Back in the day only monks got to write books and they wrote them down by hand on parchment made from animal skins. Often the parchment was recycled from a previous book and the old text was erased before the new text was written down by hand. Call it the Age of Parchment.
But then along came paper and finally in 1440 Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith, invented the printing press. This lowered the cost of printing big time and I say it created the Enlightenment where non-monks could write books and get them published and read by a much larger audience. Call it the Age of the Printing Press.
Was it purely an accident that with the printing press a new educated class rose to influence in the Enlightenment because it was much easier and cheaper to publish and broadcast philosophical and political ideas? And was it an accident that about the first book published was the Bible and that shortly after the Protestant Revolution happened as folks started reading their Gutenberg Bibles and getting ideas of their own? And was it an accident that the educated class provoked the Age of Revolution from the Puritans in England to the colonists in North America to the lawyers in France? And that they all kicked out the old royal houses descended from feudal warriors and replaced them with men that fought with the pen — or rather the printing press — rather than the sword?
Now right now our liberal friends are having a bit of a flap at The Atlantic about Substack, which allows just about anyone to publish their opinions on the Internet. It’s reported by liberal Freddie DeBoer.
Substack, which got its start by offering mainstream journalists lucrative profit-sharing arrangements, has embraced a Muskian set of free-speech principles: As Jonathan Katz reported for The Atlantic last month, the company’s leadership is unwilling to remove avowed Nazis from its platform.
DeBoer thinks that the heavy breathers should take a hike. Substack provides an integrated service that allows nobodies to publish their stuff and get paid by subscribers.
And it’s not just Nazis, but “misinformation.” Back in 2022 the Washington Post was all worked up about anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Joseph Mercola publishing on Substack.
Shut down by major social media platforms, Mercola has found a new way to spread these debunked claims: on Substack, the subscription-based newsletter platform that is increasingly a hub for controversial and often misleading perspectives about the coronavirus.
Back in the day, if you look up “disinformation” on La Wik, it was a Soviet thing, dezinformatsiya, a creature of the KGB.
After the Soviet term became widely known in the 1980s, native speakers of English broadened the term as "any government communication (either overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material, often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience."
But now the scholars are agreed that disinformation has entered a new phase.
There is a broad consensus amongst scholars that there is a high degree of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda online… This conventional wisdom has come mostly from investigative journalists, with a particular rise during the 2016 U.S. election: some of the earliest work came from Craig Silverman at Buzzfeed News.
See what’s happened? Since the Trump Horror of 2016 our journalist friends have got all worked up about the wrong sort publishing opinions. Before the Internet opinions only got published in newspapers, network TV, and books. You can see that before the Internet only the educated class need apply.
So I propose that we are entering a new era. With the Internet and social media and Substack practically anyone can publish information for all the world to read. And with smartphones, practically anyone can publish videos for all the world to see. Let’s call it the Age of Free-for-all, when not just the special Somebodies but Anybodies and Nobodies can publish stuff for all the world to see. It’s a free-for-all!
Only, of course, our journalist friends are horrified. Because what with Nazis and conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers, anyone can publish their “disinformation,” their “misinformation,”and their “malinformation” for all the world to get misled into racist hate and harm.
But maybe, just maybe, the world is entering upon a new era, in which information will not be curated by the politically powerful, but broadcast for all the world to see.
So, back in the Age of Parchment, only monks and the kingly Lord Keeper of the Great Seal got to publish information.
In the Age of the Printing Press, only educated intellectuals and professors and published writers got to publish information.
But now, in the Age of Free-for-all, anyone can publish information: anything, at any moment, for all the world to see. And the educated intellectuals and professors and published writers and their handlers in the ruling class don’t like it. Not at all.