Written By October/November 2009

f movies are indeed a new alphabet, barely 100 years old, then the Internet is the most culturally seismic phenomenon to hit hu- mankind since the invention of moveable type. Think about it: That morning in 1450 when Johannes Gutenberg applied his brilliant new trick with inks and leaded alloys to the production of 180 copies of the Bible, he redefined authority in Europe. The Catholic Church, which had been the keeper of knowledge and information locally for close to 1,000 years, had been quietly superseded. Every- body could now own a copy of the sacred text used to govern them. Is it any wonder the Reformation followed? Martin Luther could publish his argu- ments, and—boom—“religion” was rediscovered to be a rashomon. Civilization was reborn and re- shaped—the world over, as it turned out. The early Renaissance, which produced Gutenberg in the first place, was suddenly energized beyond its original limits: Maps could find their way into the hands of dreamers like Christopher Columbus; texts of an en- tirely new sacred order were made possible by such as Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine. Truly, every wondrous leap of the 500 years between 1450 and 1950 was pioneered by that fantastic ca- pacity we now take for granted as a basic right: to privately “own” the world’s common knowledge and think it over for ourselves. What if the church fathers of the 1400s had been in a position to lock away such developments before the bull escaped the barn? Shakespeare might be remem- bered as an interesting Jesuit, his “To Be or Not to Be” sermon right up there with the greatest hits of John Donne. Ben Franklin? Maybe he would’ve invented moveable type, in London, and a Stratford rail-splitter named Abraham Lincoln might’ve risen 100 years lat- er to write verse-plays you could recognize as crudely akin to Richard III and Henry V (genius does tend to find a way), but the world as we know it would not exist—or at best, be emerging at a slow pace so cruel as to make it uninhabitable by ourselves. If we reimagine the lives of our ancestors, making their ways through worlds of repression unmediated by Gutenberg’s gift, it’s a mathematical probability that most of us might never have been born. Such volatile swings of historic potential are worth keeping firmly in view as the issue of Inter- net Freedom is debated in Congress now. At stake is a world of creative eruption comparable to every positive development of the past 500 years, but on a timetable five to 10 times faster and infinitely more concentrated… and more vulnerably: The corporate giants governing our economies are just as threat- ened by the speed and vastness of this phenomenon as were Medieval keepers of scripture, except that they have more effective instruments at their dispos- al to dominate and even suppress its progress. Corporate Synergy Cyberspace as a word has come to feel a bit shop- worn lately, but it describes the phenomenon—the big bang—of the past two decades more amply and accurately than the modest Internet. What we’ve enjoyed is an explosion of “new space” that has en- ergized and redefined everything we do, from bank- ing to making love to reading the paper. Its frontiers are so unlimited as to constitute the discovery of a second planet within the one we’re living on. But when the real estate feels infinite, the temp- tation to make a land-grab proves irresistible to a royalty determined to remain in power. Enter Com- cast, Verizon, and AT&T. OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2009 WGAW Written By • 25

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