For ten thousand years, ideas needed human minds to copy themselves forward. That has ended.

The Great Inversion is a trade non-fiction book about the moment culture stops needing us as its bottleneck. From ancient stories and print culture to algorithmic feeds and generative AI, Jordi ter Woord traces how ideas learn to survive, why the mirror of the internet feels so personal, and what remains human when creation becomes cheap.

This is not a digital-detox book. It is a book about attention as the one act the machine cannot perform for us.