“Our language is valuable, and we’ve gotta hold on to that. That’s the most human thing we have.” — Jeff Jarvis

Last week, to celebrate episode 3,000 of the show, the New York Times’ Sam Roberts articulated the art of the obituary. Borrowing from Citizen Kane, he described it as the Rosebud method. Obits are all about life (death only figuring as an afterthought), Roberts explained, so hunt for the moment which defines that life.

Today’s show is a kind of obituary of that type. Only it’s about the life of a machine and the mass media that emerged in its wake. In Hot Type, tech historian Jeff Jarvis introduces us to the magnificent late 19th century machine that not only gave birth to industrial mass media, but also bankrupted Mark Twain. It’s the history of the Linotype, the machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler that ended four hundred and fifty years of setting type, as Jarvis puts it, “one damn letter at a time.”

It’s an extraordinary story. Before the Linotype, American daily newspapers were limited to a 4,000 circulation. First installed at the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886, the Linotype scaled print, thereby enabling the age of mass circulation newspapers, magazines and books. It appeared so infinitely scalable that Mark Twain poured his entire family fortune into its doomed rival, the Paige Compositor. He lost all his money, of course, making it his Rosebud moment — Citizen Twain, so to speak. But for the rest of us, Mergenthaler’s magnificent type machine was so hot that it revolutionized 20th century culture in the same way that AI is now revolutionizing 21st century reading and writing. The art of obituary. A description of life, not death.

Five Takeaways

• One Damn Letter at a Time. For 450 years everything was set by hand — the average daily was “a small Substack newsletter.” Then a watchmaker who knew nothing about printing molded whole lines at once, and mass media was born.

• The Union That Didn’t Smash the Machine. The typesetters studied the Luddites and demanded to run the Linotype instead: 30,000 jobs lost, full strength in five years. The lesson: take charge if you can.

• The Machine That Drove Twain Mad. The Paige Compositor ate two fortunes and sits in a Hartford basement like “a railroad with nowhere to go.” It robbed Twain of his love of technology. Andrew’s biopic pitch: Citizen Twain.

• From One Gilded Age to Another. Steam, steel, and wire then; bits and AI now. Altman, Musk, and Amodei as the new moguls — chasing the Valhalla of AGI, “pure BS.” The hope: open-weight models.

• Words Matter, Damn It. Against Anthropic’s watermark: treating “overcast” and “gray” as interchangeable declares all language fungible. Against the gray goo: poetry. Language is the most human thing we have.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy Hot Type: waterstones.com

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: a Luddite summer needs a media historian
00:01:51 One damn letter at a time: the 450-year bottleneck
00:03:30 Inventors with German-sounding names
00:05:24 “So you were a scribe until then”
00:06:57 Does history calm the hysteria?
00:08:50 Why nobody fought the typesetting machine
00:11:13 Scale: what the Linotype actually did
00:13:42 Did readers notice? Fresh type and white space
00:16:20 Whitelaw Reid: the villain who was completely wrong
00:17:15 Frank Munsey invents the attention economy
00:17:55 Nietzsche’s typewriter, Hemingway’s style, Hesse’s pages
00:20:29 “Rather like how I use Claude”: Andrew’s confession
00:21:31 The AI footnote: confessing a borrowed phrase
00:23:29 The ITU’s two lessons: take charge, or find something else
00:27:37 Altman, Musk, Amodei: the new gilded class
00:30:12 Guardrails are a fool’s errand: you can’t ban Luther
00:31:23 Becoming Mark Twain (blame Hal Holbrook)
00:32:32 The Paige Compositor: the machine in the basement
00:35:17 Citizen Twain
00:36:22 The democratization of intelligence
00:39:04 Pope Leo’s encyclical: work brings dignity
00:39:32 Words matter, damn it: the case against the watermark
00:42:45 What does it mean to be human? Against the gray goo
00:43:38 “No one less gray or gooey”: thanks and goodbye