CONCEPT
The Cost of Attempting
Eisenstein’s economic concept for the threshold below which speculative production becomes rational—the investment required to test whether an uncertain idea has merit—and the structural variable whose collapse transforms what kinds of work a civilization attempts.
The cost of attempting is not the cost of succeeding. It is the cost of finding out whether something is worth pursuing—the investment required before the result can be evaluated.
Elizabeth Eisenstein identified this threshold as the structural variable that determines which ideas a civilization tests and which die unexamined in the minds of their originators. In the scribal era, the cost of attempting publication was so high—months of scribal labor, enormous expense in materials—that only texts of proven value could justify the investment, and the selection pressure eliminated precisely the speculative, experimental work that drives intellectual diversity. When the printing press reduced that cost by eighty percent in a single generation,
speculative production became rational, and the explosion of pamphlets, experimental treatises, and vernacular texts that followed transformed European intellectual culture not by improving the quality of any single work but by dramatically expanding the range of what was attempted. The language interface is collapsing the cost of