Chapter 2: Gutenberg Steals the Realm of God

In the winter of 1440, the night in Mainz, Germany, was unusually deep.

From the cracks of a window in an old workshop at the end of an alley, a faint candlelight was seeping out. Inside, along with the sharp sound of clashing metal, came the regular mechanical rhythm of a heavy pressure being applied. Thump, bang. Thump, bang. To the people of that time, that sound, as regular as a heartbeat, may have been more than a mere machine noise. It was the sound of the walls of the old age collapsing, the birth pangs of a new civilization coming into being.

Johannes Gutenberg was peering at the metal type with exhaustion-soaked eyes. The smell of ink clung to his fingertips, and the soot on his face never seemed to wash off. The people around him called him mad. The clergy denounced him, saying that printing the word of God with a machine was blasphemy. The existing guild of scribes cursed him, claiming he would cut off their livelihood. But Gutenberg did not stop. Did he know? That what he was making was not a mere book, but the first device to extend the brain of the human species outward.

Let us imagine the world before that.

Knowledge was rare. To make a single book, dozens of sheets of parchment had to be processed. The number of pages that could be made from the hide of one cow was limited, and inscribing letters onto them demanded months of time from a professional scribe. The cost of copying out a single Bible was equivalent to the amount an ordinary family of the time could live on for several years. A book was not money but treasure, and to own one was, in itself, power.

Naturally, books belonged to the few. Only the Church, the nobility, and a tiny handful of scholars monopolized knowledge. Through knowledge they held the authority to interpret the will of God, and through that interpretation they ruled the masses. Knowledge was power, and power was holiness. The common people had no need to think for themselves, and were not even allowed to. They had only to listen to the interpretations of those in authority and believe them. Rather than performing memory and reasoning on its own, the human brain remained a storehouse that passively received the words of others.

But the moment Gutenberg's metal type pressed down onto paper, the world turned upside down.

The same content could now be reproduced far faster, far cheaper, and far more accurately. As the price of books plummeted, knowledge spilled over the fortress walls and flowed into the towns, the villages, the private studies of individuals. This was not merely a change in the speed of transmitting information. The very way humans related to knowledge had changed.

Anthropologists and cognitive scientists see the printing revolution as the starting point of the externalization of knowledge. Until then, humans had to remember everything inside their brains. In an age when the oral tradition was strong, the person with an excellent memory was the wise person. But printing made it possible to store knowledge permanently in an external medium called the book.

This was the first case in which humans began to delegate part of the brain's function to a machine. We no longer needed to remember every fact. We could simply open a book when we needed to. The human brain gradually began to shift its center of gravity from the function of storage to the functions of interpretation and critique.

As books piled up, people began to compare. Book A says this, while book B says that. Who is right? One had to think for oneself. It was the moment when the passive brain, which had believed only the words of authorities, evolved into a brain that actively asked questions.

In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan offered this insight into the effect of printing on human consciousness: printing gave birth to individualism. The act of reading a book is essentially a solitary act. It is a process in which I, and no one else, confront the written word alone and extract meaning from it. Through this process, humans at last discovered the self as a subject. The foundation was laid for the move from collective faith to individual conviction, from blind obedience to critical thought.

The greatest ripple effect brought by printing was the Reformation. When Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, the fact that they could be printed on paper and spread across all of Europe in an instant was decisive. Had there been no printing, Luther's claims might have merely murmured within the local church and then faded away.

But the printed pamphlet returned the authority to interpret the Bible — once monopolized by the clergy — to the laity. People began to read the Bible for themselves, to speak with God for themselves. The Pope and the clergy could no longer be the sole mediators between God and humanity. The democratization of knowledge was, at once, the democratization of holiness.

This shook the very foundations of the power structure. The class that had monopolized knowledge fell into confusion, and the masses who had acquired knowledge awakened. This current flowed beyond religion into the scientific revolution. As Galileo's observations, Newton's laws, and Vesalius's anatomical atlases were printed and shared among scholars, science accelerated. Knowledge was no longer a secret; it became something that could be accumulated. The cumulative effect of knowledge — in which one generation's discovery becomes the stepping stone for the next — had begun in earnest.

Looking back from today's vantage point, the printing revolution was the first stage of human evolution. We often think of evolution only as biological change — that is, the mutation of DNA — but from the perspective of the history of civilization, evolution also means the expansion of human capability.

Printing expanded human memory. The book was an additional memory device attached outside the human brain. This is, in essence, the same context as when we later used computers as external hard disks and the internet as an external knowledge base.

Did Gutenberg know? That the machine he invented was not merely a tool for printing many books, but would change the brain structure of the human species, reorganize the social system, and ultimately become the very first step in the making of a new intelligence called artificial intelligence.

He brought the creation and distribution of knowledge — once thought to be the domain of God — into human hands. And in that moment, humanity no longer remained Homo sapiens as nature had made it. It began to move toward a new stage of being, one fused with technology.

If printing drew the memory function of the human brain outward, the next revolution would be the turn to draw the body's functions outward. After the liberation of knowledge came the liberation of force.

Outside the workshop, darkness still wrapped everything, but before Gutenberg's eyes the dawn of a new world was already breaking. While the ink of the first Bible he printed was drying, the history of humanity was already crossing a river from which there could be no return.

Next: the Reformation and the scientific revolution that books created, and the birth of the individual.