An index looks humble, but it reveals the book’s real terrain. It lists the recurring objects of obsession: death, happiness, consciousness, humanism, algorithms, religion, animals, nations, markets, and the many names of modern power.
It also changes how you read. Instead of moving forward like a story, you can jump sideways—tracking a single idea across chapters and watching it mutate in different contexts. That is useful in a book built from long chains of implication.
The index hints at a deeper claim: knowledge is retrieval. What you can find quickly shapes what you believe. Search engines and indexes don’t just help; they quietly govern attention.
If you take that seriously, the index becomes ironic. It is a human-made tool for navigating ideas—appearing at the very moment the book warns that navigation itself may soon be outsourced to machines.