Twittermobs were as yet undreamt of

In 1994, when this book came out, its author Sven Birketts was reflecting on answerphones and CD-Roms, thinking about renting a video, and using an IBM Selector to type. Yet he managed to predict many of our present ills. Writing at a time when people hoped to fine-tune printed books into multimedia products, he saw that print and digital (‘hypertext’ — remember that?) were actually two different things.

The ills have been spawned by that shift he foresaw, from intensive reading into extensive reading. More books did not mean more depth; in fact (Birketts argues) the opposite: following Walter Benjamin on mass reproduction, he argues we now have more books, more shallowly appreciated. At a time when houses were being conglomerated, he saw that the bottom line was rearing up.

Books had fixed shape, and digital does not; books pretend they are permanent, but digital must always be provisional. Instead of ‘the stable hierarchies of the printed page’, we get a ‘rush of impulses’, but 25 years before it became usual to speak of instant-click gratification, Birketts could see that this would change human being: the private, interior, Jewish or Christian and Renaissance ‘self’ would be giving way to ‘network consciousness, subject at every level to mediation’.

If you want to know how the ‘hive mind’ imagined in the 1990s changed into a demos-for-populism by the 2010s, you will find the roots here. Whereas ‘the true life of reading — the ulterior life’ is a person’s ability to return to the same physical book, ‘thrusting the changed self forward again to encounter the stationary text’, falsehood takes over when ‘the effect of the hypertext environment, the ever-present awareness of possibility’ undercuts any effort to settle, reflect, and commit.

Revisit this prescient book from 1994. This is how the public became a mob for the populists to exploit, not to fear.