*Naomi Alderman* # Progressive Summary Alderman frames the current moment as the third big information crisis since the invention of writing and the printing press. > If nothing else, this book is an argument that once we do know the name of our epoch, we can work to look after our selves and our societies and communities through it. Use the technologies for all the fascinating opportunities they offer. But also: have dinner with people in real life. Talk to real people not AI. Read a book over scrolling. Have the kind of hard conversation which builds relationships. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## 1 - the most useful thing > I’m using ‘burning at the stake’ as a shorthand in this book – for all the things people end up doing in the throes of a doctrinal dispute that are really completely against the values they would otherwise claim to hold. They are things that involve turning a living, breathing person into a symbol, something that can be treated with extreme cruelty to make your point. When I talk about ‘burning at the stake’ I don’t mean ‘criticizing someone’s views in mature debate’ or ‘protesting against government policies’. I mean the things that demean you as a human if you do them to others. I mean the point when the desire to just win this argument turns you into someone who goes against all your other values. There is never a good enough reason to burn someone at the stake. > I think the following is incontestable: trying to get rid of all opinions that are different to yours can only ever be attempted by unthinkably vast human rights atrocities. (And even then it doesn’t actually work. There are still, in fact, both Catholics and Protestants.) > We live in a tidal wave of data, coming at us constantly. We don’t have the social and informational structures in place yet to manage it. > > My suggestion is that this enormous information wave makes us anxious and angry. > > How? All this information introduces us to all the things we don’t know, all the ways in which we’re not experts. ## 2 - the uli that never fades > It is hard for us now, in a culture built on literacy, to really experience how writing shapes so many aspects of our world. But permanence is a big one. Like the modern internet, the invention of writing was a process which removed a previous ‘right to forget and be forgotten’. > The power of writing technology is almost impossible to overstate. As Obi Okonkwo discovers, it invents the concept of inescapable debt – it also makes possible advanced forms of trade, stock-keeping and taxation, bureaucracy and wills that express a person’s wishes after death. It also made new forms of conflict possible for the very first time. > What we can say is that the symbolic world of written words, of printing and now of the internet, introduces the possibility of a war of interpretation – in which people fight ceaselessly about the meaning of maybe as little as a single written word or phrase. It creates conflict that goes on and on, because the words that were used remain fresh in writing as they never could in memory. And it creates the possibility of conflict with people you’ve never actually met. > There’s a theme here that’s going to be repeated when thinking about how information technologies change societal values – once we can record what people think and distribute it easily, we need the actual people quite a bit less. As Ong wrote: ‘Writing, and even more, print, downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favour of younger discoverers of something new.’ > Ong wrote that in oral cultures ‘exploratory thinking is not unknown, but it is relatively rare’ – he called it a ‘luxury’ because almost everyone has to spend the vast majority of their time – as he puts it – repeating ‘the truths that have come down from the ancestors. Otherwise these truths will escape and culture will be back on square one.’ > The historian Robert Bellah argues that – along with iron and the development of stronger weapons – development of a writing which most people could learn was one of the two key technologies that caused the Axial Age to happen. Bellah suggests that what was special about this epoch of history was that people began to experience ‘theoretic culture’ and ‘second-order thinking’ – that is, thinking about thinking – and that this could only happen because of the ‘external memory’ provided by writing. Once you can get your thoughts on paper you can look at them, as it were, from the outside. That’s why journalling, or writing an essay, or jotting down some notes or a mind-map about a new project ‘works’. You begin to be able to spot patterns in your own thinking, ways in which you go in circles or that what you’re saying is self-contradictory. These are incredibly powerful mechanical changes which give an immense array of new tools to human thinking. > What happens in an information crisis is that we have to deal with vastly more symbols than ever before. Our symbols speak to us as if they were people. > In an information crisis, because you’re learning to treat more and more symbols as if they were people, it’s easier to treat people as if they were symbols. ## on forgetting, and the right to forget > Ted Chiang, the brilliant science-fiction writer and observer of technology, has written an excellent story on the nature of forgetting and how the technology of writing interferes with it. The story is called The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling; like all his work it’s short and hugely thought-provoking: please do read it. > In the story, Chiang differentiates between truth as ‘precision’ and truth as ‘what is right for the community’. He writes: ‘The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently: for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.’ ## the box-pew effect > Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his book Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, has written: ‘Before the invention of printing, a major part of a scholar’s life was spent copying existing texts by hand, simply in order to have access to them. Now that printed copies of texts were increasingly available, there was less copying to do, and so there was more time to devote to thinking for oneself.’ > Writer and thinker Neil Postman has described the social change that had to happen to get through the Reformation and into the Enlightenment. For one thing, we had to rewrite the idea of childhood: ‘In 1480,’ he writes, ‘there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660 there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles.’ Now, there are more than 24,000 schools in England and we’ve gone from roughly one school for every 75,000 people to one school (and probably a much, much larger school) for about every 2,400 people. > > That’s an extraordinary change. To deal with the flow of information we had to take school from a very minority pursuit into something that every child does for the majority of their waking days for at least twelve years. We needed to invent the idea of a curriculum and the textbook; that is: ways to sift and condense enormous amounts of information. > It began to be normal for a book to have a contents page, an index; for books to be catalogued in standard ways; for indexes and books to be arranged in alphabetical order. The system of peer review of papers for journals was invented, systems of journalistic ethics and safeguards on accuracy. The world of print eventually became something any ordinary person could learn to navigate, and with skills tell truth from falsehood, at least most of the time. > The box-pew problem is in some ways a problem of social proof – seeking truth we turn towards this wonderful new technological source of information and away from other people. But with the new technology, sources of truth multiply. And without other people, how do we know which technological sources we can trust? ## 5 - the rise in utter nonsense > This is about not treating people as symbols. About the sense that we are not surrounded by cretinous vicious imbeciles but mostly by careful thoughtful people who may disagree with us but usually have good reasons for doing so and with whom we could have a reasonably civilized conversation and find many points on which we do agree. I know that saying this already makes me sound like a utopian. I know that it feels right now like we probably are surrounded by cretinous vicious imbeciles a lot of the time. That’s because we’re already right in the middle of an information crisis. ## 6 - mapping the inner world > What happens is a thinking-together. You get the same thinking-together in a democracy, or on a jury, or in an audience all watching the same play. I move my mind to the individual, I become part of collective thinking. Back and forth. That thinking-together is happening again right now, more intensely and more quickly. I have seen the same thought or the same reply to a debating point ripple out across the internet in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. It can feel overwhelmingly fast, and that’s mesmerizing … or terrifying. If you miss the moment when everyone changes their mind about something, you can be the one left high and dry. > Thinking-together can be extraordinarily powerful, a force-multiplier of human intelligence. It can also be insular, damaging and dangerous. No one ever created a system where everyone even appeared to agree without having committed a really large amount of atrocities. And every information crisis creates new ways to disagree and therefore new reasons for terrible actions. ## 7 - the idea of a library > Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Book of Sand, published in 1975, is about a man who comes into possession of an infinite book. When you hold the book, it is somehow impossible to turn to the first page or the last. However many pages you turn, there are still more between your fingers and the covers. The narrator receives the book from someone who is only too keen to get rid of it, a man who asks for a large sum but doesn’t bother to count the money he’s paid. > > Borges’s narrator soon finds out why possession of the book is as much a curse as a blessing. Even though he can’t read the words in the book, he cannot stop leafing through it to look at the pictures. Scrolling – as we might say – night and day, he becomes ‘a prisoner of the book, I almost never went out any more’. He begins to list the illustrations by writing them in a notebook; they never repeat and his notebook is soon full. He can barely sleep and when he dreams it is only of the book. > > In the story, the narrator realizes at last that the book is ‘a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself’. He does the only thing with it that he can think to do. He takes the Book of Sand to the Argentine National Library, loses himself in the stacks and, carefully not noticing where he is, he leaves the book on a shelf. > Neil Postman, in his fantastic prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, points out that an information glut can be extremely damaging to us. He says: ‘Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.’ He makes the brilliant point that the only really actionable item in the daily news for most of us, most of the time is … the weather. We might look at information about the crisis in the Middle East, about rising poverty, inflation, the risk of spreading war in Europe or the climate, but on any given day we’re not actually going to be able to do anything with that information. They’re not actionable on the level of ‘taking a jumper because it’s going to be cold later’. Postman says that constantly being surrounded by information that we can’t act on at that oral-culture human level gives us a sense of ‘diminished social and political potency’. If it was true in Postman’s day of newspapers and magazines, it’s even more true now in the age of always-on news and opinions via a smartphone. Fundamentally, like so much else that happens in an information crisis, the more we access this kind of completely unactionable information, the more we feel afraid, angry and out of control. A related thought to this might be the idea that the more privileged we are with our sense of agency, the more information we can take in without feeling "diminished". > A public library isn’t there to give you absolutely everything. It solves the Book of Sand problem by introducing a bit of scarcity and a lack of immediacy. And it’s not there to make money. It is there as a public service. It will not try to force you to come back again and again or insist that you take out books you didn’t really want or keep track of what you’re reading and sell that information about you to the highest bidder. > Really take a moment to consider what it means that a lot of modern smartphones can’t easily be turned off. > Aza Raskin, the man who invented infinite scroll, feels guilty about it now and believes it’s made smartphones more addictive. ## 8 - loneliness > As we’ve seen earlier, Walter Ong suggested that the development of easy-to-learn phonetic script may decrease respect for the elderly because we don’t need their memories of earlier events so desperately. I’m going to suggest that Ong’s insight is a specialized version of a general case. Writing, then printing, then the internet make us need the contents of everyone’s brains less. So it encourages us to respect each other less, talk deeply to each other less, trust each other less. > Nobel Prize-winning animal-behaviour expert Nikolaas Tinbergen studied herring gulls and came up with the theory of the ‘supernormal stimulus’. Adult herring gulls have a red spot on their bills which herring gull chicks peck at to get their parents to regurgitate food for them. Tinbergen showed the chicks objects with bigger, brighter, redder dots, even a bright red stick. The chicks pecked at all these supernormal stimuli in preference to their parents. > I would say that musical instruments are supernormal stimuli for the human voice. There may have been someone who argued against the invention of the skin drum or the bone flute, but history does not record them and music seems a pretty unalloyed good to me. Similarly, storytelling feels like some sort of supernormal stimulus for ‘just the normal events that make up a life’. If you work a long time with stories you start to get the sense that what you’re doing is a kind of denial of the fundamental shapeless soggy quality of actual life. Of course storytelling can be used for bad ends. But I wouldn’t give up the literature of the world in search of some ‘normal-stimulus purity’. Art is a supernormal stimulus. > Here is what the writer Catherine Shannon wrote in a brilliant post on her Substack called ‘Do You Remember How Life Used to Feel?’ about her experiences giving up using a smartphone. Just one week after she stopped using her smartphone she observed that: ‘People are already a bit more interesting to me. When I had my iPhone with me, I had what felt like the sum of all human knowledge in my pocket, coupled with an instant communication line to all of my friends and acquaintances. Seriously: who can compare? Now, I feel like every person I meet might teach me something. My conversations are literally more interesting, probably because I am allowing myself to be bored.’ That's how I felt after visiting Dharma Gaia for 2 days. > Fundamentally, the only way you discover whether you can trust other people is by trusting them a bit and seeing what happens. If they have the opportunity to harm you and don’t, that’s one good piece of evidence that they’re trustworthy. The way that communities form is by having to rely on one another. Everyone being tremendously independent and being able to do everything alone … leads to loneliness. ## 9 - a fast machine > In 2023, research for the Booker Prize Foundation found that readers under thirty-five are now buying more than six times as many books in translation as retired people. I find that exciting. People who grew up with this information crisis are naturally seeing themselves as more ‘the same’ as people who live in other countries and speak other languages. > Having thought about this a lot: increasingly I take everyone’s emotions seriously … and very few people’s opinions. Everyone’s got an opinion. Unless the person is an expert it’s a mistake to treat their opinion as very important. > We’re going to be living through a mechanical change in technology for the rest of our lives which will – for the rest of our lives – make us more psychologically prone to feeling that extreme punishments are justified for people who aren’t ‘on our side’. ## 10 - all right, but what am I supposed to do about all this? > Don’t let the worst ‘the other side’ has done become the new low bar for your own behaviour. Don’t treat people as symbols. Consider the possibility that where reasonable people disagree there may be some useful truth on both sides, even if it’s only the truth of – as we say these days – ‘lived experience’. Don’t try to get anyone fired today. Don’t insult or berate someone today. Don’t trawl through someone’s social media going back decades to dredge up the worst thing they’ve ever said, today. Don’t, fundamentally, burn anyone at the stake today. > I don’t say that anyone has to maintain a relationship. You must judge for yourself whether your own relationships are worth preserving. I don’t know your friends or family and it’s for you to decide if a relationship is damaging for you and whether you need to step away. But if both of you are fundamentally decent people who just happen to disagree, if neither of you has in fact burned anyone at the stake yet, it’s probably worth trying. > Something else we’ve done is to try to have most of our hard conversations in person, or at least over the phone. As I’ve written about in this book, writing technologies are incredibly useful but also each new development abstracts us more from Walter Ong’s ‘primary orality’, the warm, flexible, human-scale world of talk where we can see each other’s distress, respond to it, feel empathy with one another. It does not feel a coincidence to me that so many culture wars erupted into uncontrollable anger during the pandemic, when people could not speak to each other face to face. > Another piece of actual advice. If you encounter a stranger online who seems basically fine but is sounding really aggro with you, try saying something like this: ‘You’re sounding quite aggressive, is that what you intended?’ This works even better if you do it in a private message. Not everything has to be played out in public, just as we would (hopefully) wait to have things out in private with a friend or partner and not shout at them at a dinner party. > I can in general strongly recommend ceasing to expect everyone around you to agree with you. In this sense, what I’m recommending is a bit of a dose of the Jewish idea that action is more important than beliefs. Or maybe it’s simply the idea Elizabeth I got to after seeing her actual family destroy each other – not to mention put the country through years of bloodshed – in the English Reformation. No windows into men’s souls. The thing is that in these culture wars it’s likely that neither viewpoint will actually be eradicated. And we can’t, and don’t, demand that people all believe the things we think are correct. There is no ‘thoughtcrime’. People can believe whatever they like, inside their own heads, as long as they treat others well. > Here is a thought. If someone disagrees with you and still wants to speak to you respectfully and treat you well, perhaps consider that the name for that is love. # 11 - a wonderful catastrophe > I take the long view, and in the long view I feel fairly hopeful. We are trying to do something quite remarkable as a species, which is to think together. To come to a moral consensus together. To take these brains that evolved to live among smallish groups, a few thousand at most, and find ways to get them to deal with billions. In the past, this has led to the development of moving and beautiful moral sensitivity. > Walter Ong, the great historian of orality and literacy, wrote that the potential of writing is a wonderfully paradoxical thing. Writing ‘has the power to liberate us more and more from the […] bias and confusion it creates’ itself. We will write ourselves into all sorts of trouble – real moral, spiritual, physical, psychological, intellectual trouble – but we can also use these technologies to work ourselves out of them again. > > We made a wonderful, catastrophic thing with writing. With printing. With the internet. It’s a kind of raising of the dead. A kind of telepathy. A kind of heaven, where we see each other as thoughts and character, not bodies, wealth or birth. We are making our minds do something they never evolved to do. It’s hard, and painful, and often makes us angry and afraid. And yet … every time we end by seeing each other more clearly, understanding more, working together. David Abrams talks about how we shifted our sense of animism from nature to the written word in [[Reference Notes/Books/The Spell of the Sensuous|The Spell of the Sensuous]]. ## 12 - an afterword: the thing I haven't talked about > The thing I haven’t talked about very much in this book is the way that our current information crisis is shaped by enormous business interests, by money that is being put into exacerbating some of the normal information-crisis problems for profit, and by bad actors who have also worked out what happens during information crises and are using that knowledge to deliberately try to create chaos. > Use social media for what it’s useful for, for you. But don’t kid yourself that it’s not a massive project in the destruction of value so that a few drops of that value end up in the pockets of multi-billionaires. An enormous river of human attention, interest and thinking diverted to disperse away to nothing, so that a little run-off keeps some tech companies’ stock value high. > You may feel that this financial part is really the largest piece of the puzzle of the information crisis. I wrote this book partly because I wanted to argue that, no, actually, even without strong financial incentives to keep us staring at our screens, the nature of an information crisis is that a lot of what’s happening now just … happens. It’s happened before, in predictable ways. We can learn from the past about what to expect and how to protect ourselves. # Quotes # References See also [[How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division]]. Another woman writer, Elif Shafak, who holds space for different ways of coming together.