Naomi Alderman is a novelist, games writer, broadcaster and producer. Her debut novel “Disobedience”, which follows a rabbi’s bisexual daughter as she returns to her Orthodox Jewish community having lost her faith, has been translated into 10 languages, while her science-fiction novel “The Power” won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a television series. She is also a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her latest book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History about Living Through an Information Crisis), published by Penguin, is based on her Radio 4 essay series, in which she discusses how new technologies open up new ways of being. We sat down with her to discuss the book, as well as tips and tricks to help navigate our current tumultuous era.
Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today draws on millennia of history to give us lessons for our own era. You propose that we’re living in the third information crisis. If the first and second crisis start with the invention of writing and then the printing press, does the third begin with the internet?
It’s the invention of the world wide web. So the internet is when all the computers are connected, and the world wide web is the [information system] where humans are talking to each other, reading each other’s words and getting annoyed by each other, which is one of the things that makes it an information crisis.
It started in the late 90s, but it’s a full-blown crisis now. But when you say “world wide web” enough, it does start to sound really silly, so we can just go back to saying “the internet”.
These crises are marked by a sudden leap in information access, which leads to new forms of conflict. Are these mainly conflicts of interpretation?
It’s so many different kinds of conflicts. In the book I talk about the ancient Sumerians, who had a legend around how writing was invented – because they were the first people to write in script. Their legend was that their king wanted to have an argument with another king, but the messengers kept forgetting the entire message that he wanted to send. So he invented writing in order to be able to accurately insult the lord of Aratta. And now we can all insult anybody we want at the drop of a hat.
It would be ridiculous to claim that conflict is caused by digital communications. You have only to watch birds in your garden fighting over a bird feeder to know that you can have conflict without human language. And you can have conflict without writing. But communications technology – writing and printing and now the web – introduces the possibility of conflict with somebody that you have never actually met. Maybe you have not even met anybody who has met them. You can just send them your anger – via a clay tablet or a tweet – and they can receive your anger.
So it introduces a really wide range of different kinds of possible conflict. A war of interpretation can only happen once there is writing. Anyone who spends time on the internet has had the experience of [being misinterpreted]. Take [the classic Twitter meme about] waffles, where Person A says, “Yes, I love pancakes”, and Person B jumps to the conclusion, “Oh, so you hate waffles.” We don’t have the social norms yet around how to make sure that we’re expressing what we want to be expressing.
You do write about actual stake burnings, during what you identify as the second information crisis and the religious wars that followed. But you’re also using burning at the stake to make a broader point, around dehumanisation.
It’s to do with treating another human being not as a person but as a symbol. It’s anything that would make you feel ashamed afterwards, where you subsequently go, “I didn’t live up to my values there.” It’s incredibly easy to throw a stone in a crowd full of people throwing stones, and yet that’s also a reason not to do it. There are several stories now, of people who’ve been driven to suicide by [online] public shaming. Would you feel brilliant to have taken part in that?
Controversially, I even believe we should probably think about politicians and the royal family as humans, and they are obviously people who are very much turned into symbols by the world.
This relates to your point about people seeking purity. We see this clearly in right-wing politics, around the call to return to “traditional” values, or to religious doctrine. But you think this is also a left-wing phenomenon, and you give the example of efforts to decolonise the curriculum.
I stole this from Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. On their podcast The Rest Is History, they talk about how everyone involved in the education system now wants to go back to the “pure” root of education, to remove some kind of “taint” that they perceive. A right-winger might say, “We’ve got to go back to teaching Shakespeare and the Bible”, which is the root of the British culture and of the English language. And then a left-wing person might say, we need to get rid of the “taint” of colonisation. There’s a sense of wanting to remove, instead of contextualising.
You may not know this, but on the church in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the door, there is a carving in stone of rabbis suckling at the teats of a pig. So that’s some pretty extreme anti-Semitism, and there are calls now to remove that. And I would strongly argue, don’t remove it. Contextualise it. Put a statue next to it of a famous Jewish citizen of Wittenberg, or a plaque explaining why this is hateful.
Would you take the same approach for statues in the UK, around that debate?
I would accept moving a statue, maybe putting it into a museum with this context around it. But we have not reached the end of history. We need to be able to tolerate the presence of things that do not perfectly accord with our values. If we’re not able to do that, we will eventually end up doing some atrocities.
How does that perspective relate to your novel The Power, in which women develop the ability to electrocute men? Some of these women believe they have the right to exercise their new superpower because of their history of oppression.
The Power was an exploration for me of what would happen [if women suddenly became physically superior to men]. What do I think would be right? Do I think that women are somehow so much better [than men], that if every woman were able to electrocute people at will, we would usher in a world of peace and harmony? I took myself all the way through it, and at the end I was like, “Oh, you’ve got to have rules about how we behave that apply to everyone, no matter how just your causes.”
Look, I am Jewish. I support the right of the State of Israel to exist. I do not agree with many of the things that the government of Israel does. And I do not think that there is any level of having suffered that makes it impossible for a group to contain sadists and psychopaths. There can be no such thing as giving an entire group a free pass because of what they personally have suffered. I think we have to have the same rules applying for everybody. I don’t think the oppression of Jews justifies Jewish violence against innocent children. I don’t think the oppression of Palestinians justifies Hamas violence against innocent children.
Don’t Burn Anyone At the Stake Today is a testament to the power of writing. What do you make of the decline in literacy and book reading, in favour of video and aural formats? Are we returning to a new kind of oral culture?
There’s a book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which makes this argument. It’s a very good survey of the field, but I would strongly argue that we are not going back to an oral culture. Listening to a podcast or YouTube video has some things in common with oral culture. But an oral culture world is a warm, flexible, human-scale world in which the only people you can talk to are the people that you are physically present with. And we are in such a different world to that. We’re not going back. We’re going forward into something.
On literacy, we can think about exercise. A hundred years ago, no one had to ask themselves, “Am I getting enough physical exercise?” Because most people’s daily lives were physically tough, they were getting plenty. And now we do have to think about it. So I suspect that [it will be the same now with] reading long pieces, that are more than 30,000 words long, say, keeping track of an argument, holding characters in your head. We never used to have to think about how much of that we were doing, because that was the way we got information. I think those of us who deliberately spend hours of our day reading are going to be in a similar position to people who deliberately spend hours of their day lifting heavy weights, which is to say we’re just going to be able to do more with our brains.
Also, it doesn’t harm me if I live in a world where a lot of people don’t get enough exercise, but it really does harm me if I live in a democracy where people are neglecting their brains and therefore voting for the most stupid, objectionable things.
It’s hard though isn’t it, to put down our smartphones. And you have a dumbphone, I think?
I have a smartphone which has all the apps on it, and I have a smartphone which only has a few things. It doesn’t have email, but it does have the maps and The New Yorker. And so I decide which one to take with me. I’m interested in a little device called a brick [an app and bluetooth device designed to set boundaries on phone use], which I can touch to the side of my phone, which will stop a lot of the apps from working.
You’ve said that it was through the process of writing your debut novel “Disobedience” that you “wrote yourself out” of believing in religion. Does writing do something unique, in encouraging us to think and change our minds?
I did. I wrote my way out of Orthodox Judaism. But I think the smartphone is more addictive than Orthodox Judaism. Long-lasting religions, of which there are a few in the world, have lasted because they have given some benefits to the people who hold to them. They may also be producing terrible problems – most of them are in some ways – but also most of them are time-tested through hundreds of generations of people.
I think most of us would not want to pass smartphones on to our children in the way that they currently exist. It’s a brand-new, weird, human mind-hacking cult. Much worse than religion.
In comparing our own era to the religious wars of the Reformation, we can see that there’s a lot of tribalism and dogmatism that’s happening today in a non-faith context.
I mean, this is the thing. In the late 1800s, when Darwin was publishing on evolution, it’s like a meteor hit religion. But it’s not that religion vanished, it just splattered on everything else. If you are a humanist, you have, I hope, the values of the Enlightenment, of Erasmus, of Petrus Ramos [the French humanist, logician and educational reformer], who’s a hero of mine. You value education and knowledge and truth and treating humans as equal. And today there are so many systems working against that. It’s not as simple as “Oh, the enemy is organised religion.” Surely, it’s also [the American political conspiracy theory] QAnon. It’s anti-vaxxers. Or at least not the people, but the systems that have caused people to believe in this really pernicious, dangerous nonsense. Humans are a storytelling species. We understand who we are through stories. And it’s very, very easy to hijack that system.
You believe that a new framework will emerge to help us navigate this third information crisis. In the Enlightenment, that framework was the scientific method. Can I challenge you by asking, do we need a brand new framework? Could it just be the scientific method again, but perhaps with new and different ways to tell stories that are connected to that?
I love this question. And I do think it’s very helpful that we’ve had an Enlightenment already. The scientific method, thus far, has not been improved upon in terms of ways to find out what’s going on in the physical world. So it’s still important. [What is new is that] today, we can see the world through so many different people’s eyes. We are challenging ourselves to live in a way that isn’t just tolerant of difference, but is able to look out via someone else’s eyes who is different. I mean, you can literally watch images from cameras that people are holding up as they’re going around in so many different places in the world.
If that doesn’t end up changing what we think about humanity, I would be quite surprised. For example, I think it’s going to be increasingly difficult to justify why some countries are wealthy and powerful and some countries are poor and have no power. We’re very close to achieving simultaneous translation. If I’m not looking out on a favela or a slum, it’s easy to not think about it, but once you start listening to people, watching other people’s lives?
Each information crisis, you say, eventually leads to us understanding one another more clearly. But is it also about expanding the number of people we’re able to understand or empathise with? How far can that reasonably extend?
We’ve been exploring the limits to that for a really long time. You would have thought that the limit for a species that did hunting and gathering was about 300 people, maybe up to 1,000 people, like the size of a secondary school. But humanity has gone much further than that. I find us very touching in some ways, human beings. Evolution tried out something with us. It was like, “What happens if I give a species an absolutely enormous brain – so big that the babies have to be born much, much too early, so they have to be raised for a minimum of 12 years?” And we’ve been quite a successful species, actually. We’re a bit concerned about what we’ve managed to do to the planet, but we’re also the first species that has ever managed to be concerned about what is done to the planet.
Were you conscious that your book, by using the technology of writing, could help us avert the worst aspects of this current information crisis? That’s quite meta.
I genuinely think that writing Don’t Burn Anyone At the Stake Today might be the most useful thing I do with my life. It really does take the temperature down when you’re aware of [living through a historical crisis]. You might think: actually, I don’t need to break up with all of my friends and family [because of differences of opinion]. You might recognise the value of doing the taxing but not complicated work of being a sane adult on the internet. I am sending this message all the time on BlueSky: “You’re sounding quite aggressive. Is that what you intended?” I’m trying to keep remembering that everyone else is a person, not a symbol, and I’m going to sometimes mess it up, and I’m going to forgive myself and just carry on.
I actually find that quite inspiring. We’ve all got a little job. We’re living through this really tumultuous epoch, and each one of us can decide whether we are going to be fighting for the civil public space, and how long our “wars of reformation” are going to go on for. We’re not going to be able to stop them all, but if we can remove ourselves from the crowd around the stake burning, that is a good start. Then we can hasten the moment where we get to the good parts.
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
