Gutenberg
Somewhere around the year 1440 AD, a skilled craftsman sat in his workshop, fashioning pieces of tin. He and his partners had come up with an innovative variation of a common souvenir of the time, the pilgrim badge. Pilgrims provided a lucrative market, for craftsmen of the time. These badges, were mass produced talismans stamped and molded from soft metals such as lead and tin. The pins he was creating were more than mere talismans... They were tiny convex mirrors specifically designed to capture the 'holy light' of religious relics. One could, benefit in capturing the divine energy, without even needing to touch the relic.
As fate... or God would have it, an outbreak of plague had delayed production, and investors demanded their money back. The craftsman was now stuck having already spent the investment money to produce the mirrors. In order to satisfy his debt, he was forced to share his greatest secret invention with them. This man was Johannes Gutenberg, and the invention was the Printing Press.
Gutenberg's invention upturned the status quo. At the time, information distribution was a closed system. It's no understatement to say that the Catholic church had a monopoly on information and knowledge. Books were produced in monastery scriptoria, each methodically copied by hand. As such books were extremely expensive to produce, and not widely available to the public. Gutenberg's printing press made this model completely obsolete.
Interestingly, we are in a similar place today as it pertains to AI. For some reason or another people largely haven't caught on to it yet... if at all. People have drawn comparisons to AI content creation and the printing press... This is not the best comparison, and represents a weakness for the individual, and strengthening of the status quo. Nobody seems to be thinking big enough, unsurprisingly. The Big Tech Platforms have become so embedded so as to seem ubiquitous to society. They are not. For context, these platforms have only existed for a relatively short amount of time: Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, TikTok reached the west in 2018. The oldest of these has existed for barely two decades. The printing press upended a system that had been in place for over a thousand years.
The strength AI holds, that is analogous to Gutenberg's printing press, is that it simplifies the creation of advanced digital network systems. Any individual with systems design knowledge can potentially create better, more specialized systems, than those currently provided by any centralized platform. We all know that these 'platforms' in all of their incarnations have become predatory. Their business models require them to extract value from their users, to the users detriment. Being that we all know this, all centralized platforms will be made obsolete, it's only a matter of time. In fact these changes always follow a predictable pattern, known as "The Innovators Dilemma". We're watching it play out right now. Microsoft is embedding Copilot into every corner of Windows and Office, then raising prices — the basic subscription jumped to $9.99 a month and the AI-premium tier runs $19.99. Apple is baking "Apple Intelligence" into every device they sell, while keeping their walled garden locked down tight. Twitter gutted its free API and now charges developers $200 a month for what used to be free access. Reddit did the same thing — priced out every third-party app overnight. These platforms spent years building ecosystems on openness, then pulled the ladder up behind them. They're not innovating. They're fortifying. And fortification is what dying empires do.