There’s this idea that every major shift in media technology produces political instability, and that’s absolutely true. But the people who say this (ex., KK) don’t talk about why and how the form of the medium influences the nature of the political formations.

The most obvious ramification is actually related to how centralized meaning-making ends up being — something that has to do deeply with exactly how much support you need to speak, and how far your voice goes as a result.

Prior to widespread literacy, you basically couldn’t reliably spread ideas beyond a small geographical area. Reality was extremely fragmented. A big factor in empire-building was sending people who could read to far-flung places to read out the decisions of rulers.

Religious centralization by the catholic church was basically an expanded form of this: a whole hierarchy of literate people, distributed to various mostly-illiterate places after heavy training in a particular set of dogmas.

Before printing, this structure was also how books got reproduced: scribes would copy existing books as part of their training, either by consulting an existing copy (for the fancy expensive ones) or by transcribing the words of someone who was reading aloud. In other words, most codices from before the fifteenth century come from the same institutional social form as most cuneiform tablets: they are accidental biproducts of teaching reading and writing to a specialized scholarly class.

Moveable type changes access dramatically. If you want your ideas to go into a book, you…