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Will Manidis uses Henry VIII’s 1538 destruction of Thomas Becket’s shrine at…

2018-12-29 · 00:43 UTC ·WillManidis ·7 min read

Brief

Will Manidis argues that modern digital markets have optimized distribution so completely that they have recreated the medieval parish system: ubiquitous access, minimal distance, and maximum convenience. Using Canterbury Cathedral and the 1538 dismantling of Thomas Becket’s shrine as a historical anchor, he distinguishes between institutions built for universal local service and destinations that justify sacrifice, travel, and devotion. His central claim is that distance is not incidental to value but constitutive of it, drawing on Michelin’s original star definitions and Zack Baker and Adam Katz’s 2023 essay about economic life as movement toward a center. In this framework, the smartphone collapses the cost of access to near zero, destroying the assumption that abundant supply automatically creates demand. What survives are goods and experiences that function as “centers” strong enough to induce real motion—flights, detours, high prices, and visible sacrifice—illustrated by London rare-book sales to tech executives paying £100,000 to £300,000 for first editions.

Why it matters

Will Manidis uses Henry VIII’s 1538 destruction of Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury—reportedly yielding 26 carts of gold and jewels and posthumously convicting Becket 368 years after his murder—as a metaphor for the loss of institutions that could compel costly, meaningful movement.

Key details

  • The essay contrasts England’s roughly 9,000-parish medieval church network, designed so almost nobody lived more than a morning’s walk from services, with pilgrimage sites like Canterbury that required weeks of travel from places as distant as the Scottish lowlands.
  • Manidis argues the internet is a hyper-efficient ‘parish system’ that drives the distance to consumption toward zero via instant access, same-day delivery, and smartphones, but that this convenience erodes undifferentiated demand because ‘when everything is equally close, nothing ordinary is worth the journey.’
  • He frames Michelin’s star system as a distance metric rather than a pure quality score—1 star worth a stop, 2 worth a detour, 3 worth a special journey—and extends John Fiorentino’s heuristic that the only meaningful rating is how far someone will travel, from a cab ride to a transatlantic flight.
  • Citing Zack Baker and Adam Katz’s 2023 Anthropoetics paper, 'There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center,' Manidis claims modern demand is re-sorting around ‘sacred centers’: rare books, three-star restaurants, and other totemic goods that can still make buyers spend £100,000-£300,000 or get on a plane.
Source evidence

title: @WillManidis: It is 1538. King Henry VIII sent his commissioners to Canterbury Cathedral....
author: WillManidis
contenttype: twitterarticle
published: 2018-12-29T00:43:30+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/WillManidis/status/2023405488277508141

word_count: 1475

It is 1538. King Henry VIII sent his commissioners to Canterbury Cathedral.

It is 1538. King Henry VIII sent his commissioners to Canterbury Cathedral.

Their orders were simple: dismantle the shrine of Thomas Becket. Strip the gold, steal the jewels, and lug all twenty-six carts of spoils back to Whitehall. The unlucky Becket was charged and found guilty of crimes against the state, accused of being a traitor, only three hundred and sixty-eight years after his murder (by an earlier Henry).

The shrine had been the most visited pilgrimage site in England for the past three centuries. Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, one of the most enduring works of english fiction-- is literally about a pilgrimage to the shrine.

Faithful from as close as London or as far as the Scottish lowlands walked for weeks to reach the shrine. Sleeping in fields and alehouses and arriving sore and broke to kneel before the tomb in reverence. Their journey was, of course, much more the function than the destination.

The Church of England inherited the medieval parish system almost without alteration. The system divided the country into roughly nine thousand parishes, each drawn such that almost no individual in the country lived further than a morning's walk to their local church. The church you attended was the one you could reach by the time services started on foot every Sunday.

This was an ecclesiastical version of a classic network coverage problem. And the church solved it the way you solve any coverage problem: by multiplying access points until the distance between the person and the node approaches zero. More churches, more chapels, more access: ultimately, more faithful.

This complete distribution solution works when optionality is sparse. When a medieval had no choice between working the fields or attending his local parish, there was no ambiguity about what he would select.

What was lost was the very thing that King Henry's commissioners carried away: the capacity to make a person move.

The pilgrimage and the local parish are different solutions to two distinct spiritual problems. The parish answers the question of how do we serve everyone who is obligated to come, in a maximally convenient way. The pilgrimage asks whats so extraordinary that a person will risk their ordinary lives, and give their all, to reach it.

The entire economy has been a parish project.

The internet has allowed for the most elaborate distribution network in human history to be built for the singular purpose of minimizing the distance between a person and consumption. Same-day if not same minute delivery of food, goods, sin, and information are the defining attribute of modern life.

The phone in your pocket contains within it every book, every song, and every possible combination of desire that a human could want. The great work of the digital economy is not that it has created new things worth having. It is that its made the distance to everything approach zero.

When everything is equally close, nothing ordinary is worth the journey. When the church is always within walking distance, no one walks five hundred miles to Canterbury.

The parish system did not produce atheism as such but it did produce something almost as corrosive: the sensation that all acts of consumption of faith are interchangeable, that the one down the road is close enough, that the question of which is greatest need not be asked because the answer cannot possibly matter more than convenience. That the ordinary and proximal is much more than important than the extraordinary and distant.

My friend John Fiorentino, who among other things invented the weighted blanket and the greatest nightclub in New York City, jokes that the only rating system that matters is how far someone will move for it. Thumbs a few inches on a screen: worthless. A cab across town: interesting. A transatlantic flight: now you have something.

This is, of course, the same conclusion that André Michelin came to nearly a century prior. Michelin, a tire manufactuer in a country of only three thousand cars, published the guide as a way to convince homebound frenchmen to travel across the county to find the best meals- and in turn, wear through their tires.

The rating system he invented-- and this is the part that matters and has been repeated ad nauseam-- was not a quality rating. It was a distance rating. One star: worth a stop if you are passing. Two stars: worth a detour. Three stars: worth a special journey.

John Fiorentino's worship of Michelin's heuristic sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. It is, as far as I can tell, the oldest economic insight in human history, and we have spent three centuries burying it under increasingly elaborate fictions that describe consumption with factor inputs other than distance.

My friend Zack Baker, writing with Adam Katz in Anthropoetics in 2023, wrote one of the most important papers I've read in the last decade. The title is the argument: "There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center."

The claim is simple. What we call the economy is a secular re-enactment of a much older structure: the pilgrim bringing his offering to the temple. You owed a debt to the sacred center. You moved toward it. You paid at the center. You carried evidence of having been there. As the center got farther away, you could not bring the sheep anymore. Money stood in. But the structure never changed. The distance between you and the center is not incidental to the relationship. It is constitutive of it. Movement toward the center is not a byproduct of value. It is the fundamental economic act.

Which brings me back to the parish system.

The parish system works on the precondition of demand being universal. Everyone goes to church. The only variable that mattered was which was closest for them to go to.

The entire digital economy inherited this assumption. If could build the distribution and drive cost of access to zero, then demand much be infinite.

But we have flooded every category of human life with supply so total that demand is no longer obligatory. A medieval peasant attended his parish because there was no alternative. A person with a phone in their pocket has every alternative simultaneously. The phone destroyed the parish because it gave everyone infinite choice and no reason to move beyond the scroll.

This is not the end of demand but rather it is simply a re-sorting of it. The things that are genuinely extraordinary-- the three-star restaurant, the pilgrimage site, the thing that can function as a center-- still generate real pull and real movement. People will still get on a plane. But for everything else, the demand migrates from the thing itself to the totem of the thing. The first edition. The three star meal. The tallest, the best, certainly the most photographed, and the oldest.

Just yesterday morning I stopped in to visit a friend who is a prominent rare book dealer in London. The shop had recently gotten new shelves, and seemingly quite a fair bit new stock. These are irregularities for a business like the book trade that normally grows in small and inconsistent ways.

He told me his business had been totally transformed over the last year. Americans, largely tech execs, were happy to spend one, two, or even three hundred thousand quid to buy a first edition. He was closing the shop for the next week to fly to San Francisco for a round of private sales. Books these men will almost certainly never read, bought in quantities that would take a lifetime to get through. Largely first editions of science fiction novels. But via their purchase they are demonstrating the same value, same self sacrifice, and same virtue that a medieval did in their tithe to build a church spire. They are demonstrating movement and sacrifice towards the sacred totem, just a different and more secular one than their ancestors.

The internet, in its way, has made everyone a bit more Catholic.

The exaltation of the ordinary embodied faith of the local parish church-- the proximal, the convenient, and the totally adequate-- is fading in every domain. What is replacing it is not atheism. It is acts of great pilgrimage. The same re-sorting that is emptying the Church of England's pews is emptying every category of consumption that cannot function as a center. What we are left with is the older structure: sacred centers and the relentless devotional motion toward them.

Every domain is about to re-sort along this axis. Can this thing function as a center? Can it generate demonstrative motion-- real movement, real expenditure, real pilgrimage?

The things that survive are the things that can still make a person get on a plane. Everything else is scrolling. Scrolling is moving your thumbs a few inches in reverence to no center at all.

Posted: 2018-12-29T00:43:30.000Z

Engagement: 1218 likes, 136 retweets, 44 replies