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Chapter 1
Estimated reading time: 23 minutes in 3 sections
First section: 7 minutes
Second section: 10 minutes
Third section: 6 minutes

WE ARE SLAVES TO DIGITAL MONOPOLIES

FROM GUTENBERG TO ZUCKERBERG-LIBERATION TO INTOXICATION

LIBERATION

Imagine that you're not a Dumb Fuck.

Imagine you're a handsome dude with sensuous lips, nice hair, and a thoughtful frown on your face. Picture the selfie: you're intelligent, you're rad, you're sexy.

The selfie is not so much of an option right now, because it's 1517, but someone's taken a fetching portrait of you: you're all right.

You live in a pretty little town called Wittenberg in the middle of Germany, except it's not yet called Germany, it's called the Holy Roman Empire, and it isn't strictly an empire, it's not really Roman, and it certainly is not holy. At least not as far as you're concerned, and you have a strong opinion on this, because you're a friar: you spend most of your time praying and probing the nature of God. Sometimes you go on pilgrimages. You're Martin Luther. The original.

[YOU HAVE NO FREEDOM OF THOUGHT, NOR OF ANYTHING ELSE.]

Your biggest problem with the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church is that the Catholic Church through the Holy Roman Empire has near absolute power and tells everyone including you what to think, what to say, what to do, when to worship, and who to believe in. You have no freedom of thought, nor of anything else. You are being told what's what, and the risks you run if you disagree are enormous. They're real: you may be excommunicated, which in practice means you have no standing in society at all; you may be executed, which in practice means you're dead.

But there's one thing that makes you angrier than anything else: >indulgences<. What the fuck are they?

Is exactly what you think, although you don't say it like that. They're essentially Get Out of Jail cards sold by the Church to the people, only for >jail< read >purgatory<, and unlike those in Monopoly, these aren't free: people pay real money for them.

You think they're a racket. They're an insidious revenue stream which funnels funds from the poor to the rich. The poor are the people in general, most of whom have no education and therefore believe whatever they're told; the rich are the nobility and the Church. The Church is immensely wealthy, it's dripping gold. And because everyone in the eyes of the Catholic Church is a sinner, everyone will land in purgatory. Purgatory is the forecourt of hell: it's an unpleasant place. But for a small fee, an indulgence will spare you the horrible torture and excruciating pain that's going to be inflicted on you there to atone for your sins. If your sins are particularly gross, the fee will have to be a bit larger, obviously.

You think this is all a whole load of nonsense. You're a friar: you've studied the Scriptures extensively. Every day, for many years. That's literally been your job: studying the Scriptures. And the way you understand the Scriptures, anyone can find Salvation and God's forgiveness by simply believing in Christ. And you say so. The Catholic Church is not amused; as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, you're a heretic, and extremely dangerous.

Now, considering it's still 1517: what do you do?

You have no internet, no smartphone, no old school phone either, no electricity at all. No trains, no planes, no automobiles. You have the Pope and his whole >Holy Empire< breathing down your neck, and you're a friar. You are sworn to a life of poverty and piety, you have nothing.

You print.

That's your weapon, and it's no longer secret: the book. You can go straight to your audience, you don't need the Pope.

You write down your Ninety-Five Theses, you possibly nail them to the door of your church-we can't be sure today whether this actually happened-and you print them. You disseminate your thinking, you publish. And you do the same thing with the Bible: you make it available, in German, so people who can read can read it and make up their own minds. And people who can't read can learn to read. Because now, there are books.

The man who amplifies your voice and makes it possible for you to be heard across Europe has sadly shuffled off his mortal coil and is no more, but he won't be forgotten any time soon: Johannes Gutenberg. Born in about 1400, he died around fifty years before this, in 1468.

He, too, was a bit of a dude, with an amazing beard that most hipsters can only dream of, and a fine line in headgear that wouldn't look out of place in Shoreditch or Dashanzi today. His home town was Mainz, some 422 kilometres or 262 miles in a straight line south west of Wittenberg: about three weeks on horseback, or a month on foot, depending a bit on the time of year and how fit you are. Technology doesn't travel very fast yet, because people don't.

[THIS MAY WELL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE SINCE THE WHEEL.]

In 1439, when he was about forty, Gutenberg did something that genuinely changed our world. He >invented< the mechanical printing press. It's impossible to claim that he was the first person to use mechanical print: printing presses of some type or other had been used in Asia as far back as the 7th Century, but Gutenberg made some significant advances on all the techniques that had been tried before and introduced the technology to Europe. His greatest contribution: movable metal type.

This may well be the most important technological advance since the wheel. Movable metal type allowed the printer to set words, sentences, and paragraphs for a page and print from this large numbers of copies in a short time at comparatively low cost. Never before had a single invention had such a great impact in such a short time.

The simple reason Gutenberg's contribution changed our world so much is that it made mass production of printed material possible and economical. Before then, if you wanted to read a book, you had to go to a university, or a monastery, or one of very few libraries. The fact alone that you wanted to read a book made you rare and extremely privileged. It meant you could read: you had an education. You were one in maybe ten people.

If you wanted to share the book you'd read, you could either sit down and copy it by hand yourself, or get somebody else to do this for you. Either way, it would take weeks, maybe months. No wonder knowledge, even just information, was so restricted and so tightly controlled. There weren't many people in the world who could physically get their hands on it, fewer still who could actually handle-manipulate, change, or expand-it. And if you found yourself in a position where you were able to write a book and get it read by anyone, you were truly select.

That's why print so changed the game. Print is the first medium of mass communication, and it makes Martin Luther's Reformation possible: thanks to print, he can bypass the authorities. He can reach the people directly. And no, they are not yet all able to read, but they will have in their village or town someone who is, a scholar, a priest open to new ideas, or a teacher. And that's all it takes. Now, they can learn: the texts are there, in their houses, their schools, their heads.

Obviously, print was not used just for everyone's welfare. It's a technology; with it, you can spread ill will as well as wisdom. As the historian Niall Ferguson points out: a book which told its readers that witches lived among them and had to be burnt at the stake became a bestseller. But that's exactly what makes print so powerful: it's accessible to anyone, almost. It's fair to say that a printing press was still a major investment. But the shift was nonetheless tectonic. Printing democratised knowledge-and also superstition-in a way nothing had done before. Suddenly, the written word, and with it learning, political discourse, prayer, as well as polemics, poetry, and prose, were no longer in the tight grip of the learned few, but could be brought to anyone willing to learn to read and write. And there was a hunger for knowledge in Europe, and for history. For art and for insight. For ancient teachings and for new thought. For enlightenment. It was the rebirth of an age of near-forgotten art and culture, it was the Renaissance.

So yes, you can say that printing ushered in a liberation.

INTOXICATION

Fast forward five hundred-odd years, and you find yourself in the dormitory of a pale American graduate at Harvard University. Here, on 4th February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, aged 20, launches a website for his fellow students, and calls it The Facebook. The rest is proverbial history. Except that's not quite it.

You can't possibly credit Mark Zuckerberg with inventing the Internet, the Internet was already there and very much in use. You can't even say he invented the social network,...