Thanks so much for this discussion of the book! I'm glad that you found so much of interest in it.
FWIW I really regret that I couldn't cover Islamic notebooks in more detail. I did try, at the beginning of my research, but got nowhere, and had to move on. Two years later, when I'd got much better at the research, I wanted to go back to it, but had no time left. Such is life. I would love to read a good account of Islamic / Ottoman equivalents to Zibaldoni, common-place books and so on.
Interesting point you make about the Italian merchant classes 'owning' the techniques of double entry collectively. They didn't really do Intellectual Property in those days... very few people were able to protect their ideas and monetise them exclusively. (Interestingly, Pacioli was one: he got a very early, exceptional, (c) protection for the Summa.
I love the idea of how simple advances can radically reshape society, usually with unanticipated and unintended effects. For example, I’m convinced the widespread installation of central AC helped erode neiborhood street life, as families stayed indoors rather than hit the streets to beat summer heat. Now generations later, builders have almost completely deemphasied front porches in favor of elaborate rear patios.
The very contemporary cultural explosion around bullet journaling shows that people are still innovating on how we organize thoughts on paper.
Bullet journaling a system that doesn't have the constraints of digital systems, be they NotebookLM or something else, and taps into the physical connection of pen & brain. For some people, it just works much better than anything digital. And is a contemporary bleeding edge of innovation inextricably linked to paper.
For anyone who might be interested in how knowledge is recorded and transmitted for posterity, you might be interested in my draft hypertext, Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation: a fugue on the theory of knowledge (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wdzT4INpAdHYL5NaLg79r-e1FK0nEg7w/view?usp=sharing). In toto, the book explores the origins, history, and social impacts of the material technologies to distribute, use, and manage this knowledge. Episode 1 (pp. 58-80) covers the story from orality to mass printing. As Steven says, papermaking was a key technology that transformed writing from a handicraft owned by a few royal or religious scribes into something anyone could use and benefit from. For artisanal papermaking, see page 69.
The draft was last edited in 2017 (Note the video links work, but many links to other documentation are broken through age, so you will need to Google titles to find current access.
Work on it ended when my work on the conclusion showed that doing what I could to promote action on the global climate emergency took absolute priority, given the amount of time that would be required to write the concluding parts and to check and update all the links and references (with no AI to help with the tedious bits!).
[For Steven's attention:]
However, I'm hoping to find time to rework Application Holy Wars into something that will actually be publishable. NotebookLM should be helpful, but at this point, I either don't understand how to use it or it simply can't do what I need it to do: provide metadata and annotate texts -- especially those that may only exist as scanned PDFs with wonky OCR.
I'm also trying to build a doppelganger that includes a comprehensive collection of my own writings and presentations, which will need to be annotated to provide context and notes where my claims may be debatable, but where I do not want to change the already circulated document.
Great post. Just for fun, I submitted the following query to Grok 4.0: "In Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate there was the House of Wisdom. They had paper (via China) but no printing press. Speculate how different history might have been if they had both."
For millennia printed knowledge has shaped civilisations from block printing in ancient China with typified characters, but then you can look over many many civilisations of innovations from the east than we wrap.up with the west. Like the mathematical breakthroughs in ancient India later expanded by Arabic scholars. The Baghdad Water Clock, a marvel I only discovered had been that's to How We Got To Now, exemplifies how innovation transcends borders. Empires rose and fell like the prosperous Sikh Empire resisting the British East India Company and how it related to Enemy of All Mankind for its ruthless colonial exploits.
Speaking of that European imperialism imposed a racial hierarchy monopolizing literacy and culture based on races myth of the “white man’s burden” justified exploitation, painting indigenous societies as primitive, reduced to mud huts. Taking resources and wisdom from another kind without credit.
Colonized people discrimination were told they couldn’t read or write and denied a life. But Shakespeare’s work absolutely wipes the ego away (the Moor of Venice) it was only after such Elizabeth I and pirating rivals took to raiding by the 16th century brought along Transatlantic slavery. Further the age of Genocides.
Books like The Ghost Map showed the war against disease and some life changing innovations slowly slipped into a negative dark field of pseudoscience like “racial degeneracy” or "racial hygiene" emerged linking public health to eugenics. This ideology, championed by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton took a negative turn, ranking humans on graph racial scales and justified sterilization, dehumanisation, exploited labour, segregation, birth control and industrial genocide going as far as the Nazi's conspiracy claims they descent from a alien race called "Atlantis". and how it ended with Empires clashing with rival Empires and that humanity was nearing mass destruction. The end result was created of United Nations to remind us the cruelty and destruction behind us and the leading us forward, no longer Empires or Kingdoms now nations and human rights. Pacificists and environmentalists. Perhaps your next book should be on 'Eugenics' today's racial, sexist and classist division still rooted from those times still explains why they still exist today.
Thanks so much for this discussion of the book! I'm glad that you found so much of interest in it.
FWIW I really regret that I couldn't cover Islamic notebooks in more detail. I did try, at the beginning of my research, but got nowhere, and had to move on. Two years later, when I'd got much better at the research, I wanted to go back to it, but had no time left. Such is life. I would love to read a good account of Islamic / Ottoman equivalents to Zibaldoni, common-place books and so on.
Interesting point you make about the Italian merchant classes 'owning' the techniques of double entry collectively. They didn't really do Intellectual Property in those days... very few people were able to protect their ideas and monetise them exclusively. (Interestingly, Pacioli was one: he got a very early, exceptional, (c) protection for the Summa.
Nice piece, SBJ!
I love the idea of how simple advances can radically reshape society, usually with unanticipated and unintended effects. For example, I’m convinced the widespread installation of central AC helped erode neiborhood street life, as families stayed indoors rather than hit the streets to beat summer heat. Now generations later, builders have almost completely deemphasied front porches in favor of elaborate rear patios.
The very contemporary cultural explosion around bullet journaling shows that people are still innovating on how we organize thoughts on paper.
Bullet journaling a system that doesn't have the constraints of digital systems, be they NotebookLM or something else, and taps into the physical connection of pen & brain. For some people, it just works much better than anything digital. And is a contemporary bleeding edge of innovation inextricably linked to paper.
For anyone who might be interested in how knowledge is recorded and transmitted for posterity, you might be interested in my draft hypertext, Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation: a fugue on the theory of knowledge (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wdzT4INpAdHYL5NaLg79r-e1FK0nEg7w/view?usp=sharing). In toto, the book explores the origins, history, and social impacts of the material technologies to distribute, use, and manage this knowledge. Episode 1 (pp. 58-80) covers the story from orality to mass printing. As Steven says, papermaking was a key technology that transformed writing from a handicraft owned by a few royal or religious scribes into something anyone could use and benefit from. For artisanal papermaking, see page 69.
The draft was last edited in 2017 (Note the video links work, but many links to other documentation are broken through age, so you will need to Google titles to find current access.
Work on it ended when my work on the conclusion showed that doing what I could to promote action on the global climate emergency took absolute priority, given the amount of time that would be required to write the concluding parts and to check and update all the links and references (with no AI to help with the tedious bits!).
[For Steven's attention:]
However, I'm hoping to find time to rework Application Holy Wars into something that will actually be publishable. NotebookLM should be helpful, but at this point, I either don't understand how to use it or it simply can't do what I need it to do: provide metadata and annotate texts -- especially those that may only exist as scanned PDFs with wonky OCR.
I'm also trying to build a doppelganger that includes a comprehensive collection of my own writings and presentations, which will need to be annotated to provide context and notes where my claims may be debatable, but where I do not want to change the already circulated document.
Great post. Just for fun, I submitted the following query to Grok 4.0: "In Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate there was the House of Wisdom. They had paper (via China) but no printing press. Speculate how different history might have been if they had both."
It got pretty wild!
For millennia printed knowledge has shaped civilisations from block printing in ancient China with typified characters, but then you can look over many many civilisations of innovations from the east than we wrap.up with the west. Like the mathematical breakthroughs in ancient India later expanded by Arabic scholars. The Baghdad Water Clock, a marvel I only discovered had been that's to How We Got To Now, exemplifies how innovation transcends borders. Empires rose and fell like the prosperous Sikh Empire resisting the British East India Company and how it related to Enemy of All Mankind for its ruthless colonial exploits.
Speaking of that European imperialism imposed a racial hierarchy monopolizing literacy and culture based on races myth of the “white man’s burden” justified exploitation, painting indigenous societies as primitive, reduced to mud huts. Taking resources and wisdom from another kind without credit.
Colonized people discrimination were told they couldn’t read or write and denied a life. But Shakespeare’s work absolutely wipes the ego away (the Moor of Venice) it was only after such Elizabeth I and pirating rivals took to raiding by the 16th century brought along Transatlantic slavery. Further the age of Genocides.
Books like The Ghost Map showed the war against disease and some life changing innovations slowly slipped into a negative dark field of pseudoscience like “racial degeneracy” or "racial hygiene" emerged linking public health to eugenics. This ideology, championed by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton took a negative turn, ranking humans on graph racial scales and justified sterilization, dehumanisation, exploited labour, segregation, birth control and industrial genocide going as far as the Nazi's conspiracy claims they descent from a alien race called "Atlantis". and how it ended with Empires clashing with rival Empires and that humanity was nearing mass destruction. The end result was created of United Nations to remind us the cruelty and destruction behind us and the leading us forward, no longer Empires or Kingdoms now nations and human rights. Pacificists and environmentalists. Perhaps your next book should be on 'Eugenics' today's racial, sexist and classist division still rooted from those times still explains why they still exist today.