Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons From History About Living Through an Information Crisis)

In this era-defining book, developed from her groundbreaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to explore the epoch we’re living through, an epoch she calls the "Information Crisis." The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, and opportunities as well as verbal attacks, disinformation, and misinformation than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehoods more quickly. It brings us together and also divides us in new ways. It is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world.

There is no going back, but we have been here before: This is humanity’s third information crisis. The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, and the second, the invention of the printing press 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions, and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed, as well as more knowledgeable, educated, and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand our present and prepare for our future.