The Blockchain is Like a Pair of Underwear...

I want to talk about a publishing innovation that changed the world.

You probably know how much I enjoy talking about the movable-type printing press that Johannes Gutenberg used to kickstart the Age of Enlightenment, religious reformations, and the development of modern science.

Gutenberg’s press was a marvel, to be sure. Forked from a technique pioneered in China, its operators could replace an entire scriptorium, a roomful of scribes who spent their days copying books by hand. By doing so, Gutenberg removed the content and gatekeeping limits that had reserved publishing power to only the people or institutions that could afford the upkeep of entire roomfuls of dedicated quill-monkeys.

But for Gutenberg’s press to work at all, it needed an adequate supply of paper, and that required underwear.

As movable-type printing spread across Europe, as more and more books were being printed, the demand grew for more and more paper. The process of making paper from wood pulp was still centuries away, so most paper available at the time was made from hemp and linen rags, often from undergarments that were no longer fit for wear.

So the scandalous truth is that the Gutenberg Bibles, the most valuable books in human history, are printed on upscaled rags. And if the template for our modern world came off of Gutenberg’s press, then all of our greatest scientific advancements, the development of democratic systems, and the development of religious schools of thought share a common origin in used medieval-era underwear.

Some medieval peasant chucked a stained pair of knickers into a rag-collector’s cart, lowered the price of rag-paper by a marginal amount, and made book publishing an economically viable proposition. That forgotten hero had no way or knowing his or her underwear, processed and imprinted with Latin bible verses, would someday become a prized centerpiece of a national library’s collection. And but for that forgotten hero, we might all still be living in a never-ending Middle Ages.

In 2021, I minted twelve Blockchain Vulgates to commemorate the launch of PageDAO’s beta minter as a milestone in the ongoing advancement of publishing technology. In 2024, I released an NFT collection called Gutencasts to commemorate the imminent launch of PageDAO’s next-generation minter.

Celebrating Gutenberg’s press or the PageDAO minter is important, but such commemorations should also celebrate the medium on which current and future literary treasures are published. If the minter is the modern equivalent of Gutenberg’s press, then blockchains are the modern equivalent of a medieval peasant’s discarded underwear.

More generally, the history of publishing shows us that even the crappiest things can be refined into something great.