Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore. It’s a brilliant book — right down my alley in a dozen different ways. There’s a problem, though: it’s a book, and the people in government and the tech sector who most need to understand the story it tells don’t read books.
Oh, a few of them read books for entertainment and maybe even inspiration, though, as Lepore points out, they reliably misunderstand the ones they do read. (One darkly enjoyable chapter is essentially an expansion of Alex Blechman’s famous Torment Nexus tweet.) But both Silicon Valley and our governmental offices are dominated by people who would never think it a good use of their time to read a book in order to understand what it is they’re doing. And while once upon a time such leaders would have relied on book-reading advisors — Tyrion Lannister types — I don’t think that’s true today. People making massively consequential decisions for the U.S.A. and indeed for the whole planet desperately need to know the history that Lepore tells. The question is, How can they be brought to know it?
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