The Printing Press - How Long Was the Adjustment

The timeline

So how long?

There are three defensible endpoints, and the choice of endpoint is the argument:

Even the friendliest number is over a century. Acemoglu’s own framing — “think of American society or European society or even India or Latin America in the 1980s… human community was very well adjusted” — puts the settled state at roughly five hundred years after Gutenberg.

Was it worse than social media? Almost certainly, yes — and that’s Cowen’s point

The body count is not close. The Thirty Years’ War killed somewhere between 4.5 and 8 million people and depopulated parts of Germany by a fifth to a third. The French Wars of Religion killed millions more. No serious estimate puts social media’s direct harms in that range.

Cowen presses the case harder than the religious wars, and this is the strongest thing he says in the exchange:

“Say book markets and the printing press, they weaponized Marx and Lenin for many decades. That’s an algorithm in the very broad sense that led to terrible consequences, much worse than whatever you might think current social media have done, and yet we believe in free speech for the printing press.”

That is a serious argument. The 20th century’s totalitarian catastrophes were print-borne. If your standard for restricting a communication technology is “it has been used to cause mass death,” print fails the test far worse than TikTok.

Acemoglu’s answer is not “print was fine.” He grants all of it — “I don’t know what my reaction to that would have been” if he’d lived through the religious wars. His answer is that algorithms are categorically different, and the difference is targeting:

“Once algorithms can see, ‘Tyler has a weakness for this specific thing, I can fan the flames,’ I think that’s a completely new world.”

A book is broadcast: it says the same thing to everyone, and you have to go get it. An algorithmic feed is personalized and adversarial: it selects, for you specifically, the content most likely to capture you. His proposed remedy follows exactly from that distinction — not banning speech, but requiring chronological, non-algorithmic feeds. “That’s like the Myspace kind of model.”

Whether that distinction holds is the crux. Two ways to attack it: propaganda has always been targeted at susceptible populations (print runs aimed at particular regions, languages, classes), so the difference may be one of degree; and conversely, personalization at individual scale with real-time feedback may be a genuine phase change that has no print analogue.

Faster or slower this time? — arguments both ways

Faster:

• We have institutions now — regulators, courts, a body of media law — that took centuries to invent the first time. The adjustment does not start from zero.
• Adoption itself was near-instant, so the reaction cycle compresses too.
• We can see what is happening. Nobody in 1520 had a research literature on the effects of pamphlets.

Slower, or never:

• The technology keeps changing. The printing press was largely static for centuries; recommender systems are re-engineered continuously, and each change resets the adaptation.
• The adaptation is adversarial. Print did not optimize against your resistance; a feed does.
• The print settlement required the state to give up control (1695). The current analogue would require a handful of firms to give up optimization, and nothing forces them to.

My honest read: the printing press analogy is better at establishing that adjustments are long and violent than at predicting this one. It mostly refutes the complacent reading of itself — “we adjusted to books, we’ll adjust to this” is true only if you are prepared to accept a 150-year timeline with wars in the middle.

The finding worth taking away

Reading the timeline as a whole, the adjustment to print was not primarily people developing better habits. It was, in order:

1. Censorship (Index 1559, licensing regimes) — crude, state-run, largely failed
2. Political settlement (Westphalia 1648) — the wars ended by treaty, not by adaptation
3. Property and liability law (Statute of Anne 1710, libel doctrine) — who owns and who is answerable
4. Professional norms (much later — editors, mastheads, the idea of journalism)
5. Constitutional protection (1791) — last, and only once the rest existed

Acemoglu is proposing step 3 and Cowen is defending step 5. They are arguing about different points on a sequence that historically took two centuries to traverse — and the historical order runs against Cowen’s implicit assumption that free speech came first and worked.

From the book

The analogy is Cowen’s, not Acemoglu’s. The press appears once in twelve hours of What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, and not as a technology-adjustment story at all — it is Chapter 2’s example of a community refusing a technology, the Ottoman Empire that gave Europe inoculation while it “steadfastly opposed the dissemination of other valuable knowledge and the adoption of useful technologies such as the printing press.” There is no adjustment period, no counting of years, and no comparison to social media anywhere in the book.

The Reformation is in there, and it is on the other side of the ledger. Chapter 8, Social Engineering, treats the century after Luther as a case of institutions tightening rather than of a society adapting:

“In the centuries after the Reformation, following Martin Luther’s influential 95 Theses that launched Protestantism, the Catholic Church doubled down on indoctrination and thought policing. Beginning with the Council of Trent, 1545 to 1563, the Church tried to stop the spread of Protestantism by more closely policing religious practice and thought. Recent scholarship suggests that these efforts did more than slow down the advance of the dangerous ideas of Protestantism, they stopped scientific inquiry and even the sharing of scientific findings.”

That is a striking convergence with the finding this page arrives at independently — that the adjustment was institution-building rather than habituation — with the sign reversed. The page treats the censorship regimes as part of the settlement. Chapter 8 treats them as the disaster: the Index and the Inquisition are its examples of social engineering doing lasting epistemic damage. Both readings are available from the same events, and which one you take decides what “we adjusted” is supposed to prove.

On social media, the book does not use an adjustment frame at all. Chapter 9’s diagnosis is structural and current: an “algorithmic cage of norms” produced by a business model — “Social media companies have an incentive to build an algorithmic cage” because “digital ads exploit strong emotions and proclivities toward intense norm enforcement and thought policing.” His counterfactual is not that we will get used to it but that it could have been built otherwise: “if social media platforms did not algorithmically boost the most sensationalist and emotion-triggering content and were organized more like neutral repositories, accurate information could be obtained.” And the prescription is immediate rather than generational — “in the age of algorithms, the regulation of social media and AI should be at the top of the list.”

So the honest placement of this page is that it answers Adam’s question and Cowen’s frame, not a thesis of the book. Acemoglu’s on-air concession that the press had a violent adjustment period which is now over is a concession made in conversation; his book never argues it, and the mechanism it does supply for social media — designed incentives, correctable now — is one on which waiting for an adjustment is the wrong response.