Galileo Galilei’s decision to publish in Italian is as important as his decision to risk confrontation with the Church, for what it says about the fundamental pillars of free science in the history of the West. Not merely, in other words, an insistence upon the freedom of ideas to work their will in skilled hands, but a determination that the ideas which motivate the world, which explain its behaviour, and which render it controllable, should be universally accessible to people regardless of their ability to acquire enough social surplus to have Latin.
We have come, at the end of the 20th, and the beginning of the 21st centuries, to an equivalently important moment in the history of human civilisation. A moment at which the principle of the universalisation of free knowledge becomes, for technical reasons, universally fulfillable. Where it becomes, for technical reasons, possible for the first time in the history of human beings, to bring all useful and beautiful knowledge to everybody without regard to the ability to pay. We are, to be sure, at a minimum a generation from the achievement of that goal, but we have never in the history of human beings been within one generation of the achievement of that goal before.
The principal social alteration which brings about this epochal change in the nature of human society is the digitisation of knowledge. The onset of a frictionless mechanism for storing and forwarding information, for switching it in any direction that it is desired to go, by either of the endpoints in any point-to-point transaction for knowledge. We have now learned, at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, how to use the common property in the electromagnetic spectrum, and common physical materials, cheaply integratable into mechanical and electro-mechanical devices, to spread knowledge infinitely wide and infinitely thin.
We can produce anything of value, utility, or beauty that can be represented by a bitstream, which increasingly means all beautiful and useful human activity, anywhere, at any time, to anyone, at no more cost than the fixed cost which created the first copy of the relevant bitstream. That fixed cost may be, under certain circumstances, very substantial. There is no question that it continues to cost money to acquire knowledge and to represent it in beautiful and useful ways.
But what has changed is that the marginal cost of the additional copy of each bitstream has gone to zero, and with that change fundamental economic reordering begins in global society. By the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, almost everything which it has been in the past the purpose of industrial civilisation to put into analogue representations of information - music, video, art, useful information concerning the operation of the physical environment, political ideas, comedy, drama - will all be universally represented in dephysicalised forms that it costs nothing to make, move, and deliver.
