A barbarian king sacked Rome in the year 410, and fifteen hundred years later teenagers are still being blamed for it. They do not know this. Neither, for that matter, did the cathedral builders, the horror novelists, or the engineers now training machines in dim rooms. They are all, every one of them, characters in the same long misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding has a name. The name is Goth.

This is the biography of a single word that should never have travelled as far as it did. It began as an ethnic label for a wandering Germanic people, curdled into an insult, got pinned onto the most luminous architecture Europe ever produced, leapt from buildings into novels full of crumbling abbeys and restless dead, leapt again onto a generation of young people in black eyeliner, and now hovers over our newest creation— the artificial mind we fear may sack the next civilization. Five things, almost no shared blood, one borrowed name, each christened after the thing before it by someone who got the history wrong.

With dry wit and a refusal to take any of the panic at face value, this book follows the word link by link from Alaric to the algorithm. It is a book about how human beings fear the stranger at the gate, name him after the last stranger they feared, and then— eventually, sheepishly— invite him in and put his name on a fashion line. The original Goths, it turns out, were never even the destroyers we made them out to be. The joke, as the best jokes do, lands on everyone.

A history of architecture, horror, music, and machines told as the unraveling of one spectacular case of mistaken identity.

Keywords: Goths, Gothic architecture, Gothic literature, subculture, artificial intelligence, history of ideas, cultural misunderstanding