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If an AI-infused web is the future, what can we learn from the past? Jeff Jarvis has some provocative thoughts…

The Gutenberg Parenthesis—the theory that inspired my book of the same name—holds that the era of print was a grand exception in the course of history. I ask what lessons we may learn from society’s development of print culture as we leave it for what follows the connected age of networks, data, and intelligent machines—and as we negotiate the fate of such institutions as copyright, the author, and mass media as they are challenged by developments such as generative AI. 

Let’s start from the beginning…

In examining the half-millennium of print’s history, three moments in time struck me: 

• After Johannes Gutenberg’s development of movable type in the 1450s in Europe (separate from its prior invention in China and Korea), it took a half-century for the book as we now know it to evolve out of its scribal roots—with titles, title pages, and page numbers. It took another century, until this side and that of 1600, before there arose tremendous innovation with print: the invention of the modern novel with Cervantes, the essay with Montaigne, a market for printed plays with Shakespeare, and the newspaper.
• It took another century before a business model for print at last emerged with copyright, which was enacted in Britain in 1710, not to protect authors but instead to transform literary works into tradable assets, primarily for the benefit of the still-developing industry of publishing. 
• And it was one more century—after 1800—before major changes came to the technology of print: the steel press, stereotyping (to mold complete pages rather than resetting type with every edition), steam-powered presses, paper made from abundant wood pulp instead of scarce rags, and eventually the marvelous Linotype, eliminating the job of the typesetter. Before the mechanization and industrialization of print, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in America was 4,000 (the size of a healthy Substack newsletter these days). Afterwards, mass media, the mass market, and the idea of the mass were born alongside the advertising to support them. 

One lesson in this timeline is that the change we experience today, which we think is moving fast, is likely only the beginning. We are only a quarter century past the introduction of the commercial web browser, which puts us at about 1480 in Gutenberg years. There could be much disruption and invention still ahead. Another lesson is that many of the institutions we assume are immutable—copyright, the concept of creativity as property, mass media and its scale, advertising and the attention economy—are not forever. That is to say that we can reconsider, reinvent, reject, or replace them as need and opportunity present…

Read on for his suggestion for a reinvention of copyright: “Gutenberg’s lessons in the era of AI,” from @jeffjarvis via @azeem in his valuable newsletter @ExponentialView.

* Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

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As we contemplate change, we might spare a thought for Jan Hus. A  Czech theologian and philosopher who became a Church reformer, he was burned at the stake as a heretic (for condemning indulgences and the Crusades) on this date in 1415. His teachings (which largely echoed those of Wycliffe) had a strong influence, over a century later, on Martin Luther, helping inspire the Reformation… which was fueled by Gutenberg’s technology, which had been developed and begun to spread in the meantime.