I could be pedantic and argue that the real innovation was the moveable type and not the press itself (printing presses already existed), but I'm less interested in the effects than the processes, and no it's not because I don't understand processes in general, it's just that I specifically went to school to study a subject where one could plug in knowledge gaps with sophistry, word-play and the structures of rhetorical argument. You're just dealing with the wrong type of nerd for all that math shit.
It's not weird or really coincidental that within less than a century of moveable type, literacy spun out of the control of the aristocracy and the church, reshaping societies starting with something as simple as demand for access to the Bible in the local language. These demands had existed before, resulting typically in (at best) circumscription and censure but often also the horrific maiming and torturous death of the perpetrators. With that you get things like a whole-ass Reformation, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, all movements away from (purposely or not) an orderly control of a pyramidally shaped society to a much flatter sort of arrangement where those at the top were always more in arm's reach of the ones at the bottom.
The link between print and democratization is not to be undersold or diminished. Nothing leaked out of hegemonic control faster than an idea, committed to paper, in the hands of one person just long enough to absorb it, even if the paper itself were destroyed, lost or seized. With print you get education of the masses, a middle class, labor organization, suffragettes, civil rights movements, entire subcultures of novelty and resistance both manifesting and understanding themselves on their own terms, impervious to the pressures of norms, conformity or both.
A piece of paper is an irreducible thing, a transmitter of an idea but also a tool, for dissemination of complex challenges to seemingly intractable political oppression or just long consideration as someone figures out for the first time what sound the "A" character makes.
Sure, Johannes Gutenberg smashed open Pandora's jar, but the weight of the troubles alighting collected most heavily on those in the loftier places, with farther to fall and more to lose. Those of us who remember the early internet felt the Gutenbergian thrill of seeing it happen again, the flash-fire of an idea leaving one mind and arriving at any other in the world in a literal instant, in things like dial-up BBS communities, where the world was whatever you wanted it to be. The ethos carried over somewhat to the centralization of the impulse in services like Prodigy or AOL, sacrificing the DIY scrape-by and ephemeral aesthetic for something more reliably convenient, slickly packaged and constant, at the cost of some intrusion of advertising and the horrifying idea that now it was accessible enough that your mom could actually use it.
Then a whole swirl of shit happened:
-The death of the idea of news as a loss-leading public good in favor of a for-profit model odiously perfected by Fox News
-The undermining of traditional media as a resource for basic information in favor of instant-gratification sources in social media, especially facebook and twitter
-The collapse of traditional media in an entertainment-and-profit environment as "information" and "news" become qualitatively synonymous.
-The arrival of private equity as a predatory force stripping newsrooms for parts, with no interest in the output, mission or societal value of the thing they are buying
-The necessary turn to big-money individuals to take on news organization or social media as loss-leaders again.
The last move burnished up people like Jeff Bezos for a second as saviors of a dying industry, but the problem with corporate capture is the "corporate" and "capture" parts. You can play the pro-democracy savior right up until you decide not to, and we all get to see at once that it's been too late since about 1997. The "no real choice" option as the standard bearers of old media were dying means the mastheads and bylines are now subject to the capriciousness and idiocy of worm-headed moguls who have too much money to be told "actually, that's a bad idea" by anyone around them since they first breached about $50 million in net worth. There's a reason "brain rot" was named Oxford's word of the year.
Now what we've got are people at the bottom having their ideas being dictated to them by people at the top. We're back to the pyramid shape again, but in a more literal way: a pharaoh-and-slaves model of building. The moveable type is being deployed in a way that's designed to get the slaves to thank pharaoh for the work.
This post hasn't been that funny, but it's all getting to be a little too much with the genuflection and ass-kissing since Election Day. At least it's now all explicit. The only thing we can really say with confidence is that when things really start going to shit, the press' take is going to be: why did the Democrats let this happen?
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*actually I guess I should clarify since Wikipedia only qualifies as "research" on its own for the apolitical and/or lefties. If you're on the right, "research" means nodding along to whatever Joe Rogan just credulously said "what, really? That doesn't sound right to me, we shouldn't be doing that..." to in response to a guest asserting, like, trans kids somehow deplete global food supplies or Jell-O gives you AIDS.
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