The King and the Swarm

MARY HARRINGTON JULY 15, 2025

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The printing press did not just change how people shared information. It changed the normative patterns of consciousness itself. After those changes came a period of chaotic upheaval, out of which emerged the worldview and political settlement characteristic of modernity. In England, that upheaval reached a crisis in the seventeenth century, in a series of convulsions that birthed not just a new political settlement, but also a reality-picture that would in turn shape the cultural, scientific, and technological imaginary of the modern era—and, in time, give rise to our modern democratic norms.

This story is generally presented as one of ineluctable progress, sometimes called the “Whig version of history.” Named in 1931 by the historian Herbert Butterfield, after a faction in English seventeenth-century Restoration politics that played a crucial role in the dispatch of absolute monarchy, Whig history conceives these events and all that followed as a one-way ratchet toward modern freedom and progress.

Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over—a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made by the printing press to their story, most assumed the advent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch—one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.

The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI.

It is perhaps too neat to say the transition from print to digital forces us to replay the seventeenth century again, but in reverse. And yet much that is happening today makes sense, seen in those terms. And perhaps its most momentous effect is to undermine the cultural norms and habits of thought that form the bedrock of modern liberal democracy.

As this has grown increasingly difficult to deny, a bitter struggle has erupted over how best to shape the post-print (which is to say post-liberal, post-democratic) political order. To date, the incumbency advantage has rested with those seeking to continue print-era democratic desiderata, within a body politic now predominantly formed by and for digital media consumption. This “swarm” model frames its program as radically democratic, and as surfacing organically from the aggregate desires of the people. In practice it withdraws political agency from that people to an expert class of purportedly neutral functionaries. And the program such functionaries implement is often unpopular, its structures viewed as illegitimate by the very people it purports to represent. Its unpopularity is due not to a rupture with democratic principles so much as to continuity with these principles, and particularly with the democratic presumption of a somewhat agonistic relation between rulers and demos. More subtly, the same cognitive shift that, among proponents of swarm “democracy,” justifies the emergence of this model from the husk of the representative kind, has also contributed to stripping it of popular legitimacy.

But of all possible alternative modes of governance, the one that today carries the most potent cultural charge still lurks, mostly shadowed, at the fringes of the contemporary political imaginary. It is not deemed legitimate among respectable people, in respectable countries. And no wonder: It is the political form whose abolition forms the origin story of Whig history as such. It was the most common mode of governance across the West in premodern times, this political form that now seems, at least to many of today’s extremely online young radicals, to call seductively not from the deep past but rather from the future: the king. Even as democracy has become something other than itself under digital conditions, so this potent, enchanted-seeming figure has slipped from the reactionary fringes to animate a substantial minority. When we consider the wider metaphysical transformation that has enabled its re-emergence, it becomes unsettlingly clear that in the aftermath of the digital putsch, the king may be our least bad option.

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.

This set of nested natural hierarchies was underwritten by a metaphysics, derived from Aristotle by way of Thomas Aquinas, that understood all phenomena to be “caused” not just by material stuff and the contingent forces that act on it. Everything was understood also to have a formal cause—the form that gives a thing its characteristic being. Everything also had a final cause—the end to which it is directed. Though the ontological nature of such forms was a matter of lively debate, many simply assumed it to be continuous with divine ideation.

For medieval Christians, this political order typically required a king and was theologically grounded in the self-sacrificial rule of Christ over his Church, a model of leadership understood as perfect service. Only the fallen nature of mankind created the possibility of deviation from the prelapsarian model of authority as service, opening space for coercion, violence, and tyranny. A great deal of medieval political thought deals with how best to avert such tyranny. 

This cosmology was radically disrupted by an information revolution: the printing press. The spread of print drove far-reaching material changes, canonically explored by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Print upended European intellectual culture, forged new relations among commerce, faith, and intellectualism, accelerated the fragmentation of Latin Christendom, and drove new interest in scientific study and exploration. Downstream of these changes came every pivotal event in Whig history: the Protestant Reformation, the European exploration of the globe, the rise of modern science—and, in time, those religious and political disagreements that culminated in the English Civil War. In turn, this conflict culminated in the beheading of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, and finally the establishment of constitutional monarchy in 1688.

This all happened because the printing press did not just multiply copies of the Bible. It multiplied readers. And, as the literary historian Walter J. Ong has argued, literacy is a mind-altering technology: “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.” And as the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf has shown, the Greek alphabet especially concentrates neurological activity in the logical, systematizing left brain. Thus, one byproduct of the spread of literacy was the normalization of an increasingly linear, analytic mode of thought. Other effects include a sense of inner life, and of time as a linear sequence of events.

The printing press extended the mind-altering information revolution of literacy from a relatively small premodern political and clerical elite to the general population. It transformed the prevailing culture. It spread rationality: Eisenstein, for instance, documents the mania for tabulation, classification, and systematization across every field of knowledge that erupted in medieval Europe with the first spread of print. And it spread individualism, with far-reaching political consequences. Notably, wherever the new inwardness flourished, enabled by literacy, so too did a reluctance to accept authority as a given—especially in matters of faith. Reading the texts of early Protestant radicals, the sense is of a freshly kindled and fiercely independent piety determined to shake itself free from centralized authority, and to assert the right of individuals to cultivate a personal relationship with God. And in turn, this decentralization and interiorization of authority problematized not just the authority of God’s ministers on earth, but also that of temporal rulers.

It is sometimes assumed that the medieval world took for granted that monarchs are both absolute and unmediated, and also that they derive their authority directly from God. But it was faltering public faith in monarchy as a political form, in the early modern era, that inspired the invention of the divine right of kings as a last-ditch effort to salvage the monarchic order. This concept was first set out by James I of England in 1598, in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies. Here, James theorized that the right of a king to govern absolutely stemmed from God and in no way drew upon the consent of the governed. Referencing the medieval analogical cosmology, he argued that “the proper office of a king towards his subjects agrees very well with the office of the head towards the body and all members thereof.”

James argued that the king’s divine anointment by God absolved him of the need to pay any regard to Parliament, which should simply act as a court ready to do his will. But his words, ironically propagated by means of the technology that was undermining his legitimacy, fell on deaf ears. John Milton’s Areopagitica both addresses and describes a new, literate, free-thinking political subject unmoved by such medieval analogies, and whose insistence on free speech and thought would be critical to the ensuing political turbulence. Milton’s political writing reveals not just the early contours of this idealized individual but also those of his corresponding political form: a bottom-up order formed in aggregate from the desires of a people coming together voluntarily as a collective.

By the time James’s successor, Charles I, upped the ante on divine right by seeking to govern England directly, this individualistic mindset had passed the point of no return. Even so, the decapitation of Charles I was a profound moral and spiritual shock to the nation. Symbolically, the separation of Charles’s head from his body represented the decapitation of the medieval political order, with its nested correspondences. The radicals were sure of their cause, though. Not long after the Areopagitica, Milton would write The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in which he invoked this bottom-up political ideal as justification for that execution and painted Charles as a vicious tyrant.

But even this was only the end of the beginning. Further convulsions followed, finally coming to a head in 1688 with the deposition of James II and the accession of William of Orange. With this “Glorious Revolution,” too, came a constitutional monarchy, a settlement that limited royal powers to the largely symbolic headship of “the Crown in Parliament,” ceding political agency to elected parties, including the Whigs. The same period saw the most radical of England’s dissenters depart for the New World, where these experiments in mass literacy and disavowal of kings would culminate, a century later, in the American Founding.

Whig history begins, then, with an English head of state losing his head. Or perhaps we might say with the democratization of headship, now understood as a quality whose proper scale is the individual. It is no coincidence that, in the century that followed 1688, the individualistic ideal expressed in politics by the Roundheads, and in theology by the Puritans, would in turn be “discovered” all the way down to the most microscopic components of the universe itself. No longer ordered from the top down by God’s ideas, the stuff of reality came to be understood, in Isaac Newton’s 1704 words, as emergent from “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles.”

In the process, the reality-picture enabled by this new print culture discarded Aristotelian metaphysics and the notion of formal and final causes. One leading seventeenth-century critic of such forms was Francis Bacon, who decried formal and final cause as obstacles to inductive research. Concurrently and relatedly, the medieval conception of the world as contained within and formed through God’s ideation was first bracketed and then discarded altogether. From acting as—in Aristotelian terms—the formal cause of all creation, God would first retreat to the remote status of the “divine watchmaker” who set this mechanistic cosmos into motion, before later, as Charles Taylor has shown, withdrawing from creation altogether.

This is a simplistic account. But its characteristic features are the disappearance of formal and final causation and the related weakening and eventual rejection of top-down ordering—even, for some, of the possibility of just hierarchy as such. Today the prevailing culture simply treats as self-evident the assertion that natural phenomena do not possess any such attributes as characteristic form or purpose, except as imaginative projections that must be treated with suspicion lest they obscure our ability to see those phenomena “objectively.” The same reality-picture also embraces the print paradigm’s Newtonian conception of materiality: one of tiny, distinct, hard, particulate atoms orbiting one another and somehow—we know not how—agglomerating into larger units, from which all forms of material then appear as emergent properties, including life and even human thought. It is the most democratic imaginable conceptualization of reality. As we will see, it produced a corresponding political form.

The idealized political subject for this reality-picture is rational, politically engaged, and agentic, able to absorb information, reason clearly, and form sober individual judgments. This subject found an influential voice in Milton’s critique of state censorship and, later, in the argument for such subjects’ right in aggregate, as “the people,” to modulate or even discard monarchic authority. In other words, as the political scientist Adam Garfinkle has observed, this political subject and the “deep reading” practices that enable his emergence would, in time, legitimize the emergence of modern democracy:

Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural. And it is what ultimately allowed Americans to become “We the People,” capable of self-government.

This political paradigm reached its apogee in the late nineteenth century, with the peak prevalence of long-form reading. In the process, it set the stage for its own dissolution. Its moment of both triumph and disaster was the concurrent arrival in the early twentieth century of the universal franchise, and with it the propagation of the first forms of post-print mass broadcast: radio and television.

In the Areopagitica, Milton was frank about the need to restrict the free circulation of ideas only to those cognitively able to engage with the most challenging material. Provocative arguments, for example, should be made in Latin, thus restricting their circulation to a highly educated minority. But almost four centuries on, the democratic subjectivity Milton imagined as the property of a still relatively small, educated elite had come to be taken for granted. It was seen no longer as a hard-won byproduct of literacy, but as (at least aspirationally) a universal property of all adult humans. As such, it came to seem obviously just and proper to extend to all these rational, self-directing subjects the right to engage in democratic politics. This imperative grew especially compelling once the development of radio and, latterly, TV enabled even those without the time or inclination to read books or newspapers to inform themselves politically and engage in the political process.

Thus mass democracy was born—and, simultaneously, died. Mass broadcast media were embraced by newly mass-democratic governments, less as vehicles for deliberation and debate in the style of print, than as propaganda. Edward Bernays wrote his seminal book on this topic in 1928. Nor was this the only way in which post-print media undermined the idealized, rational political subject of Peak Literacy.

Just as the spread of literacy changed how people thought, so, too, did its supplementation (or replacement) by broadcast media. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to see this: His 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, postulated the emergence of a “global village” enabled by mass broadcast media. Walter Ong developed McLuhan’s ideas, characterizing the emerging effect of TV and radio as a “secondary orality,” which is “sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print.” Such a culture might, Ong suggested, retrieve the characteristic features of oral cultures, such as a reduced emphasis on analytic thinking or factual accuracy.

As the electorate both expanded and began to discard print for broadcast, supranational and pre-political forms of governance also expanded: colloquially, the “deep state.” The emergence, alongside the universal franchise, of an architecture of extra-democratic, institutional decision-making implies tacit acceptance among leaders that “We the People” do not always know best. Some decisions must be reserved for those with the knowledge and judgment to make them and, once made, may then be popularized and legitimized via mass media. Taken together, this represents a slow reimagining of democracy as a process of mediated acclamation for decisions already taken—what Carl Schmitt in 1970 foresaw as a “TV Democracy.”

Characterized by post-democratic managerialist rule, democratic participation would be replaced by what Schmitt calls a “daily, permanent plebiscite” in the form of TV and radio “representation.” In the event, though, the full realization of this new order would require new information revolution, on a par with that of print.

In the Whig version of history, an uprising or violent transformation is a “revolution” when it tends toward more freedom and other Whiggish goods. Revolutions that push in the opposite direction receive less complimentary descriptors: terms such as “putsch,” as for example Hitler’s 1923 attempt to overthrow the Weimar government.

The digital transformation was, in its earliest days, mostly received as another step forward in the ongoing revolution of modernity. The internet appeared, at first blush, to represent merely a further democratization of the discursive space, along the lines effected by the printing press. Texts such as Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody celebrated the prospect it seemed to afford, with a new army of amateur experts transforming culture anew, from the bottom up. Meanwhile, digitally mediated forms of public participation would extend and enhance the democratic political process, in accord with the print-era paradigm. Politics would be transformed from the bottom up, in a process now technologically turbocharged, within a reality-picture assumed to be inert, desacralized, and atomistic.

But this account has it backwards. In Whig terms, the digital is not a revolution but a putsch, for digital communication differs from print not just in quantity but in kind. All the evidence suggests that the digital is every bit as potent today as print was after Gutenberg in shaping the consciousness of those who spend a great deal of time doing it. But it is formative in radically different ways, some of which undermine the development of that rational, analytic subjectivity upon which the modernist project is predicated, along with its preferred mode of governance. 

Today there exists no shortage of dismayed commentary from academics on the frontline, concerning the by now very obvious cognitive decline in a student body that has swapped reading for scrolling. One professor at a regional public university, who writes as “Hilarius Bookbinder,” describes the typical lecture hall as full of “checked-out, phone-addicted zombies,” some of whom cannot sit through a fifty-minute lecture without leaving to look at their phones. The author describes how “our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.” And if the distracting effect of scrolling in the “attention economy” fragments the capacity to absorb and engage with long-form reasoning, others are beginning to suspect that over-reliance on generative AI still more radically atrophies the capacity to think. A recent study from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon indicates that higher reliance on generative AI correlates with less critical thinking.

A report in the Financial Times earlier this year showed that across the world, verbal and numerical reasoning and concentration are collapsing, having peaked in the 2010s. The author links the collapse to the rise of a “post-literate” society and the replacement of focused, intentional reading with context-switching and endless scrolling. Only 54 percent of Americans read even one book in the last year. The decline in reading is directly linked to the spread of digital alternatives. Device overuse is, in turn, correlated with poverty, but it is not confined to less-well-off individuals. Anecdotally, on a recent flight from San Francisco to Boston, I counted the number of my fellow passengers (presumably mostly the “coastal Americans” who pride themselves on education and rationality) who were reading books or ebooks: the tally was around 10 percent. The rest were watching videos or scrolling. 

The inescapable picture, from every possible indicator, is that deep literacy is rapidly receding. If that anecdotal 10-percent sample of in-flight coastal Americans is any kind of guide, deep literacy will perhaps end up as a minority practice roughly in line with pre-print Western cultural norms. And this development represents a putsch because, as Adam Garfinkle argues, the norms and habits of mind inculcated by widespread long-form reading are also those on which the project of broad-based democratic participation is predicated.

For one thing, such a transition radically undermines the ability of political leaders to rely on the public’s capacity for long-form analytic reasoning. This is already discernible in the protests of every classical liberal over the deterioration of print-culture norms such as scientific rationality and civil public debate. Each such commentator is, in truth, lamenting the defeat of print by digital. To this we might add countless other digitally enabled discursive phenomena: cancel culture, moral panics, polarization, meme wars, and so on. The alarm now being sounded by educators across the developed world underlines how much more pronounced this transformation of the citizenry will become, as successive truly net-native generations reach adulthood. 

There is no reversing this transformation: The internet has no “off” switch, and as of July 2025 there are adults of voting age who were born after the launch of the first iPhone. Every culture that has transitioned from print-first to digital-first ceased, in so doing, to form its population for democratic citizenship. They are, quite plainly, the wrong kind of subject.

But a declining facility for objective, analytic thinking is not the only consequence of the digital putsch. Digital reading is not “making people dumber” in some absolute sense, just less analytic. And amid the shroud- waving over smartphones and IQ, another consciousness-altering effect has gone relatively unremarked: the re-emergence of modes of thinking that emphasize pattern, image, and symbolism.

The physical form of print literature invites long-form linear reasoning, analytic reflection, and a deepening of felt interiority. By contrast, as the social critic Nicholas Carr has argued, digital reading is filled with distraction and multi-directional links, and characterized by overwhelming volume and variety. To navigate information in this form necessitates a different mode of content consumption—one that responds to information overload by filtering less for linear logic than for latent patterns. 

In my own observation, internet content consumption degrades long-form concentration but heightens awareness of patterns of shared meaning, which echo mnemonic communicative registers more characteristic of medieval culture than of modernity. The journalist Tyler Cowen reports corresponding with a teacher who affirms this observation among his students. According to this teacher, “the ability of students to process and work with a text in a standard ‘linear’ fashion has declined,” but at the same time their ability “to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially.” 

Of course a person primed to detect and interpret patterns in this fashion will not necessarily bring that capacity to bear in the offline world. But just as the experience of long-form reading had epistemological effects well beyond the printed page, it is reasonable to expect that this new information technology may do likewise. And this in turn has far-reaching consequences, not just political but metaphysical—above all, in retrieving those aspects of the medieval conception of reality discarded at the inception of modern science: formal and final cause. 

More recently, researchers in the interdisciplinary field of biosemiotics have re-evaluated findings in the natural sciences in the light of contemporary philosophy to argue that “meaning” is not a phantasm projected by humans onto mechanistic, atomistic reality but a fundamental component of that reality. Meaning resides not in “signal,” which is to say exceptional, incidents. It resides in the everyday or normative, which is to say in pattern. From this it follows that a resurgent popular facility for discerning patterns will entail a renewed interest in, and capacity to apprehend, meaning as a real feature of the world and not merely a phantasmagoric obstacle to its study. As Wendy Wheeler argues, the study of ecologies as meaning-making systems requires an “ontology of relations,” which is to say one of directedness or purpose. 

More plainly, then, the digital putsch concentrates cognitive power. But it also reopens space for the return of meaning and purpose, of formal and final causation, to everyday public awareness. With this return comes a less reflexively hostile appraisal of “natural” or given patterns, as for example in the growing popular rejection of blank-slate dogma on human sex dimorphism. A renewed realism about such givens entails a pragmatic evaluation of ineradicable power asymmetries. And all of this sets the stage for a critical reevaluation of our prevailing political forms.

This is not, however, a cozy story of some marginal “re-enchantment” that leaves our world otherwise intact. The digital putsch raises grave questions, perhaps most urgently concerning political form and just rule. If, in aggregate, “We the People” no longer appear as rational print-era subjects, our electoral contribution to political decision-making is likely to end up still more diluted than in a “TV Democracy.” And the bitterest contemporary meta-political battle retrieves the medieval political problem of how to avoid the decline of absolution into tyranny. The emerging poles are those who wish to avert tyranny by doubling down on print- era democratic “values,” and those who believe these values have given rise to a new kind of oppression. 

The first pole is the model is referred to warmly by its supporters, and contemptuously by its opponents, as “Our Democracy.” Briefly ascendant during the COVID crisis, it mobilizes digital “representation” toward a maximally emergent-seeming political order, while evacuating human leadership into purportedly neutral proceduralism wherever possible. Blending governance by NGO, treaty, and “stakeholders” with tightly ring- fenced rituals of democratic acclamation, it shows how print-era democratic norms operate in practice, applied to an increasingly post-print demos. 

One of the visionaries of the postliberal Blairite project, Peter Mandelson, saw these implications clearly in 1998. “Representative government,” he observed, “is being complemented by more direct forms of involvement from the Internet to referendums.” But as Mandelson saw it, such parliaments are no longer capable of responding with sufficient flexibility to the political needs of the moment. Implicitly, then, a technocratic elite must fill the gaps. Perhaps the most eloquent contemporary advocate for this model is the futurist Benjamin Bratton, who argued after COVID for a retreat from “over-individuation,” toward an automated, planet-spanning, tech-enabled order capable of supplying to each according to his needs. In Bratton’s view, global economic and political entanglement requires new forms of governance that render obsolete the clumsy and slow-moving capacities of “ceremonial parliaments” and “constrained private interests” in the name of “planetary competence.” But for Bratton, no single individual can be in charge of such an order. To be competent and legitimate means to have more and better technocrats wielding more and better technology.

Perhaps the most complete attempt to date to realize at such a regime was the Biden presidency, fronted by a man who, like Charles I, lost his head in office—in this instance, by way of age-related cognitive decline. Unlike Charles, Biden remained on the throne, a phantom POTUS, sustained from below by a swarm of bureaucrats who gatekept access, stage-managed public appearances, ghost-wrote decrees, and otherwise collectively operated an empty presidential shell on behalf of a political program coordinated seemingly spontaneously.

Is this the best we can do now? Absent the mass literacy that made democracy so obvious a choice for the early American republic, a downgrading of the direct role played by “We the People” in decision-making may well be in the people’s best interests. But it does not follow that more and better technocracy is the only possible response. Indeed, the American electoral answer to four years of autopen governance strongly suggests that though people may not read so many books these days, this fact in no way inhibits—indeed, it probably aids—the emerging sense that something is profoundly off about Our Democracy.

The central problem with such technocratic swarms is that the “democratic” swarm governance on offer typically disavows ordering form—sometimes quite literally, in the tacit abolition of borders. It also disavows purpose, now reduced to empty procedural liberalism. But this is to misunderstand the swarm as metaphor. A swarm of bees, for example, is not an effect of pure emergence by individual bees. Something is at work that is more than the sum of random external stimuli plus individual bees’ contingent actions. Bees bee, and the principle that orders their beeing is not an emergent effect of the swarm but pre-exists each individual bee or even the beeing of an entire hive. We can call this ordering principle the nature of bees or, more classically, their formal cause. Taken together, the beeing of bees is not random but intentional: They have a purpose, namely to bee.

To those re-sensitized by digital pattern recognition to this dimension of reality, the swarmist claim to democratic political legitimacy is plainly false. From this perspective, the idea that pure emergence might produce order is absurd, and those who make this case appear as arguing in bad faith. This in turn invites suspicion as to the real ordering principles of this ostensibly emergent governing regime. A people less primed for analytic thought but more attuned to patterns intuits, correctly, that the real formal cause of the purportedly emergent swarm is not “We the People.”

Pattern recognition also reveals with painful clarity the reality that swarm technocracies are typically directed to ends other than the flourishing of their people. This is less a matter of active malice than of inheriting from representative democracy the assumption that rulers and ruled necessarily have an adversarial relation. In a democracy this dynamic is baked in, as in the carefully calibrated checks and balances within the U.S. Constitution, and underwritten by the possibility of voting out an unwanted regime. But once transposed to post-print post-democracy, the agonistic relation between rulers and ruled ceases to be a safeguard and becomes a liability—for power now rests with a technocratic permanent bureaucracy, which views its relation to the people as agonistic but cannot be voted out.

This unhappy situation cannot be averted merely by replacing such a bureaucracy with a strongman leader. When Trump’s opponents march across America under the banner of “No Kings,” the operant fear is that the permanent bureaucracy is about to be replaced by a single absolute ruler—but the principle of agonistic relation between ruler and ruled will remain. This is, in essence, what is meant by “dictatorship.” Averting this alternate form of tyranny means not simply discarding the swarm for an individual, but re- examining the print-era assumption of a necessarily adversarial relation between asymmetric roles in a power hierarchy. A central theme of premodern political thought, from Aristotle to Aquinas, was the crucial role played by friendship between rulers and ruled. According to Aquinas, this friendship is not a matter of sentiment so much as of attuning policy decisions as far as possible to the common good:

Good kings . . . are loved by many when they show that they love their subjects and are studiously intent on the common welfare, and when their subjects can see that they derive many benefits from this zealous care.

The mutinous dissatisfaction currently in evidence across many Western polities is a consequence of the sense, held even by members of the electorate who do not read a book from one end of the year to the next, that their leaders do not love them or have their interests at heart. It is also central to the appeal of Donald Trump: a sense that, however chaotic and flawed, he is not a bureaucrat but an individual human, who feels genuine affection for the people and nation he leads. By contrast, a swarm cannot feel anything at all, least of all friendship.

None of this is to claim that the only possible model for post-print political legitimacy is explicit monarchy. But we have long since ceased to form democratic subjects, while the transposition of democratic desiderata into the post-print era produces not perfect, headless swarm democracy but brittle, technocratic puppet regimes widely experienced as hostile and illegitimate. The people may no longer be subjects who read, but that does not mean they are stupid or incapable of making inferences. Amid the fast-moving, intimate dynamics of the digital public square, the most difficult thing to fake over time is political friendship. The resulting political legitimacy gap, perhaps starkest of all in my native Britain, invites us to re-evaluate whether there is a place in our future, as in our past, for named individuals vested with sacred as well as executive authority.

Effective policy still requires long-form thinking, though. Thus a post-print leader, however obliquely or overtly kingly, can govern both effectively and with popular support only by working in two registers: the rational print one and the symbolic digital one. Perhaps the individual who rules most deliberately in this fashion is El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. Depicted as a tyrant by Western liberals, reportedly popular with his own electorate, and self-described on X as “Philosopher King,” Bukele governs as a “right-wing progressive.” His approach combines strong enforcement of public order, concern for ordinary citizens, techno-optimist elitism, and indifference to proceduralism. Importantly, Bukele uses the internet as a source of legitimacy, publishing carefully crafted iconography, public announcements, and ferocious rebuttals of his critics alongside active engagement in digital discourse, all within the accessible register of “secondary orality.” In this regard, whether by instinct or by design, he mobilizes a memetic enchantment made possible by secondary orality: one that recalls the calculated pageantry of premodern monarchs, such as royal entries and triumphal processions.

Bukele’s approach adumbrates a postliberal future of leaders who will operate in parallel thought-worlds: both the analytic, policy-based register of long-form literacy, whose expressive mode is logic, and the enchanted, monarchic register of secondary orality, whose expressive achievement is friendship. For a ruler or small elite able to code-switch, there need be no choice between the king and the swarm. Such a leader, rather than be subsumed by the swarm, will serve as its head or formal cause. 

As AI agents improve to the point of shrinking the administrative class, we may find that what actually has the power to destroy the twentieth-century technocracy is not free markets and personal responsibility, or even anons posting memes, but developments in AI. If so, classical liberals may be disappointed to discover that just as “civil discourse” is not coming back, what comes after the deep state will not be a return to small and limited republican government. It is more likely to be big government mediated by big data, crunched by machine agents in a now almost entirely digital swarm. Should this outcome be realized within the legacy democratic paradigm, it will inevitably result in governance that is still more impersonal, less accountable, and less capable of friendship for those ruled, than the impersonal, unaccountable bureaucrats it has rendered obsolete. 

If this happens, and I think it will, the return of the king will be not only possible but urgently necessary. Left headless, an algorithmically swarming regime of machinic proceduralism would represent the most monstrous pseudo-democratic tyranny of all. Our best safeguard against this fate is the ordering power of a human ruler, with a human head capable of prudence and justice, and a human heart capable of friendship.

Source: Substack First Things