Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk. This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things Magazine. I'm Rusty Reno on the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

Well, today I'd like to welcome Mary Harrington to the podcast.

We're going to talk about her article from the August-September issue, The King and the Swarm.

Welcome to the podcast, Mary.

Thank you for having me.

Well, it's a big, ambitious essay, really taking us through what you see as a real transformative

moment in Western political culture, well, Western culture broadly.

So let's go to maybe the revolution before the revolution of today,

which is the, the Whig ascendancy and the printing press. Because that's kind of where the

story starts, doesn't it? Well, yeah, well, we may go to before the time, but that's where the

story starts. Yeah, I think the, the bigger picture is that the, when you invited me to to write something

on this topic or on, you know, to contribute to a sort of longer running symposium on

political questions of our day, the first thing that came to mind was that I wanted to write something on political authority

and particularly on kingship in the context of a longer sort of long-running theme in my work,

which concerns the relationship between political orders and information, which sounds abstract when you put it

like that, but it's a rabbit hole, which it doesn't seem to matter how far I go down it.

There's just always, always another, you go down it, and then you find there's a rabbit hole

in the rabbit hole, and then there's another one beyond that.

And I started pulling this thread, really, with the contemporary question of the singularity,

which is a topic which sloshes around Silicon Valley and the wider commentosphere,

concerning the question of when or if, or in what sense we might end up merging with our technologies.

And this is generally discussed in the context of the digital revolution.

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