The Printing Press and Its Consequences
I cannot believe I feel compelled to explain this.
July 18th, 2025
Okay, I think what it is that drives me fucking crazy about the whole “well, the printing press” retort that gets proudly shrugged out in any frictional conversation with “AI” evangelists is that it seems to paradoxically recognize that change is inevitable while attempting to brush off most of the significant things there are to say about change: that change changes, that “change” is a very broad word (probably one of the broadest we have, actually), and perhaps most importantly that we are still supposed to have free will, I think(?), at least in how we feel about it―in general, it’s a refusal to try having a serious relationship to said change beyond it being their fun little toy, their thought experiment or killer app or whatever.
(We’re going to ignore, for the moment, the arguably much more serious ways that the technology unambiguously hypercharges roughly dozens of the most evil forms of destructive bullshit ever seen in this world; the way it poisons, cooks, smothers, stupefies, deludes and undermines all of us at a rapidly accelerating rate; the way it offers nothing of real value in 99.99% of its deployments outside of highly trained medical and scientific contexts in limited, entirely differently modeled, very deliberately trained and scaled applications; and the way that the printing press analogy itself is clearly a thinly surmised story-historical, unresearched, parroted shorthand for both stating and simultaneously demonstrating that one doesn’t care to think about it any further than that.)
First of all, I feel like we’re living in Flatland here with regards to thinking or even just baseline having a vocabulary about what change even is. Like, “things have always changed, therefore this is more of the same.” Alright. What an incredibly insipid and reductive thing to say about literally everything. What an unsurprisingly useless conversation I’m having with someone who’s addicted to outsourcing their thinking to a Confirmation Bias Machine.
Let’s dig into this a little further, just to get really stupid. Imagine two ice cubes. In scenario A, the ice cube melts a little bit, minute by minute, over time. In scenario B, the ice cube instantly goes from a solid to a superheated steam, explodes and vaporizes all water for thousands of miles around, splitting H20 into hydrogen and oxygen which also explodes, and everything everywhere is blasted into a glass hellscape. Both ice cubes “changed”―so what’s the difference, really? Scared of change, much??? Also, ice cube B was used to power a machine that makes ice cubes to replace ice cube A, for me, for my comforts. : )
Of course, they’re never saying only that change is all the same. They’re using the printing press thing to try to make a pathetically larger point, and here’s where we find the larger-er problem. The “AI” evangelist’s relationship to change is either delirious surrender to the dopamine and the spectacle or, equally and inversely foolish, “We can control the change and fix all of this retroactively and forever with enough of us smart people 100% committed to the change.”
Octavia Butler’s “Earthseed” comes to mind, the philosophies explored in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (the second of which I admit I still haven’t read). “God is change,” is the foundational aphorism:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
The “printing press” thing is like if you asked an LLM to summarize these books for you, and it told you to start robbing your neighbors and taking the drug that makes people compulsive arsonists. This is not the moral of the story. (There is, in fact, a story.)
When the printing press was invented (at least a couple times, and/or incrementally, depending on how you look at it), it did change everything. It brought a renegotiation of the power over information, for sure, and what unfolded was not entirely peaceful, to say the least. We used this technology for hundreds and hundreds of years in the ongoing human experience of navigating an incredible mess of ideas and ideology, the whole thing, you know, which is our gift and our curse. The newest “printing press” in question, however, the “AI” thing, is its own ideology, and it cognitively reinforces itself inside your brain while you use it. It’s a sudden and frankly difficult to grasp attempt at restructuring the information economy, a thumb slamming down on the scales of power, with chaotic and living human people on one side and on the other, the state―or, I don’t know, whatever these people think or want the state to be. The terrain of our historical moment is perfectly suited to this novelty, which, plainly, is how change happens.
Someone inclined to superficially answering all their problems and questions with a magic machine that burns one tree* elsewhere would, naturally, not be interested in reexamining the difficult options they have for living and knowing in this admittedly very complex and frightening world, nor would they be interested in actively and consciously riding the wave of change in a way that might take them somewhere better positioned to continue the mess, to fight against the push of the next wave, to negotiate with the big mysterious people thing thumbing the scales. It seems like that’s all we really get to do in this life, huh, unless we sell out? But they don’t want to do that, obviously. They just want it to be Phone.
“It’s like the printing press” is this bizarre invocation of the very thing that they’re scared of (that we’re mostly all scared of, change and chaos and our smallness in the face of everything) as a sort of almighty, and yet with a pride to be standing on the side of the guys that captured a tiny little synthetic piece of it. So, they’re safe now, surely. It’s their plaything. “Look, we can make it dance and sing.” It’s a kind of sacrilege, disgraceful as it is ominous.
*Trees come in all different sizes. Checkmate, fact-checkers.