Communication Technology and Revolution
By: Troy Camplin
Tags: Society, Revolution, Social Change, Culture, Communication

1436 — Johannes Gutenberg began work on his printing press

1450s — Gutenberg prints the “Gutenberg Bible”

1480s — 110 cities across Europe had printers

1500 — over 20 million books published

1517 — Martin Luther posted the “95 Theses” to the door of All Saints Church, then printed and distributed throughout Germany, starting the Reformation

The creation of the printing press resulted in the democratization of knowledge. It is no coincidence that after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the seeds of capitalism emerged in short order.

There were, of course, critics — the Catholic Church being a prominent one — who thought that the printing press would spread heresies and misinformation. If anyone could rapidly get published without the priestly scribes as gatekeepers, anything could be published — even pornography.

Well, of course, all of those things did happen. But so, too, did the various social and epistemological revolutions that resulted in the widespread wealth and knowledge we now enjoy.

1876 — Alexander Graham Bell received the patent for the telephone

1880s — Motion picture camera invented

1890s — Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio

1920s — Television invented

The advent of a new set of communication technologies augured in another revolutionary period. While we saw the unmitigated evils of fascism/National Socialism and Communism arise as well, this was also a period of revolutionary artistic innovation, a further democratization of knowledge, and an even more global perspective as a result of people being able to see news and films from other countries. There were of course people who were concerned that these technologies would corrupt the youth and spread dangerous ideas and even misinformation. Which, of course, did happen. But so, too, did the various social and epistemological revolutions and resulted in an even more widespread, globalized wealth and knowledge we now enjoy.

1960s — Internet developed

1980s — Internet connects U.S. to Europe and Asia

1989 — MCI Mail and CompuServe provide email and public access services to the half million internet users at the time

Early 1990s — World Wide Web being invented

1995 — NSFNet decommissioned by the U.S. government, making the internet commercially available to the public

1998 — Google founded

2001 — Wikipedia launched

2006 — Twitter becomes available to the general public

2006 — Facebook becomes available to the general public

We are in the middle of the latest communications revolution. Like the others, it has resulted in the democratization of communication. With blogs and Twitter and Facebook and personal websites and so on, anyone can write or record anything and post it online for anyone to find. People have been concerned that it’s corrupting the youth and is responsible for spreading dangerous ideas, heresies, pornography, fake news, misinformation, and so on — and it most certainly has. Just like every other new communications technology did (including writing itself, as Plato famously complained — though he did it in writing).

What we are currently waiting for is the new renaissance. We are seeing the seeds of it around the world, in the Arab Spring, in Iran and Hong Kong and Bolivia right now, and potentially — I see the ducks being lined up — here in the United States as well. Each revolution in communications technology has resulted in complete social and epistemological transformation, in political revolutions and massive paradigm shifts in the arts and sciences. Religions are overthrown, new religions established. Morals are revised and all values are revalued.

This is the period through which we are living. There are those who viciously fight against it — the fascists, the alt-right — and there are those who see opportunities for utopian transformation to create their own vicious regimes — the communists, the social justice warriors — but the true revolution will not be realized by the vices of vicious ideologues. It never is. The true revolution will be realized by the radical realists who move forward with new ways of creating, new ways of seeing, new ways of understanding, new ways of doing. The true revolution will come with the artists, the scientists, the business people, the inventors who create the new paradigms and work within it to transform society for the better.

This, I think, will be even more true now, because the paradigm in place to replace the old one is that of self-organized network processes and emergent properties. The utopians, like the reactionaries, believe in top-down organization. But this is the old paradigm, and it’s been thoroughly refuted both in the real world and theoretically. Which hardly means there aren’t people who continue to desperately cling to it. Of course there are. Marxism and other forms of socialism — solidly in the old paradigm — are on the rise as reactionary responses to the emergence of a new world paradigm. In that sense, there really is no difference between the alt-right and AntiFa, between the fascists and the socialists, between the conservatives and the progressives — all of these are old paradigms, fighting in their own ways against the emergence of the new one.

Many of these battles are playing themselves out in our universities because our university system is a throwback to the Gutenberg paradigm shift, and nothing much has changed about it except the creation of increasingly massive amounts of debt for decreasing returns. When a vast majority of high school students go to college, it doesn’t even provide a signal anymore. It has barely provided anyone with an education for too long now. Worse, one can get completely educated in practically anything one wants online. Right now, the only value of universities is as a hotbed for left- and right-wing utopian reactionary thought. The universities are bound to become decentralized, and new ways of signalling that you have certain kinds of knowledge will emerge.

This doesn’t mean the universities — and untold other kinds of institutions — won’t still be around. There are still Catholic Churches after the Reformation, after all, though the Catholic Church of today is hardly the same thing it was during the Medieval, Renaissance, or even Reformation periods.

The good news is that, if history is any guide, though we will go through a dark revolutionary period, we will emerge on the other side much wealthier and with a new way of understanding and being in the world. And while I’m optimistic about freedom in general, the 20th century should have certainly taught us that people can be enslaved in utopian versions of whatever the new paradigm may be. We are now too many generations away from the memories of the evils of Marxism and the corruption and ineffectiveness of socialism, and it seems we may end up taking a reactionary step back to trying such corrupt and corrupting systems — but we can hope that they will be more short-lived this time as the world evolves past belief in such utopian fantasies.

We can hope, too, that we will not be tempted by whatever utopian versions of the new paradigm may be — perhaps it is not too much to hope that the new paradigm will itself not be able to be made utopian, that that is one of its main features.