As Cory Doctorow has observed, regarding the inherent conservativism of creators and innovators and the fear of new technology and new modes of consuming information:

creators (and, notably, their industrial investors) are notoriously resistant to new media. The composers damned the record companies as pirates; the record labels damned the radio for its piracy; broadcasters vilified the cable companies for taking their signals; cable companies fought the VCR for its recording “theft.” Big entertainment tried to kill FM radio, TV remote controls (which made it easy to switch away from adverts), jukeboxes, and so on, all the way back to the protestant reformation’s fight over who got to read the Bible.

Mike Masnick has a recent Techdirt post on a related theme:

A Fifteenth Century Technopanic About The Horrors Of The Printing Press

from the bad-technology,-bad dept

In talking about various technopanics over time, there’s always someone who hates some new technology because it somehow “undermines” the good “way things were.” These days, think of the books by the likes of Nick Carr or Andrew Keen, who focus on just how awful new technology is making people, compared to “back in their day…” when things were just lovely. Yet, as we’ve pointed out, these sorts of complaints about new technology happen throughout history, such as the attacks on the telephone (makes men lazy and breaks up your home life) and novels (corrupts the mind). But sometimes it goes back much, much further. In the past, we’ve even joked about those “poor monks” put out of the scribe business by the printing press.

But what we didn’t realize was there actually was just such a concern at the time.

ChurchHatesTucker points us to a wonderful historical analysis of a 15th century luddite, abbot Johannes Trithemius, who was no fan of the printing press, because of what it was going to do to those poor monks. It wasn’t just that it would put them out of work, but that it would impact their souls. He worried that the printing press would make monks lazy.

It was okay that the act of copying was hard. It built character, in Trithemius’ opinion, the same way as chopping wood (though to this “interior exercise,” i.e. exercise of the spirit, he assigned far more importance). For monks, labor was part and parcel of devotion, and if you weren’t good at writing, you could do binding, or painting, or for heaven’s sake practice. And it goes even further: the labor of manuscript writing was something for monks to do — for there was no greater danger for the devout soul than idleness.

For among all the manual exercises, none is so seemly to monks as devotion to the writing of sacred texts.

He also pulls out the typical “but this new fangled thing just isn’t as nice as the old stuff”:

He does spend some time talking about practical reasons that printed books weren’t anything to get bothered about: their paper wasn’t as permanent as the parchment the monks used (he even advocates the hand-copying of “useful” printed works for their preservation); there weren’t very many books in print, and they were hard to find; they were constrained by the limitations of type, and were therefore ugly.

And then there’s just the fact that if you’re not writing a book, you don’t really “get” it:

He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.

Honestly, it sounds like a near perfect 15th century version of Nick Carr. Carr loves books, but frets about what the internet is doing to our appreciation of books. But, of course, this all seems to come back to Douglas Adams’ famous saying, which I’ll paraphrase: everything that exists before you were born is just normal, the way things should be. Everything that is invented from your birth until you’re about thirty is cool and neat and innovative. And everything invented after you’re thirty is “against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.”

See also Jeff Tucker, Mises.org in the Context of Publishing History:

When movable-type printing appeared with the Mainz Psalter in 1457, it seemed that the institution of the scribe would be no more, and monks all over Europe debated what to do. On the one hand, the religious communities had the strongest interest in printing advances. On the other hand, the class of professional scribes associated with monasteries of course opposed the advance, in order to protect the high status of their specialized services.

After the development of printing, and then movable type, German abbot Johannes Trithemius exhorted his monks to continue to copy books. He claimed that printing had a shorter life, and that the automated printing technique denied monks the discipline associated with hand scribing. He worried too that the monks would have idle hands if printing became more fashionable.

But this concern didn’t last longer than a few decades. By the late 15th century, the printing houses were working almost exclusively for monasteries, and monasteries themselves had established printing houses. Far from having taken away work for the monks, it became obvious that the new tool made their work more efficient. Their work could be made ever more valuable. The works of Trithemius himself, on a variety of topics, would eventually be printed in many editions.

…

But there was a threat on the horizon: mercantilism, the theory that producers needed special protection from government in order to remain healthy in an atmosphere of extreme competitive pressure. Producers were beginning to discover then what every business knows today: namely, that one aspect of free enterprise is that it denies long-run profits to producers.

The market process is always driving profits to zero, as profitable companies are imitated by innovative upstarts using cheaper and more efficient methods. Society benefits from this process, but in order for an established firm to stay on top, it can never stop innovating and striving for excellence.

The answer to this reality in many trades was to seek government protection from competition abroad and to ask favors from the prince to be the only and favored producer. This served both as a guarantee that people would continue to be provided with the goods and services they needed, and as a guarantee that the producer would be protected against the distraction of competitive pressure from others. That’s the theory and practice of mercantilism, and it’s a perfect recipe for hobbling progress.

Just as the printers had driven the scribes out of business, the printers were facing extreme competition by the 18th century. They sought protection from more efficient upstarts, often called pirates, who were making life hard for this very profitable industry.

These pirate firms were publishing older works and distributing them very cheaply and widely. The dominant firms claimed that this practice was undermining their ability to fund new works and was thus inhibiting innovation.

The established printers tapped into the mercantilist spirit, but with a special twist. They claimed that words on the page constituted a special form of property. When they were copied by a firm other than the current publisher, they claimed, their property rights were being invaded. Their “intellectual property” was being stolen.

Now, on its face, this is a preposterous claim. Once ideas are known by others, they are copied. They cannot be owned in the conventional sense, or, another way of putting this is that the ownership of the ideas becomes multiplied without end. The only way to possess an idea as exclusive property is to never share it with another person. Once shared, the idea takes flight.

What’s more, the entire industry had been born in the world of copying, not in making original work. Most famously, the most profitable text to publish was the Bible itself and its most ancient transcriptions and translations. In fact, this had been the driving motivation of the invention of the press in the beginning, just as it had been the driving motivation of the scribes.

For this reason, it is crucial to understand the appearance of copyright as nothing other than an aspect of the mercantilist principle. The claims about “intellectual property” were nothing but a ruse offered up by printers as a way of seeking legal protection from competition.On the Continent, no one bought into this gibberish, seeing it for exactly what it was: a sop to producers, which would have inhibited the whole engine of publishing from the ancient world to the present. They saw that copyright does the opposite of the long-established goals. It raises costs. It limits distribution. And it dooms works to a short life, given the uncertainties of the industry.

This was a terrible direction to go, and in only one place in the world did it take hold: England, which was undergoing a terrible religious struggle. Copyright became useful to the crown in order to suppress works incompatible with the official religion, whatever it happened to be at the time. And so in the 18th century, there were endless fights in England over this matter.

Meanwhile, on the Continent, publishing remained competitive and free for the hundred years after the first copyright statute was imposed on England. Even given England’s laws, copyright statutes were largely ineffective at hobbling the market process until the imposition of international copyright law in the late 19th century. Laws have grown tighter and tighter in the 20th century, until we have reached the point of absurdity since 1995 in the United States, with laws that have pretty well doomed a half century of scholarship to ruin.

If you leave the state and state-protected industries in charge long enough, they will strangle progress to the point that civilization completely stagnates. In the publishing industry, digital media couldn’t have come at a better time. It is saving what the state and the dominant publishers are trying to kill.