Print Capitalism
Print capitalism names the moment when profit-seeking publishers discovered that vernacular languages constituted commercially viable markets larger than the Latin-reading elite. The publisher who printed in French rather than Latin was not making a political decision; he was following the arithmetic of the market. The political consequence — the formation of French-reading publics who could imagine themselves as communities — was an unintended externality. Anderson's insight was that this unintended externality produced nationalism. The framework illuminates the AI transition by identifying AI companies as the print capitalists of the present moment, whose profit-seeking deployment of language models is producing community-formation effects that no one explicitly intended and few have yet recognized.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Before print, knowledge traveled in Latin and Arabic, the administrative and sacred languages of empires and faiths. The reading community was transnational and thin, confined to clerics, scholars, and functionaries. Print could have continued to serve this community; the earliest printers in fact specialized in Latin Bibles and