The K-Landndews team loves Project Gutenberg's free eBooks. We have followed if fondly since its inception.
This post, however, is about the namesake of old, Johannes Gutenberg, who gave us the printing press with movable type.
Much has been written about the fate of the paper book, the fate of libraries and the new digital economy. You can read up on all of this, we will not repeat it.
In light of the ongoing crackdown on the internet and other modern communications, we would like to point out another important characteristic of Mr. Gutenberg's invention.
The movable type press was the first anonymizer service
Gutenberg's press made anonymous publishing possible for the first time, allowing criticism to flow, allowing people we call dissidents today to shake up the world.
By design, the printing press also happens to have been the original leaks platform. Those pretty handwritten incriminating letters could be set in movable type and circulated among the literati.
The crackdown on printed matter, started swiftly after a short period of unchecked growth, never really let up. There are still books being banned today.
The basic methods of the crackdown on the internet are 100% identical to the fight against the print men.
On the legal front, the application of old unrelated laws, passing new laws specifically tailored to the threat, ignoring the law altogether.
Where print shops were regulated or shut down, we do the same to service providers and servers.
And the anonymous author flourished, supported by friendly print shop owners, by people who would print anything for money, or by the underground presses of the times, the predecessors to the modern sharing services and anonymization networks.
Snitches, spies, and metadata became part of the great hunt for whatever information displeased the rulers. The upholders of law and order would painstakingly piece together such metadata as types (letters) that we ever so slightly damaged and thus provided proof that different pamphlets (the blogs of the time) were produced on the same press.
The public book burnings have lost most of their appeal, but the blocking of websites by modern governments around the world is a worthy successor. The censors who protect us from ourselves and then go home to jack off over the porn they confiscated at work are still around. And they are being assisted by the nameless masses of censors in China and the sysadmins in the West.
The inquisitors chasing down and torturing the author of a subversive comma not long ago, they - too - have found their successors in the perverts who will watch a torture video in good conscience as long as it says national security on the sleeve.
Like the spirit duplicators that kept independent thought alive in much of the 20th century, the small "mesh" nets of the internet may well find themselves in this role.
As we said before, history always repeats itself but with minor differences, which provide ample opportunity for talking heads and experts to paint new threat scenarios to make them rich.
If you have a working old movable type press to give away and can take over the shipping cost, let us know.
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