1. Back in the days when I was doing a lot of speechifying at conferences and writing the occasional column for one or another professional journal, I would often talk about our “Gutenberg moment”. Somewhere around 1447, Gutenberg (and others) construct a printing press with reusable movable type. Not a singular invention
Great piece, Scott. There's a newish book you make me think of, J. Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which has a lot of problems but a key idea I'm intrigued by -- that the age of Gutenberg was powerful because it froze and managed written thought in ways that facilitated the growth of very large but mentally coherent societies; and that the post-Gutenberg age loses that and thus gets us a world of people living in their own bubbles, devouring Cheetos and fake news indiscriminately. I'm still thinking about that.
Thanks! I'll look into that. (I read Jarvis quite a bit in the early 2000s(?) when he was writing a lot about how journalism was being disrupted. Eventually I found his techno-optimism at odds with my own observations and haven't paid much attention to what he's been up to since.) One of the things I started to wonder as I was working on this piece is whether the individual bubble world might have just been a transitional phase that we are starting to come out of. Josie and her Zed cohort skitter across information online in very different ways than even the tech-savviest amongst us older folks. I wonder if the natural skepticism that they bring (having grown up in the post-expertise world) doesn't help them avoid the kinds of information bubbles that tend to capture their elders. I don't have evidence for this beyond my observations & speculations, but it's an idea I'll keep kicking around.
Book too superficial for me, but that one idea I'm still chewing. Generally, I'd say that between a world of writers and a world of readers, you need a narrow gateway here and there to control and guide. "Getting published" served that function; now I'd say the narrowest gateway is the Google search. I wonder what a smart-for-me AI agent could do?
Good points, and some optimism on the future is welcome. I think there's a generational difference; those of us who remember life before the Internet, those who remember life before smartphones, and the kids, who have no idea what an unplugged life is.
A problem is that the Internet, while manageable, is at best trying to drink from a firehose. So much bullshit, propaganda, sales pitches, and low-info content - and it's only multiplying. It is entirely possible to curate one's experience, but so many people don't...or can't tell real from "AI." With people's natural desire to seek like-minded individuals, we're each retreating into our own augmented reality...and consensus reality is weakening. The Internet is made of ideas, which is great for memetics, but bad for real-life implementation. Internet socio-politics need never be affected by the crass diminutions of "how do we actually implement this" and morality is reduced to what one consumes.
That’s the danger, certainly. “Curation” has been overused the last decade or so, but I think it’s appropriate here. We’ll need new tools to do the curation and we don’t have them yet. If they turn out to be as different as the tools we used before and after Gutenberg, then I probably don’t have the imagination to clearly see what they might be. Think of the difference between a medieval book catalog and a mid-20th century card catalog. My hope is that Josie’s cohort and those that come after will have the wit and resilience to invent it.
Great piece, Scott. There's a newish book you make me think of, J. Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which has a lot of problems but a key idea I'm intrigued by -- that the age of Gutenberg was powerful because it froze and managed written thought in ways that facilitated the growth of very large but mentally coherent societies; and that the post-Gutenberg age loses that and thus gets us a world of people living in their own bubbles, devouring Cheetos and fake news indiscriminately. I'm still thinking about that.
Thanks! I'll look into that. (I read Jarvis quite a bit in the early 2000s(?) when he was writing a lot about how journalism was being disrupted. Eventually I found his techno-optimism at odds with my own observations and haven't paid much attention to what he's been up to since.) One of the things I started to wonder as I was working on this piece is whether the individual bubble world might have just been a transitional phase that we are starting to come out of. Josie and her Zed cohort skitter across information online in very different ways than even the tech-savviest amongst us older folks. I wonder if the natural skepticism that they bring (having grown up in the post-expertise world) doesn't help them avoid the kinds of information bubbles that tend to capture their elders. I don't have evidence for this beyond my observations & speculations, but it's an idea I'll keep kicking around.
Book too superficial for me, but that one idea I'm still chewing. Generally, I'd say that between a world of writers and a world of readers, you need a narrow gateway here and there to control and guide. "Getting published" served that function; now I'd say the narrowest gateway is the Google search. I wonder what a smart-for-me AI agent could do?
Good points, and some optimism on the future is welcome. I think there's a generational difference; those of us who remember life before the Internet, those who remember life before smartphones, and the kids, who have no idea what an unplugged life is.
A problem is that the Internet, while manageable, is at best trying to drink from a firehose. So much bullshit, propaganda, sales pitches, and low-info content - and it's only multiplying. It is entirely possible to curate one's experience, but so many people don't...or can't tell real from "AI." With people's natural desire to seek like-minded individuals, we're each retreating into our own augmented reality...and consensus reality is weakening. The Internet is made of ideas, which is great for memetics, but bad for real-life implementation. Internet socio-politics need never be affected by the crass diminutions of "how do we actually implement this" and morality is reduced to what one consumes.
That’s the danger, certainly. “Curation” has been overused the last decade or so, but I think it’s appropriate here. We’ll need new tools to do the curation and we don’t have them yet. If they turn out to be as different as the tools we used before and after Gutenberg, then I probably don’t have the imagination to clearly see what they might be. Think of the difference between a medieval book catalog and a mid-20th century card catalog. My hope is that Josie’s cohort and those that come after will have the wit and resilience to invent it.