From Gutenberg to Google

by Tom Wheeler

  The new network that allowed e-readers to upend half a millennium of ink on paper was itself the convergence of two previous examples of nonlinear thinking and nonobvious results. As we will see, the computing engine that powers an e-reader traces its lineage to the steam engine. And the network of binary electronic impulses that transports the contents to the device links to the telegraph.

  Such nonobvious results create another socially relevant secondary effect. Because new networks dispatch old traditions, they trigger opposition from those who have grown comfortable with the old patterns. The stories we will visit demonstrate that a typical response to the effects of a new network consists of fear and resistance.

  The Catholic Church, threatened by the unlocking of information it had always controlled to produce individual conclusions it could not control, attempted to suppress the output of printers.

  The canal companies, stagecoach and haulage firms, tavern owners, and others who were bypassed by the speeding railroad used everything from political muscle to vigilantism to derail the iron horse.

  Messages delivered by “lightning” became fodder for pastors to frighten the faithful about how it could only be black magic, while the U.S. Post Office resisted its opportunity to adopt a technology faster than the mail.

  Ultimately, however, such responses proved to be the rearguard of a retreat in the face of those who saw opportunity in the new networks.

  Martin Luther leapt from being an unknown monk to lead the Protestant Reformation by harnessing the power of the new printing shop network to deliver his message.

  Chicago became the Second City of a growing nation, displacing St. Louis as the link to the West, because its city leaders aggressively embraced the railroad at the same time St. Louis was resisting it.

  The newspaper business transformed itself from a collection of local political rags of limited scope into an electronically interconnected medium that made previously scarce information plentiful.

  Though no small amount of social convulsion and dislocation accompanied the creation and promulgation of each of these network revolutions, their secondary effects nonetheless became comfortable and commonplace until each network was upset by the next new network. The network-driven upheaval of today is behaving similarly to upend the comfort that followed the standardization of what had been previous upheavals.

  The centralized structures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which networks assembled masses—of people, production, products, and information—is today yielding to a network through which forces move in the opposite direction to disaggregate and disperse activity.

  The networks of history commanded the user to come to them: Come to the book. Come to the railhead. Come to the telegraph or telephone. The wirelessly distributed force of the new network does just the opposite. Now users command the network to come to them wherever they may be. It may seem a simple inversion, but its effect is this era’s nonlinear, nonobvious result. It is nothing less than the transfer of the nexus of power from the network to the user.

  The little-known and poorly understood secret of all the previous network revolutions was that the network was in control to create hierarchies and define activity. For the first time in history, the new network puts its user in control.

  Behind this new network effect is the linkage between the technologies driving today’s changes and the technologies of earlier networks. Our new network was spawned by the earlier technological breakthroughs.

  Those breakthroughs began with Gutenberg—and Gutenberg’s innovation was not simply a method for transferring ink to paper. His enduring insight was that for information to be automated and made “mass,” it had to be disassembled into small units and then reassembled. It was a groundbreaking discovery about the interface between information and machines. The concept lives on at the heart of the internet’s digital network, which breaks information into small packets for subsequent transmission and reassembly.

  The success of the steam locomotive not only redefined production economies but also energized the belief that if engine power could replace muscle power, it could also be harnessed to replace gray matter. A spectator at the inaugural run of the first scheduled railroad, the British mathematician Charles Babbage, conceived of harnessing the same steam power to compute logarithmic tables. Thus began a developmental spiral that led from analog calculating engines to digital processors and ultimately to today’s ubiquitous computing engine, the microprocessor.

  By decoupling information from its physical form, the telegraph introduced the kind of virtual delivery that characterizes the internet. The dots and dashes of the telegraph’s on-off signals are rearticulated by the binary signaling protocol of today’s digital networks and processors.

  Today’s network echoes the networks of history in economic and behavioral aspects as well. The history of the networks that connect us is also the economic history of the world. When the economist Angus Maddison attempted in 2001 to estimate the growth of world gross domestic product (GDP) over time, the growth spurts he identified corresponded to the introduction of new network technologies.11

  The first burst of sustained economic activity coincided with the era in which the printing press exponentially expanded the free flow of information. The book-fed Renaissance, Reformation, and the age of inquiry stimulated economic dynamism and recast the patterns of life.

  The next spike in economic growth coincided with the railroad and the Industrial Revolution. As railroad track mileage and speed increased, so did economic development. The handmaiden to that expansion, the telegraph (and later the telephone), continued the network-driven economic spurt.

  The relatively recent digital network era is consistent with the axiom that a new network stimulates new economic growth. The expansion of the digital economy also manifests another force that, while operational in the previous revolutions, has grown in significance: the increasing speeds of networks correlate with the acceleration of innovation and the pace of life.

  From the dawn of the Christian calendar, it would take a millennium and a half for the printing press to emerge. From Gutenberg to the railroad and telegraph was only about 400 years. The period from the railroad and telegraph to the digital revolution was less than half that time.

  We can see a direct relationship between the speed of a new network and the rate of innovative growth that speed stimulates. The acceleration of network speeds maps to the pace of technological change and the acceleration of economic and social change.

  When information moved on horseback, it traveled at about four miles per hour.12 Measured in terms of data throughput, this was about 0.03 bits per second.13 The first network revolution, the movable-type printing press, increased the volume of data moved, but not its speed.

  The railroad introduced speed into the equation. Moving five to ten times faster than animal power in its early iterations and later up to forty times faster, the iron horse accelerated the pace of life. The exponential growth of the railroad itself was a multiplier of the effect of its speed. In 1830 there were thirty miles of railroad track in the United States; by 1860 there were 30,000 miles of steel rails.14 Before the end of that decade, 1869, the steam railroad had spanned the heretofore unbridgeable American continent, speeding change to the remotest regions.

  The first electronic network, the telegraph, accelerated the flow of information yet again. At the time of the founding of the American republic it took twenty-two and a half days for information to move between New York City and Charleston, South Carolina.15 Four score years later, news of the dissolution of that republic in Charleston Harbor moved instantly to New York by telegraph. “The speed of the telegraph is about as wonderful a thing as the noble invention itself,” observed Scientific American in 1852.16

  A talented telegraph operator could transcribe at the rate of around three bits per second.17 Making information instantaneously available everywhere at a speed 100 times faster than delivery by horse further hastened
the pace of life and the rate of change.

  Today’s networks turn on the afterburners. Change is flying at us with gigabit connectivity (1 billion bits per second) and headed higher. That is more than 300 million times faster than the telegraph and 30 billion times faster than horseback.

  As the velocity of the network increases, so does the speed with which it introduces change. In the process, twenty-first-century networks have destroyed the buffer that helped previous generations transition through change. Whereas previous new networks took years, if not generations, to mature, the current network revolution destroys old institutions and practices before it has ripened the capabilities necessary to replace them.

  Data is speeding to us wherever we may be. On today’s digital wireless networks not only does information fly fast, it flies to wherever the user wants it.18 Giving the user, rather than the network, control to call forth the high-speed information he or she creates or consumes defines the era we are pioneering.

  By definition, a network hub is a point where in-and-out activity occurs. Such hubs were formerly rail yards or switchboards, newsrooms or assembly plants. By emphasizing the virtual over the physical, our current network revolution not only makes information the preeminent product but also places in the hands of each person the ability to determine his or her own in-and-out patterns for that information. In these individual hubs users determine what they want to consume and with whom they want to connect. They create and distribute their own content as if they were the New York Times or NBC. And they perform their information-based jobs from locations of their choosing.19

  In the pockets and purses of each individual hub is a powerful computer, colloquially called a “phone.” The processing power of any one of these devices is greater than that once provided by huge machines locked in special rooms. These pocket computers speak a lingua franca that allows the information being delivered to be independent of both the network on which it travels and the device on which it is displayed.

  The introduction of new technology that transforms the way in which we connect has thus come full circle. Gutenberg built the first information network by seeing information in terms of its smallest parts. Now the network has become the interconnected sum of its smallest parts—its users.

  The act of publishing was previously centralized in the hands of those who owned the presses and the means of distributing their output. Today any individual can be an author and content creator with access to worldwide distribution.

  Railroads pulled economic activity out of the hands of individual artisans and into massive industrial institutions. Now the skilled individual is returning to prominence, thanks to the ability to connect to a massive market without the need to be massive oneself.

  The telegraph and telephone extended the user’s reach but at the price of being tied to a wire coming through the wall. Now individuals can access wireless networks to deliver connectivity where the user is rather than where the wire is.

  The mechanized productivity of information that began with Gutenberg, the power of engines that began with the harnessing of steam, and the binary transmission of information by electrons that began with the telegraph have all combined to create the third great network revolution. Accompanying this is the same kind of upheaval, opposition, opportunity, and stress that attended preceding network transformations.

  History has been clear in the expectations it sets for our future. The innovations created by new networks topple old institutions and accelerate the pace of life. The demands of the new and the absence of traditional moorings generate frustration and bewilderment.

  Like those who lived during earlier network changes, we are walking where there is no path. The stories of those who made the earlier paths are relevant not as “how-to” manuals but as landmarks. They are what navigators call a “back azimuth”—a known point to anchor and guide while we progress into the unknown.

  The stories of previous network revolutions establish that “normal” is the institutionalization of what yesterday was inconceivable. They teach that in a time of technological turmoil, the greatest danger is not the turmoil itself but the attempt to cling to the comfortable ideas and institutions that remain from the last network revolution. Nonlinear thinking produced the technological change; its successful exploitation requires nonobvious innovation.

  The challenge, of course, is the successful identification of the nonobvious. Later we will explore some of the issues created by our new network: the disappearance of privacy, the threat to jobs, the demands put on education, the rise of misinformation and its effects, both domestic and international.

  But first we need the predicates of history.

  How we connect defines who we are. The story of the human experience is how new means of communicating created new economic and social institutions. What follows are the stories of those connections. They are the history of our future.

  Part II

  Predicates

  Two

  The Original Information Revolution

  The crisp fall wind rustled the pages nailed to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church. It was All Hallows’ Eve, October 31, 1517. The following day the town that took its name from the castle would be jammed for All Saints’ Day.

  The pages that had just been posted on the church door were the work of a monk from the local Augustinian monastery. The church door was the town bulletin board; such postings were a way of triggering a theological discussion at the town’s new university and its monastery. This time, however, something different happened. Rather than simply receiving constrained consideration among the town’s intelligentsia, the monk’s posting leapt from the church door and raced across Europe’s landscape.

  The monk responsible for the posting was Martin Luther, and his thoughts spread owing to a new technology that created a new information network.

  The pages on the church door contained a set of ninety-five theses in which Luther questioned the role of the Catholic Church as the only intermediary with the Almighty. It was heresy.

  Such heresy was not unheard of; it had just gone unnoticed. For centuries, men of the cloth had proposed new theological constructions. These ideas, however, remained limited to the locale of their proponent’s preaching. The Catholic Church, after all, controlled the production of books by which the concepts could be propagated.

  By the time Luther put forth his ideas, the Church’s information monopoly had been broken. Luther’s good fortune was that his thoughts coincided with the spread of a new commercial technology for the reproduction and distribution of ideas. Printing with movable type had eliminated the choke hold on the flow of ideas that manuscript scribes and their clerical superiors had previously exercised.

  The document posted on the church door leapt to the local merchant printers and then to the presses of Europe. Tacked to the church door, Luther’s ideas had merely rustled in the wind. Set in type, they blew across Europe with a gale force.

  Printing added unprecedented velocity to the spread of information. In the process, the network of printers made the previously unknown monk from Wittenberg the world’s first mass-media evangelist.

  When Ideas Travel

  Situated in the northeastern quadrant of Germany, sixteenth-century Wittenberg was a center of political and commercial activity. The new university also made the town an intellectual center. Thanks to the university’s demand for texts, the relatively new technology of printing with movable type had gained a foothold in the town. In late 1517 and early 1518, Martin Luther’s thoughts combined with the new technology, launching what today we refer to as the Reformation.

  In his Ninety-Five Theses, Luther challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy. Why, he argued, should an individual be able to reach God only through the Church? If we are all children of God, could not an offspring reach the Father without the intervention of clerics?

  When word of the monk’s heresy reached the Holy See in Rome, the corpulent and conniving Pope Leo
X was unperturbed. Historical precedent abounded that such challenges remained isolated events and ultimately died out.1 The pontiff dismissed the Wittenberg posting as “the ramblings of a drunken German [who will] think differently when he sobers up.”2 Six months later, the stone-cold-sober monk had not changed his mind, and his ideas had taken flight to permeate the pope’s entire domain.

  Called to account for his actions, the monk dissembled. “It is a mystery to me how my theses … were spread to so many places,” he explained in a letter to the pope.3 It was a disingenuous denial. The monk may have been surprised at the speed with which his ideas spread, but there was little mystery as to how they spread.4 Soon much of Europe was drunk on Luther’s idea that individuals and not the Church controlled their relationship with God.

  Rather than withering as the wind and weather attacked the pages hanging on the church door—yet another idea constrained by local factors—the economic opportunism of the network of new printing establishments accelerated Luther’s ideas to escape velocity. Soon additional commentary from his pen poured out of printing establishments at such a rate that Luther’s screeds were nicknamed Flugschriften or “flying writings.”5

  Luther was no stranger to the network potential of the printing press. Only a few years earlier, in 1508, a commercial printer had set up shop within the walls of the monastery where he lived. Such proximity no doubt provided familiarity with the technology and insight into its potential.6

  Luther had taken advantage of that familiarity even before posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the church door. A year earlier the monk had convinced the printer to reproduce the sermon of another German preacher, to which Luther had added his own introductory comments.7 It was a trial run for how the printing press could propagate his thoughts.

  One of the most interesting twists of history is how Martin Luther’s theological revolution was triggered by his revulsion to an economic mainstay of the printing business. The technology that turned Luther’s ideas into “flying writings” was also the technology that very profitably produced letters of indulgence for the Church. It was the practice of selling such indulgences that drove the monk to challenge the institution of his faith.