The King and the Swarm

To see past the Whig history hampering contemporary efforts to understand the digital revolution requires us first to sketch the worldview it displaced. In very reductive terms, this medieval Christian picture understood all of material, political, and social reality as a hierarchical arrangement of the natural order, formed from above by the thoughts of God himself and governed by a system of analogical correspondences. Within this system, kings bore a relation to their polity analogous to that between Christ and his Church, between the head of a household and those within that household, and between the head and the body of a human being. Read Full Article »