Bypassing gatekeepers has been a dream ever since there were gates. In the late 18th century, William Blake devised a technology to bypass the gatekeepers and make his visions directly available to a universal public. He believed this technology could be used by all poets and artists to achieve the same goal. The technology still required a high degree of skill and none but Blake ever mastered it.
Real-time social media platforms have made publication to a universal public simple. The skills required are minimal. The trap hidden in these platforms is that there’s a corporation that owns the pencil and paper with which you write. And more crucially, determines the visibility of your publication within the real-time stream. The gatekeeper has not been bypassed.
I wonder if William Blake ever imagined the result of universal access to a publication machine with distribution to a potentially universal public?
In his introduction to the volume “William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books”, David Bindman discusses the inherent potential of the printing process that Blake invented.
“William Blakes’s ‘Illuminated’ books, as we called them, were a challenge to the way books had been made since the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century, and continued to be made until recently. …once the plate was completed it could, in theory at least, like a woodcut be used for a limitless number of impressions. For this reason Blake was able to persuade himself that his method could empower and liberate all writers, enabling them to express themselves freely to a universal audience without leave from worldly authority. …His new method offered the hope that poets and artists would finally have the means to drown out the ubiquitous message of Satan, carried by religious and state ritual and the printing press.”
WILLIAM BLAKE’S PROSPECTUS TO THE PUBLIC
October 10, 1793.
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.