This is the 22nd of 23 presentations in a series introducing and outlining my hypertext book project, "Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation - A Fugue on the Theory of Knowledge". The project explores the interactions of technology and cognition in the extraordinary evolutionary history of the human species. When I started this series I had not yet finished writing the final parts of Episode 5 or fully understood the importance of mnemonic technologies in the emergence of agriculture and industry. In my original schedule, I also underestimated the extent of material to be covered to explain the evolutionary origins of today and tomorrow's post-industrial humans. Thus, to properly conclude Episode 5 I have decided to skip the Cadenza section entirely. The Cadenza was intended to explore how I applied many of the ideas about cognitive technologies presented in this series in my professional work as an engineering knowledge management systems analyst and designer for Tenix Defence that helped to ensure the successful completion of the $7 BN ANZAC Ship Project supplying 10 frigates to the Australian and New Zealand Navies. The project was unusual in that as part of the contract, besides constructing the ships, Tenix was required to provide a complete package of engineering technical data and knowledge regarding ship maintenance, logistics, and operations. What we did at Tenix is still state-of-the-art, but I do not need to tell the story here as the material I intended to present has already been covered quite thoroughly in the presentations referenced in Session 21. Tonight, in lieu of presenting my Cadenza, I will finish Episode 5 by considering how the printing revolution again fundamentally changed the structure of society from a largely autocratic system to freer and more egalitarian systems. Mass printing and near universal literacy removed many controls over access to technical knowledge, enabling the Reformation and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. It also provided the basis for the emergence of individual entrepreneurs and knowledge based corporations as autopoietic systems. Beginning with the spread of universal literacy with the Printing Revolution that also put the exponential growth and spread of knowledge into hyper drive, I then explore ideas relating to the inseparability of living knowledge and autopoiesis as discussed in the presentations for Sessions 13 and 14. The following papers provide the basis for these sessions and the discussion here: Vines, R., Hall, W.P. 2011. Exploring the foundations of organizational knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers No. 3: 1-39. Hall, W.P. 2011. Physical basis for the emergence of autopoiesis, cognition and knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers No.2: 1-39. Hall, W.P., Else, S., Martin, C., Philp, W. 2011. Time-based frameworks for valuing knowledge: maintaining strategic knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers No. 1: 1-28.

1. Session 22: Episode 5(7)
—
Printing: “freedom” and the emergence of
knowledge based autopoietic corporations
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Access my research papers from
Google Citations

2. Tonight
 Last time, I discussed the transition from maintaining cultural
knowledge with mnemonic technologies to keeping records in
writing and the emergence of administrative controls and the
recording of history.
 Tonight, in lieu of presenting my Cadenza, I will extend Episode 5
by considering how the printing revolution again fundamentally
changed the structure of society from a largely autocratic
system to freer and more egalitarian systems. Mass printing and
near universal literacy extended access & facilitated adding to
recorded knowledge, enabling the Reformation and the Scientific
and Industrial Revolutions. It also provided the basis for the
emergence of individual entrepreneurs and knowledge based
corporations as autopoietic systems.
Printing: “freedom” and the emergence of knowledge based autopoietic corporations
• Replication and universal literacy
• Increasingly rapid peer review cycles leads to explosion of ever more accurate knowledge
• Rapidly increasing individual power and power centers makes centralized control difficult
• Then there is the Web where anyone can access the world body of knowledge
• The “Global Brain”?

3. What was so special
about the new
technology of book
printing that it
revolutionized the
world in ~560 years?
First copies 1454-1455
Key reference (Still the masterwork on the topic):
• Eisenstein, E.L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change (Two volumes). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press - http://tinyurl.com/2aets7w.
• Eisenstein, E.L. (1983). The Printing Revolution in Early
Modern Europe. (Condensed version) Cambridge University
Press.

4. Focus on Europe and the West
 Gutenberg was not the first to invent mass printing with movable type –
China and Korea had done so at least 400 years before
– To make sufficient type for thousands of different ideographic characters
was very costly, ditto labor to select from thousands of different character
sorts to set the page – only the most commonly used texts would be printed
– Asian cultures were monolithic, stagnant, stratified and inwardly focused
– Cultures were comparatively conservative & only conventional texts printed
 In the Late Middle Ages, Europe was ready for a knowledge explosion
– Plethora of states, languages, & cultures
– Questioning religious authority
– Renaissance rediscovery of the Greco-Roman classics via Islam and Christian
scholars driven out of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks.
– Intellectual ferment developing from the rediscovery of the surviving
fragments of Greco-Roman knowledge (including some of Heron’s
technological works)
 Printing spread fanned these sparks into world-wide conflagration
– Protestant Reformation 1517
– Scientific Revolution
 Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium 1543
 Royal Society of London 1660; Transactions 1665
4

5. Technological innovations enabling Gutenberg’s printing
revolution were minor compared to the consequences
 Europeans were already familiar with paper making, graphical
printing from carved wood blocks using presses similar to wine
presses and the binding of sheets together to form a codex
(book)
 Gutenberg’s key innovations derived from his guild training as a
goldsmith and minter of coins
– Metal type
 Based on idea of seal stamps
 Letter matrices carved or punched in steel similar to making dies for coin
stamps
 Type metal based on lead–tin-antimony alloy that expands as it cooled
 Letter sorts/type cast in matrices
 Setting type into forms to make up pages
– Oil-based ink that would stick to type and not blur and bleed
through paper
– System integration to create an manufacturing process
 Some refs. Books and Bookmaking; Wikipedia; Uhlendorf 1938;
Barker 1978; see also Replicating Knowledge with Printing in
Application Holy Wars….5

6. Writing vs printing
 Writing’s highest technology
– Produced in single copies as
mnemonic aids
– Error prone  corruption of
content
– Exceedingly laborious
– Costly process makes
products extremely valuable
– High cost status objects
 never more than a few copies
 Limited access
– No two copies identical  each
copy was unique
– Content too easily lost due to
failure to replicate last copy
6
– Costs amortized over many copies
– Affordable access to texts
facilitates spread of literacy
– Many individuals accessing same
text facilitates:
 Checking against Nature
 Criticism and peer review!
 Revision, reworking of old knowledge
 Accumulation/publishing new knowledge
 Printing
– Mass production possible
 100s to 1,000s
 All copies essentially identical so all users
of an edition see/read the same thing
 Scalable industrial process
– Mass replication ensures against
loss of the last copy
 Gutenberg press printed ~ 180 bibles in
1450-1454/5
 48 copies or substantial copies still exist
in 2015

7. Writing vs printing
7
Click
pictures
for links
 
Click
pictures
for videos
 

8. Print associated technologies
 Book design to facilitate knowledge retrieval
– Mnemonic assistance (evocative decoration and illustrations)
– Focus & logical organization of content
– White space & finding aids (blocking, sequencing, front & back
matter) to help locate and comprehend relevant content
 Library design & technologies to facilitate knowledge retrieval
– Logical organization to assist retrieval
– Identifying and locating the books you want
 Cataloging
 Indexing
 Marketing & distribution
– Book lists
– Bookshops
– Subscriptions
 See Session 6 - Episode 1 - Early technologies for making living
memory explicit8

9. Before printing
 Literacy was primarily limited to clerics, clerks and scribes
– Mostly limited to holy orders and/or palaces
– Little to separate states and religions
 Education was a largely monopoly of the Church
 Knowledge largely controlled by the accepted canon
– Bible, writings of the church fathers, a few of the Greco-Roman
classics, herbals, bestiaries, and perhaps one or two survivors of the
ancient Greek science (survived mostly in Muslim countries)
– Writing deviant ideas risked burning of the author and his books
 Difficult to access prior knowledge to build on it
– Rare (or only!) scribal copies of key manuscripts tightly held in
monastic or royal repositories
– Could only be accessed at a walking pace (or by sail if near the sea)
– Contents be compared/assembled only by hand copying and
backpacking
9

10. With printing deflagration becomes conflagration
 Definitions:
– Deflagration: (engineering) subsonic propagation of combustion by convective
& conductive heat transfer; (metaphorical) a self-catalyzing phase change
propagating through a susceptible substrate
– Conflagration: extensive and all consuming combustion
– Detonation: supersonic propagation of combustion at near light speeds by
photonic energy transfer
 Printing enabled the rapid transcription, replication and distribution of
surviving manuscript documents to begin deflagratory process
– Spreading literacy increased market for more & lower cost books 
– Standardization of ancient texts (feasible to compare different versions )
 Euclid’s Elements printed in 1482
– Feasible for many eyes to compare textual claims against external reality
– Can accumulate and extend knowledge from several texts into new texts
– Where religion & dogma were concerned, people could now make their own
interpretations of source documents rather than depend on priestly dogma
 Over time, print enabled conflagrations changed virtually everything
 First conflagration - Fragmentation of the authoritarian Church
– Protestant Reformation
– Roman & Spanish Inquisitions10

11.  The Scientific Revolution began in mid
16th century
– It took ~100 years to collect, standardize
and disseminate classical knowledge to
ever-increasing numbers of readers
– With copies of different versions in hand,
readers saw that classics were often flawed,
incomplete, and contradicted by observation
– Nature the authority – rather than a book
– Emergence of the peer review cycle and the exponential growth in extent &
accuracy of knowledge led into the Enlightenment in the early 18th Century
based on the ~scientific study of human institutions and humanity in general
 Industrial Revolution with the Enlightenment from mid 18th Century
– Application of growing scientific knowledge to implement new and more
powerful technologies
– By understanding nature, humans began to dominate and control it
– Goals: liberty, progress, reason, tolerance, and ending abuses of the church
and state
– Consequences: increasing empiricism, scientific rigor, and reductionism, along
with increased questioning of orthodoxy
Second & third conflagrations:
Scientific and Industrial Revolutions
11

12. Forth conflagration – industrialized printing
 Gutenberg’s printing revolution capped off the Renaissance,
fuelled the Reformation and made the Scientific and Industrial
Revolutions possible.
 Industrial Revolution boosts printing in the 1800s
– applied steel & external motive power (replacing wood and human
power) to mechanize and industrialize printing to cause a second
printing revolution
 Increased capabilities to print books by one or more orders of magnitude
 Reduced the cost of printed products to the point that they became
consumables – i.e., read once for information (e.g., newspapers and
magazines) or entertainment (popular fiction) and then discarded
 Favored near universal literacy and access to cultural knowledge
– Applying exponentially growing knowledge to the precise industrial
control of matter at ever smaller scales led to
 Mechanical automation (i.e., to perform calculations)
 Electronic and micro-electronic (i.e., with solid-state devices) automation
 Automation of knowledge – see Session 10: Episode 3(2) —
Automating storage, management & retrieval of knowledge
12

13. Knowledge and news grew exponentially as steam power and rotary
motion turned craft printing with hand presses into mass production
13
Koening 1814
steam power,
rotary feed, plate on
reciprocating flat bed
Hoe 1843,
curved
stereotype
plate on drum
allowed cont.
sheet feed
Hoe Web Press 1871, 18,000 newspapers/hour Hoe Sextuple Press 1892, 24,000 large signatures/hour

14. The Printing Revolution
(arguably)
changed the nature of
humanity and human
institutions

15. Storing & retrieving knowledge externally to the mind
 Cultural knowledge
– Knowledge held in a large number of copies persistently available to
many people ensures against random loss of content
– Useful knowledge accumulated and consolidated in books
– Culturally useful books can be printed in their thousands to millions
of copies for widespread availability in libraries and at low cost
– Supports development of public education systems to help and show
people how to find and use available knowledge
 Personal knowledge – empowering the individual
– Knowledge no longer the resource of a select few
– Extend mnemonically indexed living memory with appropriate book(s)
and targeted reading
– As long as books are indexed, individuals only need to read in order
to have immediately applicable knowledge in mind as required
– Wide-spread availability of useful knowledge ensures people
 Can easily fill roles in higher level organizational structures
 have power & capacity to make informed decisions to maintain reasonably
representative and democratic societies
15

16. Knowledge-based organizations and economic
speciation
 Before printing
– Secret formulas, trades & guilds
– Technological capacity and economic reach limited by distribution of
background knowledge (e.g., tables of logarithms, physical
properties) and working and technical knowledge
 With printing
– New social systems based on ready availability of complex knowledge
 Educational
 Corporate
– Much higher base level of scientific and technical understanding
 Organizations specialize in more precise, powerful & innovative
technologies to build economic niches
 Technical writing & documentation facilitates distribution of detailed
working knowledge within organizations.
– Greater availability of scientific and technological knowledge
 More innovation
 Knowledge-based competition and technological evolution (ref: Nelson &
Winter 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change)
16

17. Mass access to knowledge, the free press, and
“democracy”
 17th & 18th Century hand press printing was still a craft process
– Books were readily available for the literate middle class and elites
who could afford them
– However there were enough readers and writers to foster scientific
and technological progress
 19th Century mass production distributed relatively inexpensive
books, magazines, & newspapers to a literate public
– Increasing literacy encouraged more sales of less expensive mass
produced reading matter, encouraging still more literacy
– Provided knowledge to a citizenry who were then equipped to
criticize and eventually to act against bad government
– Yes, the system could be perverted by press barons & state
censorship, but in many cases competition amongst publishers and
distributors still managed to distribute news from various sources
 Fair to say that the level of autocratic repression declined in
the 19th Century as a consequence of the growing access to
knowledge and information.17

18. Fifth conflagration:
Detonation enabled by
transmitting scientific
and technical knowledge
(knowhow) at near light
speeds

19. The electrification of communications moved knowledge and information
many orders of magnitude faster than physical transport
 Telegraphy (miniscule bandwidth) - asynchronous
– Press “wire” services told you of world events today
– Critical info exchanged in minutes & hours rather than days & weeks
 Telephony (small bandwidth) – synchronous info exchanges
 Radio & TV (moderate bandwidth)
– Broadcast (i.e., undirected) news live as it is happening
– No facility to target specific audiences
– Ephemeral – passive audience, great for entertainment, but not easy
for end users to store and index contents for later review and use
 The Internet (exponentially growing bandwidth)
– Two-way dialogs/push pull targeting/essentially unlimited bandwidth
– Everyone has essentially unlimited access to world body of cultural
knowledge (“global memory”) via the Web
 MOOCs
 Open document repositories and libraries
– Controlled filtering, triggering, and semantic retrieval
– Anyone can publish or consume
 Consequences to be discussed next time in the last session19

20. Many knowledge based
organizations are
autopoietic entities in
their own rights

21. Autopoietic human organizations
 Bounded
– People know what organizations they belong to. Members know who else also belongs.
Many organizations are physically bounded by “semi-permeable” walls and gates, etc.
 Complex
– Members are unique, and are identified as such within the organization; also machines,
property, bank accounts, etc. are identified with tags, catalogued as property, etc.
 Mechanistic
– Individuals receive rewards and benefits to belong, and are involved in processes,
routines, procedures etc. that the organization conducts to ensure its survival.
 Self-referential or self-differentiated
– Rules of association, voluntary allegiance to common goals, etc. as determined within the
organization itself determine what people and property, etc. belong to the organization.
 Self-producing
– Members are recruited, inducted, trained, monitored, and managed, etc. Other assets
are procured and variously into the overall functioning of the organization.
 Autonomous
– Most organizations outlive the association of particular individuals, and are able to
replace individual people as they retire or leave, and plant and equipment as it wears out.
Autopoietic vs swarm or flocking behavior: key is strength of heritable knowledge
(genetic/cultural/history) serving to control organizational identity/maintenance/
development above & beyond single individuals’ knowledge for individual purposes21

22. Competing knowledge-based autopoietic entities are
susceptible to natural selection
 Organizational knowledge: tacit (whether held in living memories
of its members or in organizational structure) and explicit
knowledge (e.g., technical & operational documentation) held
within the organization primarily concerned with organizational
operations, growth and reproduction
 Selection and learning on organizational knowledge
– To facilitate self-identification and boundedness
– To maintain its tacit and documented organizational knowledge to
ensure its survival an competitive advantages
– To benefit its members
 Selection and learning on individual members’ knowledge
– Increase member’s benefits from belonging to organization
– Cognitive and physical changes to enable members work better
within the group in order to gain net benefits from staying within
the group rather than maintaining independence
22

23. Organizations: basis in knowledge, and conditions for
emergence
 Organizational vs personal knowledge – see Vines & Hall 2011
 Organizational forms
– Dependent on boundedness of group heritage
– Small group organizations
 Primate, carnivore (e.g., wolves , meerkats), mole rats, & cetacean bands
– Many anthropoid primates genetically predisposed to live in territorial,
somewhat xenophobic groups (troops)
– Culture (resources/tools) transferred by observing & doing
– Evidence of boundedness determined by whether adjacent groups show
significant culture differences
 Hominin & elephant tribes dependent on environmental, technical &
historical knowledge
– Guided by knowledgeable “elders”
– Survival knowledge may be maintained and shared via formal mnemonics
 Guilds
– Maintenance of economic roles in social economy depends on protecting &
maintaining detailed craft and technical knowledge
– Probably used mnemonics to secretly maintain key process knowledge and
formulas long after writing was used for other knowledge
 Clubs, lodges, community action groups & other focused social groups
– Member lists
– Organizational rules and agreements23

24. More organizational forms
– Religious sects
– Companies, corporations & other economic organizations
– Higher order heterogeneous and complex organizations
 Industry associations
 Cities
 States & nations
– Other knowledge-based groups
24

25. The continuing detonation:
group minds and global brains?
 Interlinkage of cognitive technologies at the organizational level
– Vast databases and memories
– Artificially intelligent systems
– Mobile robotic sensors and actors
 Humano-technical cyborgs
– Symbiosis of human cognition & memory with the global brain
– Artificially extending physical capabilities
– “Telepathic” interactions among cyborgs via wireless technology
 Uploading individual identities and consciousness into solid-state
devices
– Immortality save accident
– Feasibility of interstellar travel when time no longer a factor
 Emergence of socio-technical organizations
– Who will be in control?
25

26. Next session – the last!
26
 Tonight finished Episode 5 by considering how the printing revolution
again fundamentally changed the structure of society.
– In my own lifetime I have lived through three major technological
revolutions, i.e., microelectronics, the Internet Revolution, and social
networking. These are driving cognitive and cultural revolutions at least as
profound as those of formal mnemonics, writing, and printing.
– Mass printing and near universal literacy removed many controls over access
to technical knowledge, enabling the Reformation and the Scientific and
Industrial Revolutions. It provided the basis for the emergence of individual
entrepreneurs and knowledge based corporations as autopoietic systems.
– Printing & literacy also set the stage for today’s situation of knowledge
detonations and hyper-exponential technological change
 The next and last session will attempt to project consequences of this
increasingly furious rate of change into the future to consider its likely
consequences over the next few decades and for humanity’s evolution.
– To open your mind for discussing this I strongly recommend that you read
two books:
 John Brunner’s 1975 “The Shockwave Rider”, and
 Charles Stross’s 2005 “Accelerando”. Stross has made this available on his
website for free download under Creative Commons License here