Part III: The Reformation Rupture and Its Children

When ideas became weapons of systemic change

Between 1400 and 1700, something shifted. Revolution stopped being a cyclical return to an idealised past and became a linear movement toward a reimagined future. Three forces converged: a communication technology that made alternative visions transmissible, a religious reformation that demonstrated sacred institutions could be challenged and redesigned, and a scientific revolution that proved received authority could be wrong about the physical world — so why not the political one? This part traces the transition from "revolt" to "revolution" in the modern sense: intentional, ideological, and aimed at building something new. Before the Reformation, revolution looked backward. After it, revolution began to look forward.

Chapter 6: The Gutenberg Threshold

On October 31, 1517 — or perhaps a few days earlier, or perhaps not at all in the way the story is usually told — a monk in Wittenberg composed a list of ninety-five propositions about the sale of indulgences and sent them by post to the Archbishop of Mainz.

This was not a dramatic act. Academic disputations were common. The door of the Castle Church, where tradition claims the theses were nailed, functioned as the university's notice board. If Martin Luther did post them there, he was following standard procedure — an invitation to debate, not a declaration of war. Luther himself never mentioned nailing anything. The first account of the hammer was recorded thirty years later by someone who wasn't present. The first image of Luther with a hammer did not appear until 1697 — a hundred and eighty years after the event.

What made the ninety-five theses revolutionary was not the hammer. It was the press.

Within two weeks, without Luther's permission, the theses were printed and distributed across Germany. Within two months, they had reached the edges of Europe. Three editions appeared by the end of 1517 — in Nuremberg, Leipzig, and Basel — each from a different printer, each reaching approximately three hundred readers per run. By the summer of 1520, thirty of Luther's pamphlets had run through three hundred and seventy editions. If each averaged a thousand copies — the standard scholarly estimate — then roughly four hundred thousand copies of Luther's arguments flooded German-speaking Europe in three years.

Luther became, as the historian Andrew Pettegree has argued, "the world's first mass-media figure, its first brand." The shift was strategic and progressive: in 1518, less than half his writings were in German; by 1522, ninety percent were. He moved from scholarly Latin to colloquial vernacular — from academic debate to mass communication. Lucas Cranach designed attractive title pages highlighting Luther's name and image. Printers could simply stamp the initials "ML" on a cover and expect sales. Wittenberg, a provincial university town of no particular importance, transformed into a European publishing hub — producing at least 2,721 works between 1517 and 1546, an average of ninety-one per year, representing some three million individual copies.

Before the printing press, Luther would have been a footnote — one more discontented cleric whose objections were absorbed by the institution they challenged. After the printing press, he was a continental event.

But what exactly did the press do? This question sounds simple. It is not.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her landmark 1979 study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, offered the most influential answer. Print, she argued, did three things that manuscript culture could not: it disseminated texts widely, it standardised them (identical copies meant readers across Europe could reference the same text), and it preserved them permanently — what she called "typographical fixity." Before print, knowledge was discovered and lost again with sickening regularity; manuscripts decayed, were copied with errors, were destroyed in fires. After print, a text, once published, could not be un-published. The accumulation of knowledge became possible. And when readers could compare multiple texts side by side for the first time, they noticed contradictions — between Ptolemy's maps and actual coastlines, between the Church's claims and Scripture's text, between what authority said and what evidence showed.

Eisenstein attributed three transformations to this technology: the Renaissance (recovery and comparison of classical texts), the Reformation (ideas spreading faster than institutions could suppress them), and the Scientific Revolution (standardised data enabling cumulative research). The press was, in her framing, an agent — not merely a vehicle.

Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book (1998), challenged nearly every element of this thesis. "Fixity" did not exist as an inherent property of print, he argued. Early printed books were riddled with errors. Pirated editions were ubiquitous. No two copies of the same edition were necessarily identical, because corrections were often made mid-print-run. Technologies like print are "components, rather than causes, of cultural transformation." The trust that a printed book deserved more credibility than a manuscript was not automatic — it was a social achievement requiring decades of institutional work: copyright law, publisher credibility, regulatory frameworks. The general acceptance of print's reliability did not arrive until the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment — roughly three hundred years after Gutenberg.

In 2002, Eisenstein and Johns debated directly in the American Historical Review. The exchange clarified the fundamental disagreement: did print technology have inherent effects, or were its effects entirely determined by social context? The scholarly consensus has settled, as it usually does, somewhere between the two. Eisenstein was right that print mattered enormously. She was wrong that its effects were automatic. Print was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the transformations she described. The technology created possibilities. Human choices, institutions, and social context determined which possibilities were realised.

This distinction matters because the same debate, in almost identical terms, is happening right now about the internet. And the pattern is the same.

But before we follow that thread forward, we need to follow another one sideways. Because the printing press was not the first communication technology to reshape political power. It was merely the first one European historians recognised.

In the forests of western Africa, across the Senegal and Mauritania through to Mali and Nigeria, the talking drum — known as dundun in Yoruba, tama in Mandinka, sabar in Wolof — had been transmitting complex messages for centuries before Gutenberg was born. The technology is elegant: an hourglass-shaped drum tensioned with cords, which a skilled player can squeeze to vary the pitch continuously, mimicking the tonal patterns of spoken language. Under optimal conditions, a single drum's message can be decoded at five to eleven kilometres. Through relay — each village repeating the message for the next — a signal can travel across a region within hours.

This was not a simple signalling system. James Gleick, in the opening chapter of The Information, explains the information theory. In a tonal language like Kele, drum communication retains only the tonal information from speech — all vowel and consonant content is lost. To compensate, drum language uses massive redundancy: on average, eight words of drum language transmit one word of human language unambiguously. Formulaic phrases, stock expressions, and repetitive patterns resolve the ambiguity. This was a sophisticated engineering solution to an information-theoretic problem — understood intuitively centuries before Claude Shannon formalised information theory in 1948.

The colonial powers understood what the drums meant. In 1739, during the Stono Rebellion — the largest slave insurrection in colonial North America — rebels marched through South Carolina beating drums and shouting "liberty." The following year, South Carolina revised its slave code, explicitly prohibiting enslaved people from using or keeping "drums, horns, or other loud instruments which could call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes." That law remained the basis for South Carolina's slave regulations until 1865.

In Haiti, the connection between communication technology and revolution was even more direct. On August 14, 1791, at the Bois Caiman ceremony, thousands of enslaved people gathered for a vodou ritual centred on drumming. Within a week, they began killing their masters. The revolution that followed — the largest successful slave revolt in history — took thirteen years and produced the second republic in the Western Hemisphere. Drums were not incidental to this revolution. They were infrastructure: organising gatherings, encoding messages, sustaining solidarity in a population deliberately stripped of every other institutional bond.

The colonial response to drums was the same as the colonial response to printing presses and, centuries later, the authoritarian response to social media: ban the medium. This is the clearest evidence that drums functioned as genuine revolution infrastructure. The people in power understood, even when historians did not, that controlling communication technology was essential to maintaining the system.

In the Andes, the quipu — intricate systems of knotted, coloured strings — had administered the Inca Empire for centuries: recording census data, tax obligations, inventories, and possibly narrative accounts. After the Spanish conquest, many quipus were identified as idolatrous and destroyed. Yet their use persisted in certain Andean regions until the twentieth century, coexisting with written Spanish — a quiet technological resistance that outlived the empire that had created it.

The Gutenberg threshold was not the first time communication technology shaped political change. It was the first time it happened in a way European historians recorded and valorised.

The English Civil War proved Eisenstein's thesis in real time — and complicated it in the same breath.

In July 1641, Parliament abolished the Court of Star Chamber, the body that had enforced pre-publication censorship. The result was immediate. In 1640, only twenty-two pamphlets had been published in England. In 1641, the number was 2,042. More than three times the total from two years earlier. The print explosion continued: over a thousand pamphlets appeared in each of the next four years. George Thomason, a London bookseller, began collecting everything published — and over twenty years amassed more than twenty-two thousand items, estimated to represent eighty percent of all published material in England during the period.

Three hundred different newsbooks appeared during the 1640s. Mercurius Aulicus, founded in 1643 to serve the Royalist cause, pioneered popular journalism as a political weapon — openly smearing and mocking opponents in ways novel for the period. Mercurius Britannicus countered it from the Parliamentary side, reporting small defeats as victories and calling for days of thanksgiving to celebrate dubious achievements. Partisan journalism was born in the gap between censorship and revolution.

But the most consequential publications came from below. The Levellers — John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn — used cheap print as their primary weapon. Overton ran clandestine printing operations, evading authorities while producing pamphlets demanding universal male suffrage, written constitutional protections, and religious toleration. An Agreement of the People, published in multiple versions between 1647 and 1649, was arguably the first written constitution proposed for England. The Levellers built networks around their publications that became a powerful collective force — demonstrating that print could create not just public opinion but organised political movements.

Parliament, having unleashed the press by abolishing the Star Chamber, immediately tried to chain it again. The Licensing Order of 1643 reimposed pre-publication censorship. It was this act that prompted John Milton's Areopagitica — one of the foundational arguments for press freedom, written as a direct response to censorship by the very Parliament that had destroyed royal censorship two years earlier. The revolution ate its own children. The cycle of liberation and suppression was already turning.

The same cycle accelerates in the digital age, and the same debate plays out in almost the same terms.

In June 2009, when Iranian protesters filled the streets after disputed elections, Clay Shirky called it "the big one" — "the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media." Twitter, Facebook, YouTube — the new printing press, enabling masses of strangers to coordinate without centralised organisation.

Evgeny Morozov replied with The Net Delusion: social media creates "slacktivism" — the illusion of political action without its substance. Authoritarian regimes could and did use the same technologies for surveillance and repression. Shirky overestimated technology's impact and underestimated authoritarian adaptability.

Then the Arab Spring arrived and seemed to settle the argument in Shirky's favour — until it didn't. The Egyptian government shut down the internet entirely during the 2011 protests. The shutdown failed to stop the demonstrations. But the movement that had organised with extraordinary speed lacked the institutional infrastructure to sustain itself. Tahrir Square was electrifying. What followed was not.

Zeynep Tufekci, in Twitter and Tear Gas (2017), resolved the debate the way the Eisenstein-Johns debate had been resolved: by refusing to accept either pole. Social media, she argued, enables the rapid organisation of massive protests — but this very capability makes movements fragile. Speed comes at the cost of durability. A movement that can go from zero to a hundred miles an hour in logistical capacity skips the slow, deliberative processes that build organisational resilience. During the 2011 Tahrir Square protests, a young pharmacy student used Twitter and Google spreadsheets to coordinate ten field hospitals, including shifts and supply delivery. That is extraordinary tactical capacity. But tactical capacity is not strategic capacity. The Civil Rights Movement took over a decade of planning — years of institutional building that gave the movement the ability to survive repression and achieve legislative change. Tahrir achieved in days what the March on Washington required months to organise. But the decade of institutional work that preceded the March on Washington is precisely what made it matter beyond the day itself.

Tufekci identified a pathology she called "tactical freeze": digitally organised movements cannot make tactical turns because their decentralised, leaderless structure prevents collective decision-making. They keep going back to what worked the first time. And meanwhile, governments adapt — not just with censorship but with attention flooding, drowning signals in noise.

The quantitative evidence has caught up. Economists Chonghyun Byun and Ethan Hollander found no significant correlation between internet or social media use and popular unrest. Political conditions explain social media activity, not the reverse. At least eighty countries have adopted Chinese surveillance technology. Digital authoritarianism is outpacing digital liberation.

Technology as amplifier, not as cause. Communication infrastructure as revolution infrastructure — and as counter-revolution infrastructure simultaneously. The Gutenberg threshold was real. But crossing a threshold does not tell you which direction you will walk.

The pattern holds across five centuries and multiple technologies. Talking drums coordinated slave rebellions; colonial authorities banned them. Printing presses spread Luther's challenge; the Church compiled the Index of Forbidden Books. Social media mobilised millions; authoritarian governments built digital surveillance states. In every case, the technology amplified both the revolutionary signal and the counter-revolutionary response. In every case, the social context — the organisational infrastructure, the political conditions, the institutional capacity to sustain what the technology ignited — determined whether the technology enabled lasting transformation or merely spectacular mobilisation.

The revolutions that succeeded after the Gutenberg threshold — the ones that stuck — were those that married new communication tools with existing organisational infrastructure. Luther's pamphlets succeeded because they flowed through a network of churches, universities, and princely courts that could organise the energy print unleashed. The Levellers' publications built a political movement because they were embedded in the social networks of London's radical communities. The Haitian Revolution succeeded not because of drums alone but because vodou provided the organisational structure — the meeting places, the shared identity, the chain of command — that drums helped coordinate.

The medium is not the message. The medium is the amplifier. The message — and whether it persists — depends on what existed before the amplifier was switched on.