Appendix A — Methodological Note
This appendix sets out the methodological choices that organise the book. It does not attempt to defend a single methodology against others; it explains what the book does and why.
A.1 Disciplinary location
Located at the intersection of several fields, the work draws on the specific analytical contributions each has consolidated:
Critical political theory (in the sense of analytical reconstruction of the political-economic and institutional conditions of public reason).
Cultural sociology (in the Bourdieusian and post-Bourdieusian registers, with attention to the work of Sarah Banet-Weiser, Beth Driscoll, Claire Squires, Sarah Jerasa and others on contemporary reading cultures).
Media studies and the political economy of communication (the Zuboff–Williams–Citton lineage on the attention economy, with the more recent additions of Akbari, Dean and Harsin).
Democratic theory (the Levitsky–Ziblatt–Way framework on competitive authoritarianism, Applebaum on transnational authoritarian networks, and the broader literature on democratic backsliding).
A.2 Empirical strategy
The empirical material used is illustrative rather than exhaustive. The book does not present original survey data, ethnographic fieldwork or computational text analysis (though the appendix to Appendix B catalogues the cultural artefacts examined, and Appendix C systematises the political record).
The justification for this choice: the work’s contribution is conceptual — a re-description of an empirically well-documented pair of phenomena under a single analytical frame. The empirical record on which it draws is publicly available, has been exhaustively documented elsewhere, and is referenced in the body of the text. Where the empirical record is contested, the contestation is reported. Where the record is incomplete, the incompleteness is noted.
A.3 The temporal frame
The project’s temporal frame is post-2016, with intensive engagement of the period 2024–2026. The choice of 2016 as a hinge year follows the consolidated political-science literature on democratic backsliding, which treats the year as a global inflection point (Trump’s first election; the Brexit referendum; the consolidation of Orbán’s regime in Hungary; the failed coup and subsequent purges in Türkiye). The intensive engagement of 2024–2026 reflects the period in which the structural argument of the book has been most clearly demonstrated by events.
A consequence of this temporal frame: the book’s analysis is likely to require updating before its publication date, and almost certainly will require updating after it. The chronology in Appendix C is intended to assist readers in relocating the argument in time.
A.4 The geographical frame
The study’s centre of gravity is the anglophone North Atlantic — principally the United States and the United Kingdom, with comparative material on Hungary, India, Türkiye and Spain. This is a limitation, acknowledged here, and partially compensated for by:
A.5 The normative frame
The analysis is avowedly normative. It takes for granted that:
liberal-democratic constitutional ideals (justice, equality, freedom, the public practice of reason) are worth defending;
the erosion of those ideals between 2016 and 2026 is a loss;
the academic vocation has resources for naming and resisting that loss.
These commitments are stated explicitly rather than concealed.
A.6 Citation and notation
The book uses APA 7th edition author–date citation throughout (parenthetical and narrative forms as appropriate to syntactic context). All sources are listed in References. Direct quotations include page numbers; paraphrases and structural references give the year alone, in line with APA conventions. DOIs are provided where available; URLs are given for sources that lack a DOI but possess a stable institutional address. The book is written in British English, and APA 7’s punctuation and formatting conventions are applied throughout, with British orthography retained in the running text. Terminology that is contested — for instance, the choice between ‘illiberal democracy’ and ‘competitive authoritarianism’ — is signposted on first use; subsequent use follows the choice signalled there.
With few exceptions, supplementary notes, clarifications and illustrative material are presented throughout as margin notes positioned alongside their anchor paragraph rather than collected as endnotes. This layout follows Quarto’s .column-margin placement option and is intended to keep contextual material visually proximate to the passage it qualifies.
A.7 Bibliographic strategy
Readers familiar with the literature on platform power may notice that this book does not take Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) as its principal anchor for the political economy of information, despite that work’s near-canonical standing in trade and adjacent academic discourse. The decision is deliberate. Zuboff’s totalising frame collapses institutional differences that the argument needs to keep visible — between platform regimes, state data regimes, and the symbolic-cultural regime of intellectual capital under which the mausoleum of the mind of Chapter 7 becomes intelligible. Where surveillance is at issue, the book draws on Browne (2015) and Benjamin (2019) for the racialised dimension that Zuboff’s frame underweights, on Nissenbaum (2010) for the analysis of normative migration across contexts that the chapters of Part II require, and, for the broader institutional architecture, on Cohen (2019), whose category of informational capitalism offers the legal and constitutional purchase that the genealogy of Chapter 1 and the institutional analysis of Chapter 7 both depend on. The reader will find Crawford (2021) and D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) doing similar work in Chapter 6 and Chapter 5 respectively, and Hagendorff (2020) performing the metacritical function of distinguishing genuine normative inquiry from its corporate simulacrum.
A.8 Drafting and revision support
The argumentative and editorial development of the manuscript was supported throughout by Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic). The model was used at each stage of the project’s structural arc: to organise the initial conceptual framework and chapter architecture; to draft individual sections from working notes and source annotations; and to support the iterative revision cycles through which the bibliography grew from approximately 70 references in the initial phase to approximately 190 in the final one. Each revision cycle involved integrating newly added documentary material — locating its argumentative position within the existing structure, assessing redundancy or tension with prior formulations, and editing accordingly: deleting superseded passages, expanding or qualifying claims in light of new evidence, and adjusting cross-references throughout.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) was used selectively for lower-demand tasks, principally those concerned with formatting, layout and document appearance rather than argumentative content — including Quarto rendering issues, citation formatting, and the preparation of the glossary and visual-materials sections of this appendix. All substantive intellectual judgements, source selections, argumentative claims and editorial decisions remain the author’s own; the models functioned as a structured drafting and revision environment, not as sources of content or authority.
A.9 Visual materials
The illustrative images distributed across the margin columns of the book were generated using Perplexity’s integrated text-to-image service in its default configuration, which routes prompts among GPT Image 1, Nano Banana and Seedream 4.5. No manual override of model choice or sampling parameters, no upscaling, and no external post-processing were employed; outputs are direct PNG exports at the service’s default resolution, embedded via Quarto’s margin-layout options without further rescaling. All images are illustrative, not evidentiary: they exemplify conceptual distinctions made in the text rather than document empirical referents, and should be read as visual analogues to the argument rather than as evidence in support of it.
Prompts were drafted in English and Spanish on the basis of the argumentative content of the passages each image accompanies. They specified, in each case: spatial scale, architectural or compositional structure, lighting and material qualities, palette, format (predominantly vertical 4:5 for .column-margin insertion, with horizontal variants where the spatial argument required them), and a neutral realistic register suitable for print and for margin-column placement. Legible text within the image frame was systematically suppressed in order to keep the visual analogy from collapsing into illustration of named referents. Generation proceeded iteratively within each working session: outputs were evaluated after each cycle and, where necessary, revised through targeted prompt edits addressing composition, the visibility of digital infrastructure, iconographic coherence, internal consistency across the series, or tonal register.
Two working sessions account for the full set.
The images accompanying chapters Chapter 1 through Chapter 7 were generated on 3 May 2026 (CEST). The prompts derived directly from the argumentative claims of the passages they accompany — among them: a structural analogy between a mended Chinese jacket and a Dior tote bag as cultural reliquaries; the disgustingly educated archetype as a legible identity performance; the Substack inbox as a digitally mutated form of the unread literary-magazine pile; the BookTok condition of jamais lu, mais tout vu; and a temporal diptych contrasting the 1950s anti-intellectual mother with her 2026 monetised counterpart. The diptych required three revision cycles — the most of any single image in the session — with adjustments concerning the orientation of the laptop screen away from the viewer, the removal of device interfaces visible to the spectator, and the introduction of a shared institutional symbol (a stylised classical portico) linking the book cover in the 1950s panel to the editorial contract in the 2026 panel.
The three images placed in the margin column of Chapter 8 were generated in a separate session on 7 May 2026 (CEST), under the same technical conditions. They correspond to the three conceptual cases the closing chapter contrasts: a small physically oriented public library; a large infrastructurally dense library as a node of access to scholarly and professional resources; and a printed-backdrop “library” used for performative self-presentation in digital video. Three generation cycles, one per conceptual case, with revisions limited to high-level prompt edits adjusting composition, the visibility of digital infrastructure, and tonal register.
A.10 What the book is not
A final clarification.
This work is not a manifesto and does not advance a political programme; its contribution lies in clarifying the conditions and concepts that any such programme would have to confront. It is not a journalistic survey of contemporary reading cultures: the journalistic literature — Cartner-Morley, Sykes, the Guardian fashion columnists’ wider corpus — is the material on which the argument draws, not the register in which it is conducted. The genealogical chapter is a reconstruction adequate to the argument, not a comprehensive history of anti-intellectualism in its own right. And the chapter on AI and cognition draws on the rapidly consolidating empirical literature without contributing original empirical work to it.