In 1476, about two decades after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, a merchant named William Caxton built Britain’s first printing press, in a building near Westminster Abbey. The following year, he used it to publish a book, one of the first ever mass-printed in English, called “The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers.” (The title was redundant: “dictes” and sayings are the same thing.) The book was a translation of a French anthology, which was a translation of a Latin anthology, which was a translation of a Spanish anthology, which was a translation of an Arabic anthology that had been transcribed from oral tradition in eleventh-century Egypt.

“The Dictes” was what classicists call a doxography—a chapter-by-chapter list of ancient thinkers and what they said, or what they were said to have said. The chapter on Socrates, for example, included a brief summary of his life and death, a few descriptive details (“When he spake he wagged his litil fynger”), and a recitation of his various opinions, including his opinion that philosophy should only be transmitted orally, not through books.

Many of the dictes were mystical aphorisms (“Thought is the myrrour of man, wherein he may beholde his beaute and his filth”), or alarmist diet tips (“Wyne is ennemye to the saule . . . and is like setting fyre to fyre”), or paeans to a deity who was made to sound blandly, anachronistically Christian. Pythagoras, it was reported, instructed his followers “to serve God.” Omitted was the fact that Pythagoras was a pagan who believed in reincarnation and occult numerology. Still, at least Pythagoras was a real person. Some of the other philosophers in “The Dictes,” such as Zalquinus and Tac, probably never existed at all.

As it turns out, the whole volume was shot through with what we would now call fake news. Caxton did not introduce these errors; they were there all along. According to the “Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature,” the Egyptian anthology on which all subsequent translations were based was “highly influential as a source of both information and style,” despite the fact that it was “almost entirely inaccurate, and the sayings themselves highly dubious.”

The standard story about mass printing is a story of linear, teleological progress. It goes like this: Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, books were precious objects, handwritten by scribes and available primarily in Latin. Common people, most of whom couldn’t afford books and wouldn’t have been able to read them anyway, were left vulnerable to exploitation by powerful gatekeepers—landed élites, oligarchs of church and state—who could use their monopoly on knowledge to repress the masses. After Gutenberg, books became widely available, setting off a cascade of salutary movements and innovations, including but not limited to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the steam engine, journalism, modern literature, modern medicine, and modern democracy.

This story isn’t entirely wrong, but it leaves out a lot. For one thing, Gutenberg wasn’t the first to use movable type—a Chinese artisan named Bi Sheng had developed his own process, using clay and paper ash, three and a half centuries before Gutenberg was born. For another, information wants to be free, but so does misinformation. The printing press empowered reformers; it also empowered hucksters, war profiteers, terrorists, and bigots. Nor did the printing press eliminate the problem of gatekeepers. It merely shifted the problem. The old gatekeepers were princes and priests. The new ones were entrepreneurs like Gutenberg and Caxton, or anyone who had enough money to gain access to their powerful technology.

From the beginning, Caxton was ambivalent about his status as a gatekeeper. He seemed uneasy even acknowledging his power. In an epilogue, Caxton wrote that, after receiving an English translation of the French version of “The Dictes,” he read the manuscript and “found nothing discordant therein”—well, except for one thing. “In the dictes and sayings of Socrates,” he wrote, the translator “hath left out certain and divers conclusions touching women.” In previous versions, the chapter on Socrates had included a sudden digression into petty misogyny. (“He saw a woman sick, of whom he said that the evil resteth and dwelleth with the evil.” And “he saw a young maid that learned to write, of whom he said that men multiplied evil upon evil.”) In the English translation, the digression was gone.

Should Caxton overrule the translator and restore the original text? Or should he let the censorship stand, implying that, even if such insults were acceptable in ancient Athens or medieval Cairo, they were now beyond the pale? After many sentences of ornate hand-wringing, he tried to have it both ways. He translated the misogynistic passage into English and reproduced it in full. But, instead of placing it in its original context, in the Socrates chapter, he put it in the middle of his epilogue, as if to quarantine it.

“I told you, nothing is wrong.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Maggie Mull

As soon as he made his decision, he attempted to rationalize it. In the rest of the epilogue, he seemed to imply that he wasn’t a gatekeeper after all—that, although he was clearly a publisher, his printing press should be treated more like a platform. He was merely serving his customers, he suggested: they deserved to hear all perspectives and make up their own minds. Besides, anyone who was offended should blame Socrates, not Caxton. Better yet, a reader who disliked the passage could “with a pen race it out, or else rend the leaf out of the book.”

In the twentieth century, as early packet-switching networks evolved into the Internet, a generation of futurists and TED talkers emerged, explaining the new system to the laity in a spirit of wide-eyed techno-utopianism. They compared it to a superhighway, to a marketplace of ideas, to a printing press. Anyone who was spending a lot of time on the Internet knew that many parts of it felt more like a dingy flea market, or like a parking lot outside a bar the moment before a fight breaks out. The techno-utopians must have been aware of those parts, too, but they didn’t mention them very often.

In 1998, James Dewar, a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote a paper called “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead.” He had a rosy view of the past, and he extrapolated this into hopeful speculation about the future. “The printing press has been implicated in the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution,” he wrote. “Similarly profound changes may already be underway in the information age.” Near the end of the paper, he acknowledged that “we are already seeing some of the dark side of networked computers.” He listed a few examples, in bullet-point form: “New and interesting ways of breaking into computer systems”; “Chain letters (that are both illegal and bandwidth intensive)”; “ ‘Trollers’ are posting to newsgroups.” Yet this brief qualification, which appeared in a section called “Afterthoughts,” seemed perfunctory at best. It had no effect on Dewar’s sweeping, optimistic conclusion: that it was “more important to explore the upside of the technology than to protect against the downside,” and, thus, “the Internet should remain unregulated.”

In the ensuing decade, a few nerdy young men created a handful of fast-growing social networks—Myspace, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. They didn’t pretend to know exactly how social media would be used, and they gave even less thought to how it might be misused. Despite Caxton’s self-justifications, subsequent generations of printers had grown to understand themselves as gatekeepers, and publishing had become an industry defined as much by what it didn’t publish as by what it did. In the new industry of social media, the default setting was reversed. Founders vowed to keep their platforms “content-neutral.” The assumption was that almost all voices, even odious ones, deserved the chance to be amplified.