“The narrator of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court sounds an awful lot like a twenty-first-century Silicon Valley technocrat. Enamored of the glories of industrial manufacturing — telephones and newspapers, revolvers and Gatling guns, trains and fireworks — the Yankee firmly believes these products can spread enlightened civilization to the benighted sixth-century British world in which he finds himself. Of course, things do not work out quite how he plans.

“The Yankee reserves his supreme adoration for the newspaper. When he prints and disseminates the first issue, he announces the newsboy’s arrival by claiming, ‘One greater than kings had arrived — the newsboy. But I was the only person in all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty birth, and what this imperial magician was come into the world to do.’ Despite their illiteracy, the people around him are suitably impressed by the product this imperial magician offers them. Hank explains to his eager listeners that a man and a boy produced one thousand identical copies of these paper sheets in just a day. Upon hearing of this inconceivable feat, ‘they crossed themselves, and whiffed out a protective prayer or two. “Ah-h —  a miracle, a wonder! Dark work of enchantment.”’ As the Yankee passes the paper around to the astonished throng, the recipients treat it accordingly: ‘They took it, handling it as cautiously and devoutly as if it had been some holy thing come from some supernatural region; and gently felt of its texture, caressed its pleasant smooth surface with lingering touch, and scanned the mysterious characters with fascinated eyes.’ The mechanically printed paper is a kind of cult object, a talisman, and it is surely significant that the narrator’s name — Hank Morgan — appears in full only once in Twain’s novel: when it is reproduced in a clipping from one of the Yankee’s sixth-century newspapers?

“While Hank does not think his printed newspaper is a literal miracle, he does expect it to have miraculous results. Hank operates on the assumption that if you have newspapers and factories and railroads, then equality, democracy, and material progress will inevitably follow. He would concur with Frank, Melville’s con man [in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade], that the printing press deserves the title of ‘Advancer of Knowledge: — the iron Paul! Paul, I say; for not only does the press advance knowledge, but righteousness.’ In the early euphoria of iPhones and Twitter, many political activists were similarly under the false impression that the Internet would almost magically bring about just, democratic societies. In the introduction, I pointed to Wael Ghonim’s about-face during the Arab Spring as an example of the disorienting effect of crossing Illich’s second watershed. Ghonim and many of his allies believed that social media would inevitably serve the cause of democracy, assuming that ‘if you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet.’ As he discovered, matters are considerably more messy. Zeynep Tufekci pours cold water on overwrought claims for the magical power of digital technology, concluding in her analysis of the Internet’s role in the Arab Spring that ‘technology influences and structures possible outcomes of human action, but it does so in complex ways and never as a single, omnipotent actor.’ Such claims may be more qualified in the 2020s than they were in the early years of the twenty-first century, but plenty of people — including those in positions of authority in Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. — still share Hank Morgan’s assumption that new information technologies can solve intractable human problems.”

— from Jeffrey Bilbro, Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope (Baylor University Press, 2024)

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