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 important thing you could ever know about your own life?'

In this era-defining non-fiction book, developed from her ground-breaking Radio 4 essay series Naomi Alderman, acclaimed author of The Power, turns her sharp insight to a question that affects us all – how to 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.

Humanity’s previous two major revolutions – the invention of writing 5,000 years ago and the Gutenberg printing press, 600 years ago – drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. And by looking at their outcomes – both the turmoil and the advances - Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better manage our current information age.

Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, as well as addressing misinformation, conspiracy theories, public disagreements and groupthink, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today offers a new understanding of the emotional and cognitive upheavals we face with today's information crisis.

Reading the tea-leaves of the past to predict the future, Alderman 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, panic, distress and rage.

Above all, she reminds us not to burn anyone at the stake today.