The facts without the chase.

The Great Inversion is a trade non-fiction book about what happens when ideas no longer need human minds to reproduce.

A civilisational history of cultural replication, from cave stories to algorithmic feeds and generative AI, asking what a person can still choose when making more culture becomes almost free.

For ten thousand years, ideas needed human minds to copy themselves forward. That dependency is breaking. Generative machines now produce the images, arguments and voices that used to cost a life. The Great Inversion follows the history of how culture replicates, from the cave elder to the feed, and asks what a human still does once the replicator no longer needs them.

Jordi ter Woord is a Dutch writer, solution architect and IT lead. He writes about culture, attention and the systems that quietly teach people what to notice.

Jordi ter Woord is a Dutch writer, solution architect and IT lead. He studied philosophy and artificial intelligence at Radboud University, then spent the last fifteen years building systems that move information inside organisations in healthcare, retail and public-sector work. The Great Inversion is his first non-fiction book.

Creation is cheap. Attention is the scarce thing now.