The Great Inversion: For ten thousand years our ideas needed us. Now the one move left is choosing what is worth keeping

At two in the morning, a father holds his three-week-old daughter and scrolls with his free hand. The feed slides across her sleeping face in shades of blue and white. She is the most unmemed human on the planet. By the time she is sixteen, she will have been measured a thousand times by a mirror that is always measuring back.

For ten thousand years, the bargain of human culture was simple: making a thing cost a life, and looking at it was nearly free. A story had to be remembered. A book ha...