Posts Tagged ‘Gutenberg Bible’
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”*…
… But that most valuable of gifts is being hijacked, subverted/converted into a commodity, and used to mold not just consumer behavior, but society-as-a-whole. We live in an attention economy, and its media/tech ownership landscape is becoming ever more consoldiated.
Kyla Scanlon unpacks the way in which concentrated ownership of media and tech and their automated manipulation reshape democracy…
It’s nearly impossible not to get lost in the news right now. I was at a wedding last week, and every conversation eventually drifted back to the same subject: the World We Are in and All That is Happening. The ground feels like it’s moving faster than anyone can feasibly keep up with.
Some people think the shift is progress. Others see collapse. Either way, the line between digital and physical life is increasingly blurry. What happens online is real life. What we consume is what we become.
Plenty of thinkers have circled this before – Postman, Debord, Huxley, Orwell on media; Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Thucydides, Gibbon on human corruptibility during times of uncertainty. The convergence of endless information and a ragebait economy creates the perfect environment for splintering how we understand the world and how we understand each other.
The deeper problem is this: we no longer trust institutions to provide truth, fairness, or mobility. Once, they were scaffolding that helped us climb from raw data to wisdom. And when that scaffolding gives out, people adapt: some over-perform in the status race (because you have to) and others defect from obligations altogether (why would I work for institutions if they don’t work for me).
There are a few ways to picture our distorted information ecosystem.
- The DIKW Pyramid (Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom): raw posts and clicks at the bottom, trending content in the middle, shared truths above that, and finally wisdom, the rare ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
- Or the Ladder of Inference: we start with data, add meaning, make assumptions – and our beliefs tend to affect what data we select. Bots and algorithms hijack that ladder, nudging us toward polarized beliefs before we realize what’s happening.
Taken together, we can combine them into what we might call a hierarchy of information:
- Raw data: the endless stream of posts, likes, bot spam
- Information: headlines, hashtags, trending things
- Knowledge: the narratives we share and fight over.
- Understanding: recognizing what might not be real (or is hyperreal)
- Wisdom: systemic analysis, the ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
Right now, we’re stuck sloshing around in the middle layers of the hierarchy: drowning in outrage, fighting over partisan hot takes, rarely reaching understanding, almost never wisdom.
Chaos always has an architect. And if we want to make sense of American democracy today, we need to understand who those architects are, and how they profit from confusion.
This polarization rests on media concentration.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was sold as a way to increase competition in media and telecommunications, but in reality, it did quite the opposite. Within five years, four firms controlled ~85% of US telephone infrastructure. That deregulated spine carried today’s consolidation of the entire media environment – not just telephones. Newspapers. Social media. TV stations.
We have the increasing concentration of media ownership, the financialization of attention, and the transformation of information from a public good into a private commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated…
[Scanlon characterizes and explains the concentration, examines its impacts, and unpacks the roles of bots…]
When manufacturing consensus is both cheap to produce and valuable to those who benefit from confusion, you get industrial-scale manipulation.
Truth becomes whatever can capture the most attention in the shortest amount of time. Traditional journalism, with its slow fact-checking and institutional processes, can’t compete with bot-amplified outrage. Democratic deliberation, which requires shared facts and good faith dialogue, becomes nearly impossible when the information environment is designed to maximize conflict.
We’re living in a speculation economy where perception drives value more than fundamentals. Look at the stock market: Nvidia gained $150 billion in value based the back of a $100 billion OpenAI investment (which OpenAI will use to buy more Nvidia chips). Ten companies pass hundreds of billions back and forth, and the S&P jumps like it’s measuring something real.
It’s all memes wearing suits. Meme stocks and Dogecoin at least looked like jokes; now the same speculative energy runs through the corporate core. Attention, perception, and narrative drive valuation more than production or profit.
We’ve built a world where the hierarchy of information has flipped upside down.
At the bottom, bots flood us with raw noise. In the middle, outrage and team narratives harden into “knowledge.” At the top, the ladders to wisdom like journalism, schools, civic discourse, shared institutions are weakened. The scaffolding that once helped us climb no longer holds.
The traditional solutions – fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation – assume we’re dealing with a content problem when we’re actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable.
Recognizing this as a market structure problem rather than an information problem changes everything. Instead of focusing on individual bad actors or specific false claims, you start thinking about the underlying systems that make manipulation both profitable and scalable.
The information wars are economic policy, determining how we allocate attention, structure incentives, and organize the flow of information that shapes every other market and political decision we make. I don’t think it’s useful to get on a Substack soapbox about this – but we need to take (1) the power of media seriously and (2) those trying to influence it extremely seriously. There is a way to get to the top of the information hierarchy! We don’t have to be stuck in these middle layers…
Follow the money: “Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention?” from @kyla.bsky.social
For more on how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped set all of this in motion, see: “On Jimmy Kimmel: It’s Time to Destroy the Censorship Machine and Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996” from @matthewstoller.bsky.social.
For more on thoughts on why companies are behaving in the ways they are: “Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump” and “Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next.”
And lest we think that this came out of nowhere: “David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About these Eight Things.”
[Image above: source]
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As we reclaim recognition, we might recall that on this date in 1452 an earlier information revolution began: Johannes Gutenberg started work on his Bible (which was completed and published in 1455). An inventor and craftsman, Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press, enabling a much faster (and cheaper) printing process. (Movable type was already in use in East Asia, but was slower and used for smaller jobs.) His Bible was his first major work, and his most impactful.
The printing press later spread across the world, leading to an information revolution– the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Humanist movements.
“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.”*…
Per the Oxford Dictionaries, “anarchy” has two meanings:
1. a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.
2. the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism.
It’s fair to observe that, in common parlance, it’s the first definition that rules. The estimable Alan Jacobs puts in a word for the second, and positions it as something beyond the political, something spiritual…
Perhaps the most unusual element of my 2022 essay on anarchism is this: I present anarchism not as a political system but as a spiritual discipline. I don’t put the point quite that bluntly, but I come fairly close:
The first target of anarchistic practice ought to be whatever it is in me that resists anarchy — what resists negotiation, the turning toward the Other as neighbor and potential collaborator. I return to Odo’s line, “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice,” but I add this: The responsibility of choice arises when I acknowledge my own participation, in a thousand different ways, in the imposition of order on others. This is where anarchism begins; where the turning aside from the coldest of all cold monsters begins; where I begin. The possibility of anarchic action arises when I acknowledge my own will to power...
It should be obvious that if you are delighted with power politics – if you think the purpose of politics is “defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils” of your victory – then you won’t be worried about your own will to power. You can just turn off your conscience and go on the attack, thinking only about winning (good) and losing (bad). My suggestion that the desire to impose order on others is a desire that needs to be reflected on will seem obviously silly to you. But there’s another way of thinking about the political order that is equally incompatible with the kind of reflection I counsel in that essay: the libertarian model.
Libertarianism doesn’t want to impose order on others, but its most passionate advocates have a strong tendency to assess existence in terms of winning and losing – winning and losing not in the corridors of political power but in the marketplace; the individual entrepreneur controlling the segment of the market in which he works. As Mark Zuckerberg likes to say, it’s all about DOMINATION; just not domination by law. Anarchism, by contrast — this is my argument in that essay — stands between (libertarian) chaos and (seeking to become) the Man. Some of the most thoughtful anarchists like to say that “anarchy is order” – but order that emerges from collaboration and cooperation rather than being imposed by governmental power. I don’t think it’s possible to create an anarchist system, because an anarchism imposed on people by those in power isn’t anarchism.
Here’s what I think can be done: Try, in every way we can think of, to increase the number of situations in our lives in which we are neither dehumanized by an omnipotent state nor engaged in ceaseless competition with one another in an omnipotent marketplace. As Wendell Berry has written, “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” We should assume that privilege whenever we can, and take it upon ourselves as a collaborative of equals to determine what, in any given case facing us, justice and mercy are. In other words, what I call the anarchic imperative is an attempt to rebalance what Berry has called “the two economies”:
For the thing that so troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that, moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend. In attempting to criticize such an economy, it is probably natural to pose against it an economy that does not leave anything out. And we can say without presuming too much, that the first principle of the kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it, we may say, whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it. That is to say that the kingdom of God is orderly.
Amen to that. But what is the nature of that order? Eschatologically, it certainly ain’t anarchic: it is the kingdom of the archē, the source of all things, the Lord. But to understand and instantiate that Kingdom here and now – when, as St. Augustine says, the City of God and the City of Man are inevitably and confusingly mixed – we need to collaborate with one another to increase both our knowledge and our ability to act effectively.
I have argued at some length that Christians aren’t pluralists – we believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow” (Phil. 2:10) – but in our current position we should expect, accept, and even embrace plurality. We need to cultivate the virtues appropriate to a plural world, and we can do that by expanding the sphere of voluntary collaboration, negotiation among equals, emergent order, even when such expansion makes life more difficult for us. That’s anarchism as a spiritual discipline…
Charting a course between libertarianism and autocracy: “Anarchism as a spiritual discipline.”
[The image above is from Jacobs’ Harpers essay— eminently worth reading]
* Ursula K. Le Guin, who created Odo (and Odoism) in The Dispossessed
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As we choose, we might recall that it was (probably) on this date that the first edition of what we know as the Gutenberg Bible was published.
While many believe that Johannes Gutenberg first work using moveable type was the Bible, it was probably the second or maybe even third. [Indeed, there was an earlier (32 line) version of the parts of the Bible, labeled an “indulgence.”] The Gutenberg press was in operation by 1450, and it is known that a German poem had been printed before the Bible. However, it is known that Gutenberg began the painstaking process of hand placing every letter for every page of the new Bible during that same year. It is believed that the 42-line Gutenberg Bible [the one we know as “The Gutenberg Bible”] was completed on this day in 1456. About 180 copies of the book were printed, which seems rather small for a first edition…
Emergent-cy…
Scripps Research Institute biologist Gerald Joyce (pictured above) and his colleague Tracey Lincoln have built an “immortal molecule.” They have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components. And since these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts, the process can continue indefinitely.
As Cosmos reports,
The ultimate goal is to create genetic systems that behave like life, and are for all intents “life” as we know it, but arose without using biological systems.
“The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment. But that we don’t have yet,” [Joyce] said.
“What we do have is a self-sustained chemical system that undergoes Darwinian evolution. They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving. But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent a whole cloth of functions. The idea is to give them enough information wherewithal [genetic building blocks] so they can start inventing their own solutions rather than just optimizing existing solutions,” he added.
Joyce said it was not practical to synthesize the more complex DNA-based life we know from scratch; it’s too complex and probably beyond today’s science. But it is conceivable to start with a much more basic form of life-like molecules based on RNA, and use evolution to build on them.
Many scientists believe that early life was based on RNA and predated the arrival of life based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and proteins. RNA, which can both store information like DNA as well as act as an enzyme like proteins, may have supported pre-cellular life.
A leading proponent of this so-called “RNA world” hypothesis, Joyce believes that RNA-based catalysis and information storage may have been the first step in the evolution of cellular life.
Read the whole story here.
As we search our closets for those chemistry sets, we might celebrate the emergence of a technology that took on a life of its own and changed… well, everything: this date in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type. The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377. Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.
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