The Fifth Wave: Andrey Mir Takes on World History

Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by riddles at every turn. How did we get here? Where are we headed? Amid the affluence and luxury, given global communication and cheap travel to iconic places, what is the right path as individuals and as a people—and why?

The 20th century gave us profound broodings on the meaning of history by authors like Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset and Arnold Toynbee. These thinkers put the human story in the widest possible context, thereby enlarging our understanding of the present and casting a flickering light into possible futures. They may have been right or wrong—mostly the latter, in my opinion—but they painted on a huge canvas and invited us to think of ourselves on a similar scale. Where are their heirs today? Glimpse, if you dare, at the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction, and this is what you see: an obsession with celebrity, identity and Donald Trump—all of it amounting to the same fractured frivolity.

Then there’s Andrey Mir, whose books, if I may say so, redeem our age. Mir is the most adventurous and imaginative media scholar writing today. Born in communist Russia, an emigrant to Toronto, Canada—city of Marshall McLuhan, whose disciple he is—Mir brings a fresh and capacious perspective to his subject. Everything he writes is original. Much of it is memorably epigrammatic, even though English is his second language.

I first encountered Mir’s work when he mailed me a copy of his smallish book, “Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship,” shortly after I had published “The Revolt of the Public.” He claimed, with some excitement, that we were both saying the same thing. I read the book, amazed: Mir was right. “Human as Media” is the book I would have written if I had been born in Russia and could discipline my thoughts into 100 pages. We even cited the same lines from the same forgotten philosophers. With its concept of the “viral editor” (now transformed, in our harsher decade, into “viral inquisitor”), “Human as Media” remains mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the disruptions of the digital. Mir and I became fast friends and allies in the struggle to understand the effects of new media.

His next book, “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers,” chronicled the rise and fall of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”—the age dominated by the printing press. It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of historical and media analysis. As a historian, Mir has a knack for identifying the space where new technology converges with economics, and he always asks the big questions. Why did something as strange as the newspaper come into the world? What was its actual purpose? And why are newspapers dying today? The term “postjournalism” pertains to the precipitous decline of the New York Times from objectivity to something like a hymnbook for the progressive creed. This great fall, we learn, has been driven more by a desperate business model than by ideology.

And now I’m happy to report that Mir has just published a new book, “Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.” As the long title hints, it’s his most complex and ambitious undertaking. From the start of history, the reader is swept along to its appointed end. My intention here is to write about this book—but I can’t imagine producing a conventional review out of such a layered tale. Allow me, then, to follow in Mir’s footsteps and reflect on writing as a medium, history as purpose and other perplexities of some importance to our species culled from his latest work.

The Dawn of History and the Axial Age

A major theme of “Digital Future” is that the internet has returned us to “digital orality,” that is to say, to the forms of communication prevalent before the invention of writing. This brings in a long train of consequences, not least concerning the nature of truth. In preliterate societies, truth is “relationship-oriented” and relative to the speaker—a function of charismatic persuasion. With the arrival of literacy, truth breaks free from space and time and attaches itself to a permanent and deeply inward medium: It becomes canonical, abstract and absolute. Today, the children of the web, as Mir correctly observes, are ignorant of canonical narratives and baffled by absolute propositions: Truth, for them, is once again relational, personal, “my truth.” “In digital orality, ‘Two plus two equals four’ is doubted if said by Hitler,” Mir writes.

Speech and writing aren’t just modes of communication. Like all media, they direct the mind in specific directions and reorganize the world. Civilization is the gift of literacy. Writing is sticky: Once invented, it rarely disappears. Civilization, too, is durable. Any given instance of it may be fragile and liable to be undone by a failure cascade, but as a whole—as the pervasive effect of literacy on human arrangements—civilization has survived the most determined assaults of the forces of barbarism and seems difficult to eradicate.

Early writing systems needed a vast number of symbols: Chinese, for example, has “safely in excess of 100,000” characters. Mastering such systems took a lifetime of study. The first civilizations were thus the original example of that “rule by experts” so vehemently condemned today—but in this case, the only alternative was the rule of magic and brute force. At the dawn of history, literate priests and mandarins invented religion, the state, bureaucracy, accurate record-keeping and colossal architecture: All came together in a single package. It was, Mir tells us, the first step out of Plato’s cave.

Yet something essential was missing. The oldest civilizations feel alien and inaccessible. Concepts basic to us now were nowhere to be found: good and evil, for one. The individual did not exist. The meaning of a human life was seldom questioned. Egyptian pyramids and temples are extraordinary creations, but the ancient Egyptian religion is a puzzle to the modern mind. These civilizations preceded us in time but spiritually and culturally were not ancestral to our modes of thinking and acting. So the question arises: Where do we come from?

Mir tackles the puzzle of our spiritual ancestry with his usual fearlessness. He leans in part on the ideas of the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers, who in a 1949 book, “The Origin and Goal of History,” first proposed the concept of an “Axial Age.” The axis of Christian history, Jaspers wrote, was the birth of Jesus. The axis of history as history was the period between 800 and 300 B.C., which wrenched human existence free of the old parochial gods and kings and radically reconsidered it in universal terms, as a terrifying puzzle to be solved.

The Axial Age took place in a handful of regions: China, India, Iran, Israel and Greece. A partial roster of its achievements would have to include Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, monotheism, the notions of good and evil and of ethical religion, philosophy, science, mathematics, democracy, individualism and history itself. These concepts and practices gradually spread over the world so that today we are all Axial people—we can conceive of our own selves and the reality around us in no other terms.

What inspired the Axial Age? Jaspers delivers a profound analysis of the course of history but is remarkably indifferent to causes. We are left with rhetorical shrugs about “the enigma of world history, which we deepen but do not dissolve.” Mir, characteristically, is not content to let this slide, and performs a brilliant maneuver by plugging in the rise of new media as explanations for the stages of history proposed by Jaspers. It’s Mir in “Digital Future,” not Jaspers, who argues that literacy is the necessary precondition to early civilization. And it’s Mir, not Jaspers, who has suggested a plausible cause for the Axial Age: the alphabet.

The first scripts were like a mirror to nature: Characters often represented familiar objects. An actual alphabet demands absolute abstraction. The reader must decode arbitrary signs into language and meaning. More importantly, the author must reduce reality to a symbolic system. This trick, which required a difficult reorientation of the mind, has proved endlessly fertile. The distance from orality to the alphabet is immense; but from the alphabet to Einstein’s relativity formula, it’s a short skip. With abstraction came the invention and conquest of nature, which in turn alienated the individual from his natural and tribal context. For the first time in the meandering history of our kind, we learned that we were alone. It’s no coincidence that the Greeks, who possessed the first fully evolved alphabet, bequeathed to us the sense of tragedy.

The Terraforming Power of Media

From a certain perspective, “Digital Future” reads like two distinct books, woven together with some effort. The first is a meditation on Jaspers and history. The second is a running explanation of the “ecological” effects of media—its “terraforming power” to change the human environment and so human behavior and society. The technological project we have engaged in since the conquest of fire, Mir asserts, has aimed at full immersion “until we sense no world at all”: That is, until mediation is all we know. At that point, “The user, media, and environment will become one.” This is Mir at his most original and stimulating.

Mir describes himself as a “media ecologist,” and he means something specific by that. “Media studies in general explore what we do with media. Media ecology looks at what media do to us.” “In ecology,” he continues, “a single factor can legitimately have deterministic power.” The reintroduction of 41 wolves into Yellowstone Park restored the balance of vegetation, increased the diversity of birds and rodents and, due to the return of the beaver, altered the waterways and the microclimate. The systematic destruction of sparrows to protect crops during China’s “Great Leap Forward” “resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops” and propelled the deadliest famine in history.

The same principle applies to new media. It disrupts established arrangements unpredictably. Each new medium has an ecological destiny—what Mir calls “affordances”—that never coincides with the expectations of cultural gatekeepers. The printing press began with the Bible but soon veered off to heresy and pornography. Television was supposed to educate the masses but instead gave us “I Love Lucy” and “Game of Thrones.” The smartphone was sold as the ultimate convenience but is responsible for increased rates of depression and suicide among teens. Mir’s affordances act like a gravitational force, overcoming idealistic intentions and the harshest of prohibitions alike.

This is the intellectual framework he applies to the question of orality and literacy. Preliterate groups weren’t simply people without writing. Like the wolves at Yellowstone and the dead sparrows in China, orality stood at the source of an ecological system that mandated certain behaviors and stifled many others. A speaker is bound to the present, must rely on a long memory and attention span and delivers what is in essence a performance replete with “emotional states” and “requests for affirmation.” None of this holds true for the written word, which is a medium for information rather than display. If orality is “relationship-oriented,” literacy is “object-oriented.” Where orality takes place “now,” literacy is about “not now.” Big picture, orality=wisdom=answers, whereas literacy=thinking=questions.

What are we to make of Mir’s claim that “digital orality returns us to the acoustic space”? There can be little doubt that the web often feels like one giant melodramatic request for affirmation. Discussions in this medium are invariably performative, a malady that has infected our institutions and our governing elites. The ideal of truth, as I noted, is no longer objectivity but “my truth.” Everything online is about “now,” even though digital is supposed to be forever. Mir is clearly on to something. The Gutenberg Parenthesis gave us our technological civilization. If that ecological system now seems to be breaking down, it may be because orality, digital or otherwise, just can’t carry the burden with minds that have lost the capacity to symbolize reality. Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called this “the vertical invasion of the barbarians.”

But there are counterfactuals. Seventy-five percent of Americans read books. Book sales are by no means collapsing—and, interestingly, printed books, that old-fashioned Gutenberg format, remain the favorite with readers. Substack, with its long-form style of literacy, is thriving. The triumph of texting, which users prefer twice as much as phoning, must be accounted for. Furthermore, much of the shouting and drama on the web has a text—a newspaper story, for example—at the center of the brawl. Mir himself dwells on the sharp decline in the average user’s attention span, with memes and emojis replacing actual speech. I could say the same about historical memory. Yet focus and memory are attributes of orality.

So the picture is mixed. Mir is aware of this: He speaks of “a new hybrid state of mind.” I hope he turns to this subject in future writings—I would be interested in learning what kind of a hybrid we’re looking at. A pessimist might predict that it will be a dull barbaric brute, driven by the dogmatism of literacy and the tribal narrowness of orality. But we could as well be talking about hybrid vigor: a creature made stronger by its mixed ancestry, whose literate power of abstraction will be wedded to the expressive force of preliterate speech.

The Goal of History Meets the Singularity

Jaspers maintained that the human race, long divided by geography, culture and race, was headed for global unification. That was the “goal of history,” the secular equivalent of Christianity’s Kingdom of God on earth. Writing in mid-20th century, witness to the rise and fall of huge agglomerations of power, Jaspers naturally imagined a grand coalescence of all nations—and conceived of it as a political event. Human unity, he wrote, would be accomplished either by a coercive “world empire” or a benevolent “world order.”

If we put aside, for the moment, the question of whether history can have a goal, we find that Jaspers’ prophecy was only half right. The Soviet Union went out of business in 1991, bringing about the end of history, at least according to Francis Fukuyama. Immediately after, the world entered a phase of fragmentation and disintegration: At an accelerating rate, internally and internationally, things began to fall apart. At the moment, there is no empire and no order, and no possibility of either. That part of the prophecy has been falsified.

Yet, as Mir points out, humanity today is more tightly bound together than ever before. The unifying event wasn’t political but informational, sparked by technology rather than the machinery of power. “Digital media,” Mir affirms, “have completed the synchronization of world history.” Nations and peoples now move together like the synchronized swimmers at the Olympics, only far more clumsily and violently. Jaspers’ culmination of history, rewritten by Mir, resembles a nightmare or a curse: We have been herded into a single existential stage, where we can’t escape from one another. Paradoxically, it’s the “new global mix of orality and literacy” that is causing “global balkanization” and “tribal globalism.” Digital unity has been responsible for the shattering of the world.

For Mir, however, the game isn’t over. He foresees a radically different endpoint for our species: the Singularity, superhuman technological intelligence made inevitable by artificial intelligence, or AI. Under the Singularity, media ecology will expand to totality, making human beings redundant—at which point, we will be devoured by our own creations. According to Mir, “AI that acquires something akin to self-consciousness either through self-awakening or through merging with a human will via a cognitive interface ... will signify the Singularity.” Our only choice then will be to “singularize or die”—in other words, join the Singularity or go extinct. The sun will rise on a second Axial Age, but it will be “nonhuman.” Breathless and amazed before such a transcendent vision, all I feel qualified to say is “Let’s wait and see. ...”

Unlike Jaspers, I am not a historicist. If the trajectory of history were susceptible to geometric calculation, each event could be predicted—but prediction would change the trajectory, requiring new calculations, predictions and changes in infinite regression. Mir, too, argues on behalf of “media determinism,” but I have trouble understanding determinism of any kind. History, as Dominic Cummings once remarked, is a series of branching paths, some of which end in actual events but the majority ending in question marks—in a swirling mass of what-ifs. History, that is to say, is mystery. The most fascinating events are those that never happened. What would it have taken to make China, rather than Europe, the world civilization? Why has the internet, which gives a voice to ordinary people, failed to become a potent engine of democracy? Everything, to me, feels contingent. History could easily have been otherwise.

Still, the branching paths require minding. The historical imagination, like our physical bodies, must be exercised to remain agile and true. For that, inspired voices are needed to measure the range of human possibility, if not probability. Among those voices, I find none more challenging or compelling than that of my friend Andrey Mir.