Four Times Words Got Cheaper

The earliest tablets from Uruk level IV are, more than nine in ten, ration and inventory lists: so much barley, so many sheep, issued to whom. Denise Schmandt-Besserat (Before Writing, 1992) argued the signs descend from earlier clay tokens: tokens were sealed inside a clay bulla, whose surface was impressed so the contents could be read without breaking it — and the impressions eventually replaced the tokens themselves. Critics (Zimansky, 1993) find that chain drawn too straight.

The decisive step was the rebus principle: the sign for "arrow" (Sumerian ti) was borrowed to write the similar-sounding "life" (til). Once signs attach to sound, you can write personal names, negations, and "if." Around 2285 BCE Enheduanna — daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god at Ur — wrote her own name and predicament into The Exaltation of Inanna, appealing to the goddess after a revolt drove her from the temple. She is the earliest author known by name: an accounting tool took a millennium to carry a first person.

Fields come before questions. The day a logging schema is fixed, so is most of what you can analyze for the next three years — a dimension you never recorded cannot be interrogated later.

In July 751 the Tang commander of Anxi, Gao Xianzhi, was beaten at Talas by Abbasid forces and the Karluk contingent that defected mid-battle. Du Huan, captured with the army, spent over a decade in West Asia and on returning wrote Jingxingji, recording Chinese craftsmen working there in silk, gold- and silverwork, and painting. Tellingly, he never mentions papermaking — the widely repeated claim that prisoners of war carried the craft westward rests on remarkably thin evidence.

In 793–794, under Barmakid sponsorship, a paper mill was established in Baghdad and the chancery switched to paper. The cost gap was decisive: a parchment Bible required roughly 200 animal skins, while paper cut a book's material cost by an order of magnitude or more. Ninth-century Baghdad grew an entire booksellers' quarter (al-Warrāqīn) with hundreds of copying and selling shops, contemporaneous with the Greek translation movement. Jonathan Bloom (Paper Before Print, 2001) concludes that Samarkand shows signs of papermaking before 751: paper moved west by decades of commercial diffusion, not as war booty.

Storage and bandwidth curves decide what is worth keeping. Retaining every log line, hosting video for free — both are downstream of the same curve. Nobody had a revelation; it just got cheap.

Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg borrowed from the merchant Johann Fust to set up his workshop; in 1455 Fust sued for repayment and won, taking the equipment and type with his son-in-law Peter Schöffer — the inventor lost his own shop. The 42-line Bible ran to roughly 180 copies. Movable type was not new: Bi Sheng's clay type in Song China dates to about 1040, and the Korean Jikji was printed with metal type in 1377, some seventy years before Mainz.

The real combinatorial invention was the punch-and-matrix system: a steel punch cut once, struck into a copper matrix, then cast in a lead-tin-antimony alloy into hundreds of identical sorts. Add oil-based ink, a screw press adapted from wine production, and an alphabet of only two dozen letters, and the economics work. Thousands of Chinese characters change that arithmetic entirely — woodblock was simply cheaper for reprinting the same book, which is why movable type never displaced it in East Asia. A constraint, not an oversight.

Generative tools compress the marginal cost of content once more, and credibility again does not come bundled. Provenance, attribution and review have to be rebuilt — we are living in the piracy-and-error phase Johns described.

In 1559 Pope Paul IV promulgated the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, made a standing institution by the Council of Trent in 1564 and abolished only in 1966: Copernicus's De revolutionibus was suspended "pending correction" in 1616, and Galileo tried in 1633. England took another route — prior approval. The 1643 Licensing Order required a licence before printing; Milton answered in 1644 with Areopagitica. His argument was not that speech is harmless, but that no censor could possibly have the judgement required, or stay uncorrupted.

The turn came in 1695, when Parliament simply let the Licensing Act lapse. Raymond Astbury (1978) showed the decisive factors were not Miltonic principle — the debates barely cite him — but that the Stationers' Company had used licensing to monopolize copyright and infuriated provincial printers, while Whigs and Tories each refused to let the other hold the censor's pen. Principle supplied the language; conflicting interests supplied the motive. English output surged afterwards, and in 1710 the Statute of Anne replaced licences with copyright.

Control has shifted from whether something may be printed to whether it can be distributed. Beyond removal there is demotion — which produces no visible index of banned books, and is therefore far harder to measure or appeal.