Silicon Insider: Going Medieval
Dec. 30, 2004 -- -- Are you ready to go medieval? Don't look now, but you already have.
I recently stumbled across -- in Peter Ackroyd's book "London" -- a description of daily working life in that bustling city during the late Medieval Age. Central to this world was the guild.
We tend to think of guilds as being old-fashioned trade unions, bringing trainees up through the ranks from apprentice to journeyman to master in exchange for a monopoly on their products. But, in fact, guilds were much more than that.
According to Ackroyd, medieval guilds were almost sovereign societies unto themselves: many were even allowed to levy their own taxes. They established quality standards, enforced proper behavior, served local churches, drafted their own members to serve in the military and established neighborhood cultural centers at their guild halls. To enter a guild was not merely to join a union but to embark on a new, rich and largely self-contained way of life.
A few years ago, the very notion of medieval craft guilds seemed hopelessly archaic, an organization of work so deeply buried by centuries of dust that little remains beyond its name and a ragged outline of its shape.
Yet no human invention ever really dies -- a single lifetime may see many ghosts emerge from history books to take on new life. For example, 15 years ago I was in Memphis interviewing historian Shelby Foote for a public television special connected with Ken Burns' "The Civil War" miniseries, in which Foote had played a crucial part. What I remember most from that interview was Foote describing the messianic nature of that era, how every conversation seemed scored with "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and men on both sides marched off to slaughter convinced they were doing God's will.
Modern Americans, Foote assured me, would feel much more at home with the Enlightenment men of the Revolution, who enjoyed a dirty joke, a shapely ankle and a glass of claret with their talk of the Rights of Man. The men and women of the Civil War, with their monochromatic beliefs, dour speech and their Gothic apocalypticism would seem utterly alien to us.
That was then. These days I'm not so sure. In fact, lately I've been struck by just how medieval our world has become. The perpetual fear of plagues, invaders from the East, and the End Days. The re-emergence of the term "Crusader" as an epithet. Millions, even billions, of people believing in miracle cures, metaphysics, junk science and alchemy. The veneration of celebrity saints, along with mass pilgrimages to their sites and the worship of their sacred relics. Mass trading and bartering at crossroad marketplaces. The early exposure of children to sex and violence. Evangelical religious movements that sweep the countryside. Highly structured and artificial games and sports. The rise of weird heresies and barbarisms. Decadent rich who isolate themselves behind walls from the rough populace -- and buy off their enemies with gold. Academics obsessed with trivialities instead of essentials. An easy familiarity with the most horrifying images of pain and torture. The lack of any real belief in the idea of Progress.
I could go on and on. This is the 21st century: We were supposed to be jetting off to Jupiter like George Jetson, not fighting house-to-house in Fallujah against the crazed confederates of a Suleiman wannabe. What happened? Beats the hell out of me -- and most other people too, I guess, because everyone I know seems a little dazed these days. Maybe it is that we postmodern men and women were all raised to believe that history was linear, when in fact it is just as often devastatingly circular.
Whatever the reason, the brave new world is looking a lot like the scary really old one. And perhaps we'll have to fight our way out, generation by generation, country by country, innovation by innovation, just like we did the last time. Remember a decade ago, when we were all about to be rich, that the world was becoming predictable, that we were at the end of history, and that no great challenges lay before us? Well, lucky us, we got our wish: now we're back in the business of trying to save civilization from those who want to erase us from that history.
Not that "going medieval" is all bad. As historians try to tell us, the standard textbook story that conflates the Dark Ages with the Middle Ages, and then offers the Renaissance as a kind of magical transformation of cultural lead into gold, is largely wrong. The Middle Ages were a time of extraordinary energy and innovation, of deeply held passions and incredible examples of heroism, selflessness and leadership. Medieval art and literature, once you get past modern prejudices about perspective and naturalism, are as beautiful and profound as any in the history of mankind. As are the scientific works of men like Roger Bacon, who had to fight their own battles against blind rulers and corrupt and ambitious scientists. And, frankly, a Breughel picnic looks like a lot more fun than a Manhattan cocktail party.
All of this is to say that rather than dismissing the Middle Ages as hopelessly remote from the Digital Age, we might instead look to it for clues and new perspectives on how to deal with the challenges of our own time. And that brings us back to the notion of guilds. Once you understand the template, it's hard not to see proto-guilds almost everywhere you look in high tech, and especially so in cyberspace. We are likely to see many more emerge in the years to come -- not just in the increasingly fragmented and decentralized West, but perhaps most of all in isolated pockets in the underdeveloped world.
Consider: Wikipedia contributors, eBay power sellers, Amazon reviewers, Linux missionaries, Counterstrike team players, Sims download designers, Free Republic posters, cell phone ring-tone creators, even Segway owners. Different from each other as they are, each has many of the characteristics of guilds, including common rules of professional behavior, a high degree of specialization, and, to one degree or another, a distinct culture and argot. Some, like the Wikis and the Linux folks, have actually begun to meet in the physical world as well, taking their relationships to the next step. In the online gaming world, many players and teams have taken on the status of superstars, their code names known to thousands of other players. EBay shrewdly honored its top sellers with ranks (colored stars) in the early days, allowed them to create unique personas (i.e., Princess Glitz), and now gives them unique rewards -- and they return the favor by making eBay one of the most self-regulated sites on the Web.
Perhaps the most compelling example of guild-like behavior are the blogs. Look at a typical blog page. Down one side is typically a list of favorite blogs -- i.e., a list of other bloggers who share similar viewpoints, and who are thus the other leaders of the proto-guild. Same with the various links and commentaries that make up the heart of the blog -- these too tell you who is part of the guild and who belongs to the Other Side. The guild's rank and file are its hundreds or thousands of readers, the most active being the ones who regularly post replies. These posters play a crucial role in regulating the blogs, challenging their assumptions, checking facts. They also allow for the postings of outsiders, even members of competing guilds, whose comments are typically shouted down (zot!).
If you've watched the evolution of blogs over the last couple years, you've noticed some interesting changes whose meaning becomes clearer when seen with a medieval eye. There is the rise of unique terms and language (pajamahadin); the growing numbers of personal visits between well-known bloggers (with accompanying pictures posted on each site), and clusterings of groups of well-known bloggers under a common title (the Northern Alliance) for greater influence and recognition.
What comes next? Among the healthiest of these groups movement is likely toward even stronger interconnections, formalized rules and personal relationships -- that is, the extension of the guild into more and more of its members' daily lives. Some of this is already well along: the college kids who stagger into the student center in their pajamas after four days of continuous gaming, the Wiki parties, the blogger dinner/group postings, the eBay conventions, the annual fund-raisers as a form of dues collection.
Will these groups take the next step and become formal guilds like those Ackroyd describes in medieval London? Probably not. The IRS would certainly have something to say about these groups levying their own taxes. Still, the evolution has just begun -- and it wouldn't be surprising to see at least some of these groups grow ever more self-supporting, and self-contained.
And why not? After all, add penicillin and e-mail, and the Middle Ages would have been a whole lot of fun ...