Back on February 6, 2024 I told a tale at AT about how we were living in the Third Age of Communication, staring with:

The Age of Parchment: Writers write, monks in monasteries create illuminated manuscripts by hand in their monastic cells.

Then came:

The Age of Gutenberg: Writers write, printer’s devils convert the written word into print for mechanical printing presses.

And now:

The Age of Free-for-all: Writers write, and press Publish.

And I described how our illustrious leaders are beside themselves about the free-for-all! Of course, I’m not the first person to suggest that it’s Katy bar the door. According to Benjamin Carlson at The Free Press, it was all predicted by Marshall McLuhan in the Sixties. We are living in the “electric age,” McLuhan said, and

It has deprived people, really, of their private identity. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.

But suppose McLuhan is wrong, and the Age of Mass Man was really in the mechanical Gutenberg Age of printing presses, cotton gins, and steam railways, when monarchs and latterly dictators controlled the Engineer’s Dials of Politics, intellectuals controlled the Engineer’s Dials of Ideas, and capitalists and then government regulators controlled the Engineer’s Dials of Industry.

Look at........

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