Slate Magazine

“Prince-elector, I’m not aware of that.”

April 14, 2018

Duke of Saxony: Well, if so, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?

Gutenberg: Prince-elector, we print indulgences.

Highlights From the Gutenberg Hearings
An empire’s potentates size up the risks of new technology

By Andrew Kahn

[slate.com]

Archbishop of Cologne: Let’s say I’m communicating with my friends using a printing press and indicate that I love a certain kind of chocolate. And all of a sudden I start seeing, all along the edges of my Bible, little decorations about chocolate: Jesus eating chocolate, apostles wrestling a bar of chocolate, a big letter A covered in flowers made out of chocolate. What if I don’t want to receive those illuminations?

Gutenberg: We’re considering letting users pay a small fee not to see the chocolate.

Trier: But consider if someone in another country—like Saxony, for example—if a man—a large, 400-pound man in Saxony—he hacked your pringus to put out papers with, written on the documents, the pope’s worst mistake and then he asked the devil to convince everybody, using these fake propagandas, to convince them against the pope?

Gutenberg: Prince—

Trier: And then we get the gosh-darned Thirty Years’ War.

[Gutenberg blinks.]

Brilliant. Full article:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/if-the-zuckerberg-hearing-were-the-gutenberg-hearing.html