Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

An electrifying, thought-provoking exploration of how the digital era is reshaping our world, by bestselling, Women's Prize-winning writer Naomi Alderman

What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life?

In this era-defining book, developed from her ground-breaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her sharp insight and boundless curiosity to a question that affects us all – how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through? She calls this epoch the Information Crisis.

The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions and misinformation than ever before. It is affecting our ability to think clearly, dividing us, rewriting our history and changing everything, irrevocably. But we have been here before. In fact, this is our 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. By looking at their outcomes, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand, and navigate, our present and our future.

Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, addressing misinformation, conspiracy theories, public disagreements and groupthink, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today explores how new technologies open up new ways of being and helps us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload.