Gutenberg may have created masterpieces, but he was primarily out to make a living.
Gutenberg could not have foreseen the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the emergence of the nation-state as the dominant political form, the spread of mass literacy, or the rise of representative democracy. Yet all were made possible by the printing press.
Over time, Gutenbergs invention also changed the geography of language.
These consequences were not inevitable. Movable type presses were available in China as early as the eleventh century, but they were little used and had essentially no influence. The European invention of the printing press transformed Europe because Europe was ready to be transformed.
We are now, potentially, at a similar turning point. Information technology may once again be poised to transform politics and identity. If the print revolution made possible the nation-state system and eventually national democracy, where might the digital revolution lead us? Can it help us create new, and possibly better, ways of running the world?
New systems of global decision making are emerging that go beyond cooperation between states to a much messier agglomeration of ad hoc mechanisms for solving the many and varied transnational problems. No one is planning this system. It is evolving, with many disparate actors who are largely unaware of the roles of other sectors and their relationships to other issues.
The tools are now available to do at a global level what the printing press helped do for national governance -- to decentralize the flow of information, enabling democracy to emerge. The speed and scale at which decision making must now take place has outstripped the capacity of purely electoral systems of democracy to cope. If democracy is to survive globalization, it must attend to the free flow of information.
Innovative solutions often do not look much like the electoral, representative systems that are the usual focus of works on governance. Indeed, there is not much discussion in this book of the formal structures of political decision making. Instead, the focus is on what can be truly new when technology and politics combine to open up the information floodgates, in a time of transformation potentially as great as was the period following Gutenbergs invention more than half a millennium ago.
