NONZERO

Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
2. The Way We Were
3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
4. The Invisible Brain
5. War: What Is It Good For?
6. The Inevitability of Agriculture
7. The Age of Chiefdoms
8. The Second Information Revolution
9. Civilization and So On
10. Our Friends the Barbarians
11. Dark Ages
12. The Inscrutable Orient
13. Modern Times
14. And Here We Are
15. New World Order
16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

17. The Cosmic Context
18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness
19. Why Life Is So Complex
20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

21. Non-crazy Questions
22. You Call This a God?

Excerpt from

Chapter Thirteen

MODERN TIMES

[SNIP]

The connection between freedom and the press is not trivially simple; it’s not that printing always gives the masses overwhelming firepower against tyranny. In the hands of government, the press is an instrument of propaganda. (Napoleon, never shy about sharing his views, seized the newspaper Journal des débats and renamed it Le Journal de l’Empire.) Indeed, a sufficiently extreme regime can silence non-government presses, as Stalinist Russia showed.

No, the reason printing implied eventual political freedom is not that it can’t be silenced, but, rather, the high cost of silencing it. Both technological innovation and everyday capitalism are collaborative enterprises, dependent on the free and fast transmission of data. During the eighteenth century; when the world saw an explosion of newspapers, they often arose, Benedict Anderson has noted, “essentially as appendages of the market”—read for their commodity prices, their schedules of ship arrivals and departures. Leaving presses free enough to serve economic purposes while stifling any political dissent they might lubricate is, to say the least, a challenge. Modern leaders have come to realize what feudal potentates of the late Middle Ages came to realize: you need to grant some freedom to get wealth.

But in modern times, the implied freedom was greater. The lower the cost of transmitting information, the more broadly and intricately productive a society’s invisible brain can be, both in the short-run sense of everyday economics and the long-run sense of technological advance. But realizing this potential means empowering a commensurately broad swath of the population to serve as nodes in that brain: fostering literacy, for example, and giving people some leeway in what they read and write. As various scholars have noted, it may be no coincidence that Britain, which after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 led Europe in liberty (and which had a daily newspaper seventy years before France did), is where the industrial revolution reached critical mass; or that the Netherlands, which rivaled England in its antipathy toward despotism and in the vibrance of its press, had paved the way for industrialization during its “Golden Age” in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The economic logic of freedom is sufficiently subtle to have eluded a number of European rulers in the early modern age. Indeed, on balance, in the centuries after the printing press was invented, European government grew more despotic. But the trend was doomed. The economists J. Bradford De Long and Andrei Shleifer have shown that, as a rule, the more despotic the governments, and the tighter their reins on the press, the less prosperous their polities were. Even during absolutist Spain’s so-called Golden Age, Spanish cities saw declining wealth and population.

Kant, writing in the late eighteenth century, observed, “If the citizen is deterred from seeking his personal welfare in any way he chooses which is consistent with the freedom of others, the vitality of business in general and hence also the strength of the whole are held in check. For this reason, restrictions placed upon personal activities are increasingly relaxed.” What he didn’t note is how information technology in the form of the printing press, had intensified this logic—much less how information technology might further intensify it in coming centuries.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe’s reactionary forces made an epic stand against the currents of cultural evolution. They were responding to a wave of revolt that in 1848 swept mainland Europe, from France in the west to the Slavic east of the Hungarian empire. Though demands varied from place to place, they generally centered on political freedom and autonomy for subjugated national groups—two key implications of the printing press. The press’s role is further underscored by the revolt’s nickname—“revolution of the intellectuals”; it was spearheaded by writers and editors and students, and indeed got a chilly reception from many illiterate peasants.

After all the shouting was over, and revolutionary gains had succumbed to counterrevolution, Europe, though freer here and there, looked disappointingly like the status quo ante. Still, for the attentive despot, the handwriting was on the wall. Czar Alexander II, on launching a campaign for economic development in the 1850s, relaxed censorship, and newspapers and journals flourished. In the same decade the Ottoman Empire launched the same kind of reform, abolishing torture, establishing equality before the law, letting western liberal ideas issue from the press. (As is often the case, enlightenment had been sponsored partly by war. The Russian and Ottoman empires had been humiliated in the Crimean War—the Russians by losing to western powers, the Ottomans by desperately relying on them.)

In neither empire did a miracle ensue. It took repeated convulsions for them to finally disintegrate and for their cores, Turkey and Russia, to gain a measure of political liberty. The process continues, and is still fitful. Around the world, reforms will suffer relapse. But the premise of reformers is less in doubt than ever. Totalitarianism is dead, and authoritarianism isn’t looking too healthy. Human nature hasn’t changed; there are still plenty of people who would like to be masters of the universe. But increasingly they realize that, thanks to technology, they can’t be. The days when vast centralized governments could control the flow of written information—and still prosper—are gone. What ended them is a series of information technologies that lowered the cost of communication and (thus) raised the sheerly economic value of freely flowing information. First among these technologies is the printing press. It created tons of potential synergy, but set strict rules for realizing it: people could play their new non-zero-sum games well only if fairly free.

[SNIP]