I saw a continuous-web press in operation for the first time last night; by chance, I walked by the door of a newspaper at 2:30 in the morning and saw the morning edition being printed, cut, folded, and baled. And I was reminded about the twentieth-century saying, “I never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel,” originated by Charles Brownson, a Congressman from Indiana. I pondered this as I watched the awesome spectacle of one of the most powerful weapons of the twentieth century in full operation: a mass duplicator of information, the weapon that centralized control over public opinion in dictatorships and democracies alike.
It occurred to me to estimate the bit rate of this duplicator. A crude estimate of its speed would be about 2 meters per second, printing on a web that’s roughly a meter wide. A similar newspaper we have here in the house has twelve columns across a two-page spread, perhaps 50mm from one column to the next, 3.8 mm per line. Here are ten representative lines of text from one such column:
nomía nos trajeron hasta esta
decadencia; las correcciones son
dolorosas y sufridas, y encima
Cambiemos suele prescindir del
vijo axioma de Raúl Alfonsín:
“Hacer política es hacer docen-
cia.” El 70% de la población sabía
que marchábamos hacia Vene-
zuela y que la luz no podía costar
lo mismo que un café americano,
This is 317 characters of text, including newlines, in a 50mm × 38mm area, about 170,000 characters per square meter. If we figure that each character of text is 3 bits, which is about right for zipped text, this is 510,000 bits per square meter. This means that two square meters per second is roughly 1.02 megabits per second.
(We should perhaps correct somewhat for the fact that some of the paper consists of colors, even full-color photos.)
So, in the mid-twentieth-century world, a one-megabit-per-second web printing press could give you near-dominion over a small town, or a substantial position in the affairs of a large city or a nation; it would make a US Congressman fear you. Even today such an asset grants substantial influence, both because of its signaling value and because it allows its owner to reach the rapidly-diminishing population of people who still don’t have computers.
But the US just elected Donald Trump as President in spite of every newspaper in the country endorsing Hillary Clinton. It seems that the apparatus of manufacturing consent is no longer effective. And I think that we can explain this largely in terms of these bit rates. A web site in Macedonia can easily sustain a megabit per second, and any cellphone on the planet can read it.
To put this in a concrete current economic context, DigitalOcean currently offers a virtual private server (VPS) with 512MB of memory, a one-core processor, a 20GB SSD disk, and a terabyte of data transferred for US$5 per month or US$0.007 per hour (US$5.11 per month). A terabyte per month is three megabits per second — average, not peak. So DigitalOcean’s smallest server is probably substantially higher bandwidth than the continuous-web press I saw.
Moreover, publishing something on a web site only requires you to send it to the people who want to read it, while publishing it in the newspaper requires you to make one copy per copy of the newspaper. So those megabits go a lot farther.
Of course, newspapers also offered anyone the opportunity to publish advertisements costed per page, although the cost was higher. The ability to have your message printed on the high-speed press wasn’t what gave you power; it was your ownership, which allowed you to choose which message to print.
Today, a Raspberry Pi 3 costs AR$930 here in Argentina, which is US$58. It has a 100-megabit-per-second Ethernet port, which is probably a bit faster than you can get information out of it in practice; Jeremy Morgan found nginx was the fastest option, managing about 3900 transmissions of a 95,881-byte HTML file in two minutes, which is about 25 megabits per second. (The Monkey httpd was a bit worse, and lighttpd and Apache were several times worse in his high-concurrency test.)
So the capital cost of a machine to emit 25 megabits per second is about US$60, a bit over US$2 per high-speed continuous-web press equivalent, or maybe US$0.10 if you try to figure in how much of the newspaper each person reads. If you were duplicating data onto SD cards or something instead, you would probably get higher bandwidth.
By making the press itself abundant, we have not eliminated inequalities in power; we have merely shifted the bottleneck and corresponding power to elsewhere in the social system. The natural expectation might be that it would move to the organizations that control the physical infrastructure needed to distribute the copied information, and that could indeed happen — witness the failure of USA internet companies to penetrate into China due to its lack of net neutrality favoring domestic firms — but it seems that what more commonly happens is that power shifts to the institutions that have accumulated the data and interpersonal relationships to make the most addictive uses of these network links.