Analog Intelligence
The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future by Joel J. Miller (Prometheus Books, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
All over the world and from the present deep into the past, you can find brick construction. Humans have been making and using bricks since at least 7000s BC. Everywhere the original standard dimensions are relatively the same, just right to fit into the palm of a hand and light enough to be held by that one hand. Bricks are so basic to human construction and so familiar that we often fail to see them for what they are, technology. Bricks are a good example of how technology can become so ubiquitous that we barely see it as such any longer. In The Idea Machine, Joel J Miller makes the argument that books are a similarly invisible technology and “one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of the modern world” (1).
Due to perceptions of warring worldviews, we often think of books and the people who love them as being one camp and STEM and its adherents being another. The Idea Machine upsets that view, first by exploring the ways that books have been and are a sophisticated form of technology. This is a fairly provocative argument. It is not unusual for historians to identify Gutenberg’s printing press as a turning point. Historians also connect the American Revolution and the French Revolution very closely with pamphlets and Enlightenment texts. Miller is going further than this, arguing that from the beginning books were a transformative technology and that they have shaped our world.
While the premise of The Idea Machine might be unexpected, the argument is well-supported. From papyrus and wax tablets to codex and paperbacks, books provide artificial memory, allow communication across time and distance, organize and provoke thought, and generate new ideas. Miller reminds us that “externalizing thoughts on a visible medium such as wax or parchment augmented the thought process itself” (39). And once there were a few books around, “ancient archives and libraries formed an analog internet for their users” (47). Librarians even “employed different forms of metadata” when they started labeling and cataloging their collections. When you think about it, “a library represents a sort of intelligence” (57). Miller takes us all the way to the links between libraries and the internet and AI.
The parallels may surprise people, but they go way back. We worry about what the next generation will be like if they spend all their time on TikTok. Socrates worried about people spending too much time with books. His fears were not grounded as much in the content of the books, as they were in the ways that books changed how people think and remember. Books weaken memory and “convey knowledge but don’t always confer it” (24). And, like us worrying about people finding all kinds of random and possibly untrue things on the internet, Socrates recognized that books require guides and people can pick them up on their own and get the wrong things from them or get nothing at all. Of course, we have Socrates’ opinions on books thanks to books.
If one mission of The Idea Machine is for us to appreciate books as technology, another mission is for us to appreciate the ways that books have shaped our lives. Miller walks us through an overview of the history of the book and their cultural impact. Miller writes: “As their use spread, books altered human thinking, changed how we organized information and people, and helped us reimagine everything from government to education, the sexes, worship, the natural world, ourselves. Muhammad called Jews and Christians people of the book. But the truth is, whether directly or indirectly, religious or not, that name fits us all” (9). The Idea Machine hits everything from the role of books in determining religious orthodoxy to the importance of print in the Protestant Reformation to the impact on society of books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Whether or not we read books, our social and political environment reflects the influence of books.
Even though the title has the word “machine” in the title, this is a book for the book lovers. Miller highlights ways that books can and have been liberating for people, like Frederick Douglass. He also reminds us that Americans have a very literary past. John Adams carried a pocket Cicero, Jefferson and Madison were bibliophiles, and de Tocqueville was surprised by how often he came across Shakespeare in the backwoods. Though The Idea Machine is not an account of U.S. history through books, it certainly emphasizes the role of books in early American history.
No book can do everything, but Miller’s approach to organizing The Idea Machine gives him reach. Though it progresses in generally chronological order, he has smaller “marginalia” sections between larger chapters. These might be a page or two and take on a topic like the spread of paper, Muslims translating the Greek canon, Augustine’s The City of God, or data. Throughout The Idea Machine, Miller uses a grid to think about books and refers to it often. His grid has three axes: expression, specificity, time. On the time axis, books make it possible for “ideas outlive their creators” (12). And books make those ideas “dynamic, allowing them to be recast, reimagined, and reconfigured from one generation to the next” (13). Even if we had some of the ideas of Aristotle handed down orally, we would not be able to parse the words and ideas very well if not for books. You might dispute the value of the canon, but there would be no canon (or alternative titles) without books.
It may turn out that The Idea Machine has been published under a good moon, because books are having a bit of a moment. People are increasingly willing to consider limiting screens, especially for young people. Classical education is booming. Substack, where Miller is quite active, seems to have a thriving culture, filled with people who love books and ideas and hate any updates to the site’s algorithm which push them away from long posts. AI is all around us, but resistance is also at an all-time high. Of course, at the same time, the figures on American reading are pretty dismal. Forty percent of Americans don’t even claim to have read any books in 2025 and the majority of reading is done by a handful of people. The contrast between the flourishing bookstagram and Substack cultures and the broader culture means that one can now find identity as a “book person” in a meaningful way. Those are probably the people who will buy the most copies of this book.
The Idea Machine is convincing. Most readers will come away seeing books as technology. What can be gained from this? Readers may find themselves better able to appreciate the books in their lives and on their shelves. A book is not just the product of a printing press, it is a way of organizing reality and sharing data across time and space. Books offer us better conversations with the people of the past than the AI grandmothers we are being sold, even if the books don’t talk back. Perhaps most of all, The Idea Machine can be helpful for the people who love books, and perhaps increase their number, because it very clearly shows books are not just traditional, they are still transformative. When we are weighing which technologies to use and when and why, books belong in the conversation. The power of analog greatly exceeds nostalgia.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
