Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today

by Naomi Alderman

In this era-defining book, developed from her groundbreaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to explore the epoch we’re living through, an epoch she calls the "Information Crisis." The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, and opportunities as well as verbal attacks, disinformation, and misinformation than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehoods more quickly. It brings us together and also divides us in new ways. It is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world.

There is no going back, but we have been here before: This is humanity’s third information crisis. The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, and the second, the invention of the printing press 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions, and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed, as well as more knowledgeable, educated, and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand our present and prepare for our future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, Psychology, History, Technology, 21st Century, Ebooks

176 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 2025

About the author

Naomi Alderman (born 1974 in London) is a British author and novelist.

Alderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist.
She was the lead writer for Perplex City, an Alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June, 2007.[1]
Her father is Geoffrey Alderman, an academic who has specialised in Anglo-Jewish history. She and her father were interviewed in The Sunday Times "Relative Values" feature on 11 February 2007.[2]

Her literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a rabbi's daughter from North London who becomes a lesbian, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers.
Since its publication in the United Kingdom, it has been issued in the USA, Germany, Israel, Holland, Poland and France and is due to be published in Italy, Hungary and Croatia.
She wrote the narrative for The Winter House, an online, interactive yet linear short story visualized by Jey Biddulph. The project was commissioned by Booktrust as part of the Story campaign, supported by Arts Council England. [3]

Reviews

[Jack Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts off super strong with an accessible history of the three stages of our internet crisis -- writing, the printing press, the internet. However, and I think this is honestly more of a compliment than an insult, I don't think the author is chronically online enough to stick the landing. I hoped this would be more of a dissection / excavation of modern internet discourse, but instead the second half is an overview with a very light brush. There's some brilliant wisdom in here about having healthy debates -- particularly acknowledging that users you debate with online are real people not just symbols -- but I feel it only scratches the surface. There's many further layers of rock that still need to be struck into.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today is a short book that's really more of a long opinion piece. It might have helped if I'd read some of Naomi Alderman's other writings before diving into this, or maybe if I'd read it as a physical book rather than an audiobook. Unacquainted as I was with the author or her usual writing style, her narration came off kind of smug. Not burning her at the stake for saying so - god forbid! - but it did get sort of grating after a while.

Delivery notwithstanding, I admire what Alderman tried to do here. The way she articulated her ideas absolutely resonated with me, and I do hope the term "information crisis" as a descriptor for our current age catches on. I just thought there were one too many moments were she overstepped her bounds. While parts of this book were thought-provoking, others were frustratingly ill-realised, almost sketchy, yet broadly sweeping. Others still were delivered in a factual tone that revealed their speculative origins. ("Forms" of the printing press existed in China and Korea, but it was phonetic alphabets that "really" revolutionised writing technology? Okay...)

Regardless, reading (or listening to) this book is probably worth your time if these are issues you care about. But maybe borrow it from your local library - you know, those institutions whose models Alderman wishes tech companies would integrate into their products, but whose existence she doesn't defend anywhere near as ardently as the BBC.

My thanks to Penguin Audio and Libro.fm for the ALC.

[Lauren Putt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a fascinating read, sad it came to an end! Naomi offers us a guide on how to keep sane during an age of information crisis. It puts you off social media for sure!

[Mahnoor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moving lil book that argues in favor of naming our current epoch — that is, yet another information crisis, similar to the advent of writing and the printing press — in order to deal with the emotional, physical, psychological, and intellectual consequences that emerge. The title reads as very anti-cancel culture, but what Alderman is doing is something much more interesting, if a little surface level (one, because we haven't yet emerged on the other side of the crisis yet, but also because this book is pretty Eurocentric in its view of history).

I loved the bit about how there are no outside unmapped worlds left to explore — the unmapped world of the minutae of our inner lives is new territory, and its newness and sudden abundance is part of the information crisis. I'll also be thinking about the Book of Sand (I need to read Borges!!) and supernormal stimulus analogies for a while. She calls the internet a "wonderful, catastrophic thing," a kind of "raising of the dead, a kind of telepathy, a kind of heaven where we see each other as thoughts and character, not as bodies, wealth, or birth." This thread in the book — how the internet has made us see each other as symbols, simply because our minds have not evolved to keep up with the sudden influx of information we have — is what is really going to stay with me. Alderton is hopeful in the inevitability of another enlightenment period following our current information crisis. In the meantime, she views this opportunity to witness our minds cracking open and develop new ways of thinking (and thinking about thinking) as an exciting once-in-a-few-centuries development, and emphasizes our need to keep each other safe through it and avoid devolving into the chaos that comes with information crises.

Tldr: Short and engaging read that's made me more aware of historical patterns vis a vis information crises. It doesn't say anything particularly groundbreaking, but it has made me approach digital life with a little less skepticism and a little more hope.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though 3 stars doesn’t feel entirely right, it’s what I’ve settled on. I liked listening to Alderman’s ponderings, found her points and references interesting, appreciated her reasonableness.

However, listening to this audiobook in January 2026 - only a couple of months after its publication - DBAATST already feels out of step. The topic at hand is impossible to pin down, everything moving and changing so fast, as Alderman herself notes; maybe such a book was always doomed to fail in some way. Appeals to remain open to those who ‘disagree’ with you are hard to take right now, even for those who might want to build bridges in theory. It’s possible even the author herself now feels otherwise than she did when writing.

At another time, this book would likely hit completely different - but in attempting to be a book for our times, it falls on its face. That is a little harsh when there is much to be taken from DBAATST, but ultimately it’s the truth - mine, right now, at least.

[Alysse Lee-Orr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative, pragmatic and hopeful! I was starting to get really scared of technology, the internet and other people, and this book reminded me that most humans are good and kind, there is a lot to be gained from intentional use of technology, and we should probably just talk to each other more lol

[Aisling · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is brilliant!!

[Jess]

I can't give this a rating as I've only read the sampler, not the full thing, but it was insightful and interesting!

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful set of ideas for anyone alive today

[Esme Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and relevant read for today. Naomi posits that we would benefit from knowing the name of our 'era' historians will one day use to describe these times, so that we might ajust accordingly. She puts her money on 'The Informtation Crisis', though this is, in fact, the third such crisis we have dealt with. First came the written word. And then came the printing press. And now we have the dawn of the internet, social media and generative AI.

Naomi disusses how our access to information reshapes our perceptions and interactions of one another at a very basic level. Where once letters were symbols representing the people behind them, we have somehow flipped it, and the people are now mere symbols presented by the letters we write about them. It is easier to hate an anonymous face on the other side of the screen than to face it head on.

She touches on history, misinformation, conspiracy theories and the radical adoption of 'cancel culture' that boxes people up from a young age and refuses to let them grow, adapt or change.

Ultimately, Naomi talks about the power of coexisting. The power of accepting that someone might have a different interpretation of a really old book, and not condemning them to a horrifically painful death because of it. Given recent news here in Australia, this seems like an important lesson for everyone to learn.

Naomi's writing is engaging, humourous and even self deprecating. She has a powerful mind and her ability to look behind to see ahead is something we should all aspire to.

[Sian]

I'm glad this was short, it ran the risk of becoming quite repetitive.
An interesting read, but the feeling of 'oh my god, I should delete all my socials' was quickly overridden when my friend sent me a meme about skycards so...

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, very easy to read and follow and also very thought provoking

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking, gentle, observant, a book for our times which helps us breathe a little and think. I loved it.

[Maisie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Never been quite so motivated to write a review lol

To preface, when I saw this book in the shop I got Naomi Alderman and Naomi Klein confused at first but when I realised my mistake I was like okay great, I read The Power when i was a teenager and thought it was a great feminist book so this should be a good read.

It does not engage in any feminist ideas at all, not that it had to and that was my mistake but i don’t think you CAN discuss the information crisis without at least ALLUDING to the unique experiences we have with the internet … but this approach is very one-fits-all. It’s literally called Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today and it doesn’t talk about women’s unique experiences? Right….

It did cause me to revisit The Power and 9 years later I wouldn’t describe it as feminist at all, more of a tale of what would happen if the patriarchy fell and women simply stepped into their power dynamics without reordering anything other than man vs. woman. Not saying every book a woman writes has to be a feminist one but you can’t avoid it if the topic you want to write about is so central to how patriarchy operates in the 2020s (then again… isn’t everything.)

Again, when I was a teenager someone said or I read somewhere about the internet being unregulated like “the wild west” and i thought it was really profound and have since been engaging with these sort of ideas, as I’m sure a majority of us have. I wouldn’t say this book brought anything new to that conversation other than prompting me to google the author and realise why she wrote a book about people not cancelling others for what they said online 10 years ago lol…..

In sum, very surface level but I probably wouldn’t turn to this author for books with an intersectional approach anyway

[fallsforbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5 stars

I think this book captures a lot of our anxieties about the present quite well. Alderman is clearly a very captivating writer. I like how matter-of-factly her tone is, even when expressing an opinion. It feels like a very informed take overall.

However, I do believe that near the end, around chapter 10 maybe, it enters into an interesting mode of "both-sides-ism" which feels errily centrist. By recounting the anecdotal story of her friend who "has disagreed with her over a hot-topic cultural war issue for eight years" (paraphrasing), she makes a point about not abandoning people you might disagree with. Even that having the difficult conversations might actually be a way out of this information crisis. I don't know what to make of this.

On one hand, it is clear that whatever the issue is, both Naomi and her friend seem like sensible people who are invested in clean, intellectual discussion. But as someone who grew up in conservative spaces and continues to inhabit them often, not all people have the capacity to have it be so. A lot of time, taking account of the emotions of people who "disagree" with you is exhausting because unlike Alderman's friend... the other party often doesn't. I still think her overall takes on navigating these discussions are worth considering. I just feel like she may have a tunnel-vision perspective from her specific life scnerios.

Anyways, this is a book worth reading if the topic interests you.

[John Appleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

At around 150 pages, a short book but one that packs a lot of ideas in.

I'd say there are two intertwined aspects of this book - one, the parallels between previous "information crises" - the inventions of writing and printing, and the evolution of the internet - along with how these differ from oral cultures. Secondly, we have a lot of discussion about how we might better navigate the internet and social media - the current information crisis.

Alderman is by no means anti-technology - she in fact embraces technology but can see the problems it can cause, even if only by tiny, imperceptible degrees that alter the way that we interact with society and look at ourselves. And the comparisons with those two earlier innovations in communication help to understand this.

I think there's a lot for us to learn and think about in here - even those of us who think ourselves internet savvy and too clever to fall into the traps of trolls and culture wars. None of us are as clever as we like to think.

This book will be going onto my bookshelf next to Jeanette Winterson's 12 Bytes - which I read a few years back and promised myself I'd read about five years hence to see how it's ideas stood up to where technology had ended up. I'll do the same with this.

[Doc Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this short read from Naomi Alderman, ‘Don’t Burn anyone at the stake today.’ With an engaging writing style she explores the chaotic and stressful world many of us are currently experiencing. Alderman defines the current reshaping of human communication and society as the ‘Third Information Crisis.’ Providing a label to what we’re all experiencing gives us agency to step back and reflect. To think about how we might do things differently in navigating increased misinformation, polarisation, and loneliness.

We can also draw parallels from the two previous information revolutions, the invention of writing, and, the invention of printing press.

Alderman highlights
“We live in a tidal wave of data, coming at us constantly. We don't have the social and informational structures in place yet to manage it…

It's affecting everything else that's going on because it's about how we find out what's going on. This is the lens through which we see everything else. Understanding that lens, knowing the name of our own era, might be the most useful thing we could know about our whole lives.”

For those with limited time the BBC Radio 4 series, ‘The Third Information Crisis’, on which Alderman’s book is largely based is still available for listening.

[Samantha Licheni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audio version of this book narrated by the author and found it very enjoyable to listen to.

A very interesting insight into the modern internet age and how best to cope with the inevitable, fast-moving future into deeper and greater technology.

I loved how this author presented both the good and the evil of the internet and modern technology. It was a good reminder that while the internet and AI can be crazy and scary and unknown, there is also so much to be gained from it.

I loved the little deep dives into the history of writing and printing, the other information crises that humans have gone through, it was very interesting to learn about.

While I don't think any of the ideas presented in this book were revolutionary, it was a really good reminder to take a step back from the internet and social media and try and be more intentional about how I use it.

I'm sure that mindset will be gone as quickly as it has set in, as is the way of life during this era, fast and everchanging and unstoppable.

[Imran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This certainly was a breath of fresh air. A timely work which doesn't provide any earth shattering insights but it does instil a sense of calm in the reader. Seeing this cautionary tale articulated in an accessible way is an anecdote to the confusion, fear and anger that permeates our public discourse today. I clearly remember a time when fellow members of society relished a healthy debate. This could often inflame passions and get heated but at the conclusion of the conversation, we would remain on good terms. Today we seem to have lost the ability to 'agree to disagree' without the discourse turning toxic. This is my biggest takeaway from this book. The information crisis is largely fuelled by those who wish to divide and manipulate. To combat this we must use empathy and kindness. There is still hope!

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Many books leave you with glimmers of recognition, ‘eureka’ moments that summarise an inchoate feeling you knew existed but could not quite name. This is one of those books, with the chief metaphor that I take away from it being the transition from a world of finite books to a book of sand in your pocket (i.e. your phone - engaging, alarming, threatening). There is no ‘unmapped world’ left to explore, so in a world of abundance (a product of the revolution of the individual and the concomitant fascination with internal states) how do we sift through so much ‘content’? The answer is by having new institutions — a public library model where we introduce a lack of immediacy and a sense of curated scarcity without a profit motive. Lots to think about, though some to disagree with and critique. Still, it certainly makes you think.

[Kirsten Thijssen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting! Naomi Alderman helps the reader to zoom out and look at the current media/tech landscape through the lens of historical turning points such as the invention of the printing press. Any such turning point comes with similar psychological and communal shifts. We can learn from history without stopping the present.

One of my favorite highlighted sentences about how to maintain a functioning community when living through an information crisis: “Managing that disagreement, agreeing to treat people well even when we disagree with them, is how we stop ourselves from becoming lonely, isolated and afraid.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[Krista D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, but insightful book about the world we find ourselves in. Thought-provoking, occasionally uncomfortable, and meant to challenge your own interactions with the information crisis we find ourselves in.

I think one pivotal take aways for me was that you shouldn't engage with culture-war topic discussions with people who *only* want to talk to you about those topics. I've been trying to figure out why specific kinds of social media accounts really crawl under my skin and this really stood out to me that my knee-jerk feeling was actually a form of protection.

[Niamh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this book is just so sensible. It is a moment of calm in amongst the chaos that just reminds us there is life outside your apartment. And it's kind of nice to know that we aren't necessarily living in completely unprecedented times - they were indeed precedented by the information crises of centuries past. It's kind of comforting when you think about it.

[Mark Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. I have now deleted all my social media accounts. Love the references to other books and podcasts. Don’t love the constant reference to “technology billionaires”. Technology companies would be a better phrase perhaps - I reckon 😜

[Peter Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is the best thing a person can know about their life ? It is what the name of the era you are living through is called. Ours is the information crisis. A fascination read by a very imaginative lady. A guide to the information crisis we are living through. Highly recommended.

[mollie · Rating 3 out of 5]

end individualism forever

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and very useful little book regarding the 'information crisis' that we currently live though. I highly recommend.

[Anson Mackay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking book - are we at the start of a third information crisis?

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really thought provoking short book about the state of the world at the moment. More hopeful than it sounds. Some really good stuff in here.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timely and insightful