Welcome to the Singularity

Previewing The King and the Swarm, week 1

Yesterday, a cover story published in The Atlantic headlined “The End of Reading is Here”. It caused quite a stir! The author, Rose Horowitch, mentions a number of the touchpoints in early chapters of The King and the Swarm; it’s exciting to see these issues coming more generally to the surface.

But while I think Horowitch’s article documents the change pretty compellingly, we need to get beyond “oh no long-form reading seems to be over, and maybe it’ll take modernity with it”, to how is it over? Through what mechanisms? What can we learn from how it arrived, about the manner of its departure? And what does life look like in the aftermath? That is: less “can this be reversed” than “what comes next?”.

So this is what I’ll be exploring in The King and the Swarm, and previewing here in chapter-by-chapter summaries, while I work on the final section and wrap the draft up for my publisher’s September deadline. A couple of times a month I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the book or any other themes you want to bring.

This week, the book’s overarching thesis: the Singularity already happened. Not once, but three times.