Many historical threads have come together to create the data-powered world we live in today. In this very first episode of Keyboard and Quill, journey through 45,000 years of history with Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi as they begin to pull on those threads. They’ll explore how our modes of communication have evolved over time–from cave paintings to cuneiform to the printing press–and how technology has driven the relentless acceleration of our pace of life. New episodes every Tuesday from March 12-June 4.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype Link: claritype.com
-- Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
Many historical threads have come together to create the data-powered world we live in today. In this very first episode of Keyboard and Quill, journey through 45,000 years of history with Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi as they begin to pull on those threads. They’ll explore how our modes of communication have evolved over time–from cave paintings to cuneiform to the printing press–and how technology has driven the relentless acceleration of our pace of life. New episodes every Tuesday from March 12-June 4.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype Link: claritype.com
-- Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
- Okay, alright.- Hi.- And then, you're-- One more time.(light music)- You're listening to-- Keyboard and Quill.- From StarTree, creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit.- And Podcast.(light music)- Hi, I'm Tim Berglund. I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- If you're a new listener, Keyboard and Quill is a narrative podcast exploring data and technology through time.- We're going to look back through history as some key moments. We're gonna speak to some academics, authors, and technologists.- We both work in technology. We've done a lot of reading, compiled a lot of sources, interviewed some experts. We're approaching this with the humility of not being specialists in the area of history, but really trying to take a look at the forces and events and ideas that have shaped the work we do. In this episode, we're gonna explore the quickening pace of life from pre-history to the present and how it's led to the connected world we live in today.(bright music) Oh, and I almost forgot, throughout this entire podcast series, you may notice some original music, score, sound effects. That's Jeff. He'll be jamming alongside us the whole time, finding fun ways to enhance your listening experience. You know, Rachel, I have a conflicted relationship with notifications on my phone.- Really?- Yeah.- So tell me about this conflicted relationship.- It's probably not all that unusual, but, you know, my attention is very easily grabbed by whatever. And as I think about notifications, a kind that just really always blows me away is credit card fraud notifications. I realize that's oddly specific.- It is oddly specific, but I get it.- Just, all of a sudden, you have this globally networked computer in your pocket that wiggles and you look at it and it turns out somebody used your credit card 10 seconds ago to try to buy caterpillar food in Paris or something, you know, and you're not gonna be able to use your card anymore. It's just interesting to me that that's a thing that is a part of our lives. We're instantly connected to global news and so much of our commercial and social lives are mediated through our phones, text, images, all instantly, about anything in the world. It's truly amazing.- Yeah.- And, now, you and I are old enough to remember-- We're technologists of a certain age.- We are technologists of a certain age, as they say, and you used to have to wait for a letter or make a long distance phone call, but that was expensive. You had to like not do too much of that.- Or even when you were, I remember having to dial up my first internet connection to my university and it was a long distance phone call. And so my dad would tell me,“You can only spend 10 minutes online!” Weirdly enough, I echo that to this day. Even though it doesn't cost me any money-- Even though the-- “Still spend 10 minutes online!”- Marginal cost of the next minute is zero. It's... Yeah, right. And we have a pace of life my grandchildren are growing up with with talking to grandpa on a FaceTime call, whatever, you know, it's getting faster, and that's not an unqualified good, but I kind of like it.- Yeah. It definitely isn't all upside. I really feel like the speed of modern life, it's a trade off, right? We have data at our fingertips, but is it information overload? Are our lives that much better because it's faster?- Yeah. It's not clear. I think just about everything is a trade off. I wanna explore the story with you of how life has gotten faster over the course of the history of humanity. How has it gotten us to the point that immediate results seem like a good idea? You and I are basically in the analytics business, which is all about collecting data and trying to find a story in it, and doing it now, and that's valuable. But how would you get to a point as a civilization that you'd want that? I think it's a good thing. There will be shadow sides to all the things we talk about, but it's an interesting story, and I kind of wanna go through it.- I think it might be fun to pull on the thread, because you are definitely more techno optimist about some of these things than I am. Our conversation earlier you were like,"Well, but life really sucked before the industrial revolution." And it's all about the difference of perspective.- Right, I'm generally bullish on growing markets, improving productivity, improving standards of living. Do they always happen evenly across the human race? No. Those are real issues. Has the industrial revolution caused pollution and is climate change a thing to think about? Obviously all of these are shadow sides and trade-offs. We have to acknowledge the reality. Now, the way we're thinking about this story, it's huge. And we're gonna have to discipline ourselves a little bit. And I think we wanna try to limit our exploration broadly speaking to the way people communicate. But I wanna rewind to what life was like, I don't know... 50,000 years ago?- Oh, are we gonna get in our time machine and check this out?- Yes, let's do it.- Tudululu, tudululu.(machine beeping)(light primordial music)- The oldest undisputed visual artifacts left by human beings are something like 45,000 years old. These happen all over the world. There's some in France, there's some in Indonesia, in Asia. They're kind of all over the place. And it was just pictures, right? It was hand prints, it was people hunting, cattle-like things.- Things with, like, big pointy horns and stuff.- Yeah. Right. Who doesn't like a hunting story? It's very understandable-- And delicious.- And... Yes! I mention this because there's this history of cave paintings, and I'm sure if you're a scholar who does this and write papers and you go to places and you have pictures of 'em, you can tell the difference, but they kind of look the same for tens of thousands of years.- Yeah, we really didn't like figure out this whole three dimensional thing for quite a while.- Takes a pretty full belly to be able to figure out perspective. It just, life wasn't changing that much. You had humans as hunter-gatherers and that's what they did. And you had periods of tens of thousands of years of just, you know, there's migration and life and drama and people living nuanced lives and having relationships and being humans and everything. But that doesn't seem to change very much.- But they were busy. They were busy just trying to human, like doing the basic human thing pretty much took up most of their time.- Exactly. And the fact that anybody could take time to do a cave painting like that person was hustling. That's remarkable, 'cause it took all of everybody's productivity to stay fed.- Right, and there wasn't a Michael's down the street that you could go get your cave painting paints from or your brushes.- You had to figure out how to make that stuff. You had to have spare time. There wasn't a lot of spare time. So it was a life that went slowly and you were occupied in feeding yourself and things just didn't go very fast.- But what's funny is that we have this like romance about what life was like back then. You know, people are always trying to break away from modern technology and go live a simpler life. But I'm not exactly sure that it was that much better.- Uh, no, I mean there's the famous quote from Hobbes that life was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He was referring to life without a government. But that generally is like, think about it-- But it also could be life without Netflix.- (laughs) Without medicine, without any-- Yeah, okay. Antibiotics, painkillers-- All kinds of bad things. That was a tough time. And after we take a short break, we'll find out about greener pastures.(upbeat music)(upbeat music continues)- I’m Rachel Pedreschi.- And I'm Tim Berglund.- And this is Keyboard and Quill.- We're gonna keep going with our show on the quickening pace of life with the advent of agriculture.- So what was the thing that allowed us to go from these, what was it, short, brutish lives of no painkillers or Netflix? What changed?- Well, what changed was figuring out how to cultivate grass that you could eat. People figured, okay, here's this grass. It grows this stuff on the top. I can eat that. And then let's set aside a bunch of land and plant it, cultivate food and stop wandering around following the herds and stay here and grow the food. So agriculture, and that's about 12,000 years ago. Roughly 10,000 BC people start cultivating edible grasses and as a result you get cities.(triumphant music) I think this has to do with this pace of life thing we're talking about. Again, this is not a people who had Netflix, they did not have smartphones, they did not have credit cards. So all of these things that we associate with our lives moving quickly, they didn't have, but they're settling down.- And I think with settling down, allowed people a bit more leisure time or there allowed people to specialize. They also had to make houses and goods more permanent. So there was a need to improve the materials that were being used to see their crops through the next year.- Exactly. I mean, you could choose to make those investments in a different way. Instead of emphasizing like portability, you maybe wanna emphasize something that's gonna last for a long time. A hunter-gatherer life, like everybody is kind of at the margins, just barely staying fed. The idea of farming, now all of a sudden you had one person who could grow enough to eat, feed his family and sell stuff to somebody else who wants to get good at making pottery or building buildings or leather goods or whatever.- And probably paying taxes.- And probably paying taxes.- And probably paying taxes,'cause all of a sudden now I've got a big pile of grain, warlord in the area can say,"Hey, if you gimme some of that grain, I'll make sure none of the other warlords attack you." And you know, you've got something like a city government. And it's not like urban life 10,000 BC is the norm, okay? You still have a substantially a hunter-gatherer planet.- And when we talk about urban, we're talking about maybe 100 families.- Or maybe 1,000 for a big city. Like, I don't know the counts, you got earliest cities like Jericho who comes up in that list and places in Iraq that I think were a few tens of thousands of people.- Oh wow.- Yeah. They got to size where you could have people specializing in things. And when you're specializing, you're doing that to trade. And it all works out If we do the thing that we're best at and we swap the things that we want. But what do you do then you're trading, and if you're trading in an organized way, you're gonna have to start keeping records.- Especially if you're gonna pay taxes. You really need to keep records of that, don't you?- Exactly. And when you've got people who have time to do things other than just grow food full time, they can start to mess around with what you and I would call Science.(light music)(fire crackling) And about 5,000 years after, people are making cities and growing food and things and settling down, somebody figured out, "If I heat this one funny looking rock up, I get this cool metal stuff out of it that I can work."- 5,000 years is a long time to figure out that you throw stuff in fire and something happens.- A lot of funny rocks to heat up. Who had that idea? I don't know. I would have that idea. Definitely. I mean, I have thrown things in fire since I was a little boy. It seems like a very natural thing. And it took a while to discover this one is copper ore, and I have copper, I can make an axe out of that, which wasn't a very good axe. So 1,000 years later, 4,000-ish BC somebody's like,"Oh, here's tin. We mix 'em together, we have this much better metal called bronze." And then you have the Bronze Age. And with it many big budget Golden Age Hollywood epics. I mean, where would we be?- Exactly.- At least in a certain part of the world at this point some people are living in cities and life there this faster pace. And you've got some technological advancements that are starting to accumulate. Around 3,500 BC, we have the emergence of writing. Kind of a precursor to information technology that we work with. But yeah, you've got cuneiform happening in sort of the area of modern day Iraq.- You know, I never knew that's how that was pronounced. I've seen that word. But what is cuneiform?- Cuneiform, the first known form of writing. And the nice thing about it is it was done in clay, so it's super durable. We've got artifacts. But you'd cut a reed, it would have like a little triangular shape and you'd just press little patterns of that triangular shape into a piece of clay, throw it into a kiln and fire it. And there you've got your data.- It sounds like the Christmas tree ornaments that my children made for me in preschool.- Absolutely, yes. That is the descendants of cuneiform. About 3,300 BC, you've got hieroglyphics. Everybody likes to think of hieroglyphics as an early form of writing, and it's the one that a lot of people think of as the first writing. Cuneiform beat it to the punch by just a little bit. But it shows up, and things are starting to move along now.- Hieroglyphics stayed around for a long time. It seemed like a pretty useful evolution.- Yeah, absolutely. We should all be happy to have such a lengthy life for a technology we invent. But this gets us to about 1800 BC where you have the first alphabets occurring in the Middle East. The alphabet folks were like, "You know what, we're just gonna go symbols for sounds and go from there. The thing is, this is not the only game in town globally. Around 1200 BC, right in the same kind of area, you have the first known preserved certain Chinese writing, totally different writing system where you've got a symbol for an idea instead of a symbol for a sound. But writing is happening there and you've got their giant literary tradition and all of that happening just a few thousand miles away. We're looking at these things happening and wondering, you know, you live in Rome in 300 BC, do you think life seems fast paced? You probably do. It probably feels like a big bustling city.- Compared to the people that live a hundred miles away that you know about or even a thousand miles away that you've heard about.
- And we would say the same:
life in the country is slower than life in the city. So part of this story is, and we're just looking at the creation of cities here really and cities getting started. But urbanization as a trend over time makes life go faster. After a short break, we'll explore woodblock printing. But first let's pay the bills.- At the tone, please record your message.- Hi, this is Xavi from San Francisco, California. Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit, an annual conference that brings together professionals in the data space to discuss harnessing actionable insights from real-time data. Join us to learn, teach, connect, and have an amazing time with the best community in the user-facing real-time analytics world.- Register now at rtasummit.com. I'm Tim Berglund.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- This is Keyboard and Quill.- We're going to keep going with our show on the quickening pace of life with an exploration of woodblock printing. From what you've described, if we're using clay tablets or we're carving into stone, this is a pretty expensive task to undertake. A written document needs skilled labor, a population that is literate and can read it, but more importantly the raw materials. How to use carbon to stone or into marble, and what type of tools do you need. All of a sudden this throwing rocks into fires have become pretty useful, hasn't it?- It sure has. It sure has. And there's definitely like papers in the world, China's got super cheap paper, but still it's expensive. It's a specialty, and not very many people can do it. So you could say the unit cost of text production is very high and we're gonna keep tracing this development. And that's kind of a thing I wanna keep our eye on, that unit cost of producing text, that's gonna come down and there are some important things that are gonna make that happen.- So what do you think was one of the drivers of bringing that unit cost down? What was one of the first things that had happened in a civilization on the planet that said,"You know what, we can make this cheaper and better.- Well, we talked to a scholar who had something to say about that.- Oh, very cool.- Hi, my name is Tom Mullaney and I am professor of history at Stanford University. For any listeners who don't know, this movable type printing was not invented by Gutenberg. The first implementation was in China. The second implementation was in Korea. And then effectively a third implementation was with Gutenberg. What he figured out was the particular recipe of the ink, which had to be very different than the kind of ink that was being used. He had to figure out the right mechanism of the press and the amount of pressure, he had to figure out a casting system that allowed for copies, exact good copies. He had to figure out the proper recipe for the metal alloy that would be used so that it would cool. And so, it's incredible. But it wasn't the first. China and Korea came across this innovation. They took one look at it and said, "No, we have a different mode of textual production that is far more effective. And this is xylography. This is woodblock printing.- Well, that's interesting. So why was that? Why did the Koreans and the Chinese feel that woodblock printing, or xylography, another good word for me, was more effective?- Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world,'cause if you have 26 letters, then you're gonna make the master type that goes in your type drawer that you're gonna move around in your tray. You can make 26 of those. That's not that hard. If you have 70,000 ideograms,'cause you're writing in Chinese-- Right, I didn't think about that.- That's a big drawer.- That's a lot.- It's just not a good idea. And so as Tom said, they had played with it, but they decided, this would just be a lot easier. I have a knife and a piece of wood. I'm gonna make my book page here. And so it's like this completely freeform thing that you can just draw on however you want and then throw ink on it and stamp it on paper, and away you go.- We were talking about how the incremental cost of written communication was going down. So Gutenberg and his engineering feats had made it less expensive for the written word to be disseminated amongst Europeans at the time.- Right, right. I don't think Gutenberg was aware of what was going on in China, but the Chinese had made some, they had a printing method. It worked great. Books were cheap. But over in Europe, you still got this really expensive hand copying and the unit cost of text is insanely high. And Gutenberg now takes that and says,"Well, here's a machine that can make that happen faster." And so the unit cost of text goes down by a lot.- And he could probably support many different languages. Right? All you needed a different type set and you could put letters in different orders or you could create different letters for different type of alphabets. Not just the Latin alphabet, but also the Cyrillic alphabets as well.- Yes, yes. And another neat thing happens, which is if the cost of a word goes down, it's maybe 1,000 times cheaper to put a word on the page. If copying Bibles and copying the Greek classics and a Greek grammar and a Latin grammar, you know, those are kind of the books people are making copying by hand, if that gets 1,000 times cheaper, you don't make 1,000 times as many of them. Other kinds of books, pamphlets, essays, that it would've been too expensive to make copies of them, now it's not.- Well and right now, so we have the ability to have fairly cheap prints out there. And so the population, in this case in Europe, is able to get access to different ideas, you know, I think of like the Protestant Reformation, and we're able to disseminate it. But the thing that's keeping us back is that it's hard to get these things out to people. We're still reliant on traditional modes of transportation. Like the wheelbarrow.- Exactly. Piling a bunch of folded up broad sheets in a wheelbarrow. Yeah, exactly. This is still printed on paper. Paper is heavy. So it's great that it's so much cheaper to make text, but we're still don't have Twitter yet. There's a lot of things in between here and there, but we're at a point now where Europe is officially awash in text. As awash as we are now? Well, no. Again, we're gonna need industrialization, electrification, we're gonna need computers. But it's a big giant change and a disruptive one.(machine whirring)- I think our time machine has been put through its paces.- You're right. We started with cave paintings and now we are in the mid-1600s with Europe starting to stabilize after all the disruption of the printing press. I think we've made the case that these things are making life go faster. The pace of change is getting faster. And there are some things we're gonna talk about next time with the industrial revolution, with electricity, with how the way these things impact transmission of information that are gonna make life even faster.- So you're saying we're not gonna cover 45,000 years in the next episode.- I think if we're lucky, we'll do about 300.- I think that's a good goal.- Let's do it. Many thanks to Dr. Thomas Mullaney from Stanford, Dr. Devin Fitzgerald from Yale, Dr. Jovanna Pineda from the University of Central Florida, AI ethicist, Olivia Gambelin and Dr. Laine Nooney from NYU. You could find links to their work in the show notes. Also, thank you to Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude. It's available on Spotify and Apple Music.- Our show is produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher and Tim Berglund. It was written by Tim Berglund.- And Rachel Pedreschi. It was edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia. And our amazing original music and sound design were created by Jeff Kite of The Voidz.- Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit. Register now at rtasummit.com.- You can subscribe to Keyboard and Quill for free wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Please leave us a comment and a rating if you have a minute. And if you're a data professional, you should check out the Real-Time Analytics Podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday. Link in the show notes. I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- See you next time.