened to memory, during the 1,800-odd-year period between literacy and the printing press. In brief: not so much destruction as increasing sophistication, and - especially after the fall of Rome - a convergence of memory technology with Christian spiritual practice, in monastic life. Then I look at what happened when the printing press made the art of memory obsolete.

This is the third and final part. Here we discuss the implications of, perhaps, returning to more medieval levels of general literacy - but, this time, without (at least yet) having established a comparable culture of trained memory. Some of those implications are gloomy - but, as you’ll see, not all of them.

The Third Singularity

If the form of print turned out to have far-reaching effects on culture and consciousness, the same is happening again now with the digital transition. Why?

Well, Walter Ong predicted that, thanks to TV and radio, we were heading for an age of “secondary orality”: where the spoken word once again took centre-stage. He was right, but ahead of himself; it wasn’t TV and radio that truly turned the tide of mass literacy, in the end. It was smartphones.

For Ivan Illich, the history of the West is the history of our evolving relationship with the alphabet. Well, it just evolved again. Between roughly 2007, when the first iPhone launched, and 2021 when the Covid lockdowns ended, Western (especially Anglophone) cultures transitioned definitively from print-first to digital-first.

Our culture is already as fully merged with this new technology as the premodern one became with print, and prior to that the “Age of Heroes” oral one became with the alphabet. This is true even of those who choose not to have a smartphone: the culture around you is still changed. The medium, as McLuhan famously pointed out, is the message.

In the case of information technologies, the medium also forms human consciousness individually and at scale, in the most direct imaginable fashion. I’m sure you all know the tech-pessimist lament about how scrolling is shredding everyone’s ability to concentrate. I get more book reading done in my annual week camping in a field with no mobile reception, than I do in the months before and after. Digital reading is, by design, a thicket of interruption and distraction.

There are subtler effects, too. Importantly, digital reading is less linear. People skip from text to text, skimming or CTRL+F-ing for relevant keywords. Formally, whereas you have to work quite hard to make a book non-linear in form, you have to work quite hard online to constrain people to a linear text.

The effect is to make digital reading more shallow and patterned. This matters. It creates its own kind of flow state, but this isn’t like the linear print-era form of a sustained argument. The short-form accessibility and high emotional tenor of digital content impairs the ability to focus on cooler, more abstract forms of thought.

What tends to be cultivated instead is associative, pattern-based, imagistic, and often highly poetic in character. But it’s also emotive, drawing sometimes on dark moods. (There’s also a marked correspondence, as I argued here, between standard forms of clickbait, and the medieval Seven Deadly Sins.)

They Walk Among Us

In this space memetic riptides ebb and flow at speed, sometimes with such force that abstract thought is difficult to sustain. I’m sure you all know the experience of being caught up in an online meme tide. As half a millennium of print culture cracks, taking with it rationalism, objectivity, secularism, materialism, facts, and long-form concentration, so the poetic language of demons, cryptids, possession, and enchantment that characterised premodern cultures have begun to trickle back in.

Another related casualty is the kind of careful fact-checking and verification that became so central a characteristic of the print era, and helped drive its huge advances in knowledge, expertise, and precision. When the British activist Matt Goodwin recently published a polemical book in Britain recently only to be accused of using apparently AI-hallucinated quotes, the scandal blew over in a couple of days while the book stayed on the bestseller list. No one cared, because the arguments felt sufficiently true.

Post-print media dis-incentivises long form, linear reading and deep concentration. It encourages a more participatory, emotion-led relation to the world. It’s less interested in facts, and forms our perception not for abstraction and detachment but pattern recognition. If this is starting to sound a bit like premodern spoken-word culture, that’s no coincidence.

But there’s one crucial difference. We have, as yet, developed no digital-age cultural practices directed at forming human memory. If anything, our culture is still hell-bent on not having to do this.

Unsouling the West