10 print go to 10

We’ve come to the inevitable moment where someone tries to examine a new technology by asking what parallels it has to the printing press. (Sorry!)

So basically, moveable type worked so well in China that Gutenberg had to invent it again.

Pre-Gutenberg, people were beholden to monks to produce written materials. As a result there were very few punk zines.

Remarkably, after the printing press, it was faster and easier to print things.

Pamphlets were king. Publications became cheaper, so people could get their hands on them. More people learned how to read. All of a sudden everything didn’t have to be in Latin. The church couldn’t control the flow of information. Governments could print laws and music could be captured on paper.

Pre-6ish months ago, it was primarily artists, designers, art directors and others professionally engaged in visual culture who produced images. Those are our monks.

Fast forward to Generative AI. All of a sudden it becomes easier, faster, and cheaper to produce images.

Artists tend to perpetuate a scarcity model of art: one aspect of this is demonstrated by concerns about being replaced by machines. But if we take the conversation away from scarcity and toward a recognition that image-making, art, visual culture etc. can now, with these new technologies, expand into an infinitely larger set of frameworks, how does that change the world and our experience of it? What is coming, now that everything doesn’t have to be in Latin, now that more of us can read? What will be our punk zines? ¹

1. I’m definitely going back and forth between the terms ‘images’ and ‘art’, primarily because I don’t think we necessarily know what these forms will even be.