[P2P-F] Information technology and revolution

[Kevin Carson]

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: Information technology
and revolution via Andrew B. Watt's Blog by Andrew on 11/6/11

Information technology and revolution
Originally uploaded by dgray_xplane

The sketch at right isn’t mine. But I think that the introduction of
Design and Design Thinking into American middle schools will be every
bit as powerful and (r)evolutionary as this device invented in Germany
in the late 1440s.

Everybody assumes that Gutenberg’s press was the thing that kicked off
the Reformation. But people forget that Germany was really thinking
hard and long about revolt against the Church before Martin Luther came
along.
When Gutenberg developed his press in Mainz, the city was in the middle
of a decade-year revolt against their sovereign overlord, Archbishop
Otto.

When the Archbishop retook the city in 1463, he expelled all the
printers, including the penniless Gutenberg, and his now-bankrupted
partner Jacob Furst. Without money, neither man could control the
technology. Their apprentices claimed to be journeymen printers, and
the journeymen claimed to be masters. By 1470, those men and their
successors had opened printing shops all over Germany, and trained
their successors.

The technology metastasized. And it was anti-clerical from the
beginning. These guys had had to start from scratch, under difficult
circumstances, against a reactionary and threatening government with
more interest in protecting the wealthy than upholding the rights of
the common people.

The technology of the internet is undergoing the same kind of
revolution now. And the Occupy Wall Street movement is only the tip of
the power-shift.

Be cautious what you call up.

(Hat Tip to Dave Gray for making the image available on his Flickr
feed. Click through and give him some good vibes; he’s a major design
mentor of mine.

Via Flickr:
Information technology and revolution.
This isn’t the first time in history that new information technologies
have sparked revolution. It’s a recurring pattern.

Before the printing press, books were hand-written manuscripts
available only to the clergy and the wealthy. The mostly-illiterate
public relied on those in power to interpret humankind’s body of
knowledge. Any communication between ordinary people relied on word of
mouth and was mostly limited to short distances. In short, information
was distributed in pockets and silos.

The printing press gave people a way to share information in a
peer-to-peer way, bypassing the traditional power structures. The rapid
information sharing that followed, via books, pamphlets, newspapers and
scientific journals, effectively ended the Middle Ages and sparked the
Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and ultimately the
political revolutions that resulted in the first constitutional
democracies.

Today the web is having a similarly profound effect, allowing people to
bypass traditional media channels and power structures to communicate
with each other directly. Once again, information and ideas which were
contained in pockets and silos are spreading far and wide. Once again,
innovation is accelerating. Once again, mass peer-to-peer communication
is enabling and empowering social, intellectual and political
revolutions.

Peer-to-peer information technologies like the printing press and the
web unleash powerful revolutionary forces. But revolutions begin in the
streets. They often go unnoticed or ridiculed in their early stages. It
took 100 years of bible-printing before Martin Luther nailed his 95
theses to a church door in Wittenburg. It was another hundred years
before the first scientific journals were printed, and another hundred
before the American Revolution broke out in 1775. It took more than ten
years for colonial dissent to simmer before the American Revolution
broke out into open war.

Filed under: FutureShock, Teaching Tagged: dave gray, flickr,
information, pictures, printing, radical, revolutions, technology
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