The Friction Paradox: The Historical Pattern Behind Every Technology Panic

This post isn't directly about communication in the workplace. But in the moment we're living through, it reflects something that's been strongly on my mind, and something I think is worth taking the time to reflect on.

We live in a short present, where every new technology that arrives feels like an emergency, as if nothing like it has happened before. Today it's AI: a seriously powerful tool, and the panic we feel about it isn't new. It's centuries old. And what's also not new is that, however threatening it feels, new technology tends to bring real upsides along with the disruption, just as it did in earlier historical periods.

Here's what seems to hold true: every major shift in media technology lowers the cost of producing and sharing information. There is a paradox there, though. The same drop in friction that let a heretic, a hoaxer or a hatemonger publish more cheaply is the drop in friction that ended monopolies on who got to speak at all. The printing press broke the church's grip on the written word. The penny press broke the grip of the political elite who had owned the newspaper trade. Radio put a voice in every home, not just the halls of the wealthy. Generative AI is doing the same thing again, at a speed none of its predecessors could manage, and it is bringing the same two edges with it.

The historical pattern

With the introduction of the printing press, movable type replaced hand-copied manuscripts, and monastic scribes worried, reasonably, about their livelihoods. Religious authorities warned that cheap print would flood society with unedited heresy and destroy scholarly discipline. Hand-copying had acted as a natural filter. Once print removed that filter, it democratised reading, but it also lowered the cost of publishing hate. In 1543 Martin Luther published his antisemitic tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, and print carried it across German-speaking lands far faster than any pamphleteer before him could have managed.

Move forwards to the 1830s. The penny press replaced expensive political newsletters with cheap, steam-printed papers sold for a cent apiece. To make that model work, publishers needed volume, so they leaned on sensationalism and invented scandal to keep readers buying. Sound familiar? Fabricated stories about Jewish financial conspiracies and the Rothschild family spread because outrage sold copies. Decades later in France, cheap dailies like La Libre Parole used the same low-cost print economics to fuel the antisemitic hysteria of the Dreyfus Affair, wearing down public trust one issue at a time.

Then radio came. Critics in the 1920s worried it would ruin attention spans and turn readers into passive listeners. Musicians feared broadcasts would kill live performance work. Those fears were not baseless, but the sharper danger turned out to be something else. A voice in the home carried an intimacy print never had, and that intimacy became a weapon. In America, Father Charles Coughlin reached thirty million weekly listeners with broadcasts blaming Jewish bankers for the Great Depression. In Germany, the Nazi regime mass-produced the cheap Volksempfänger radio, deliberately limited in range so households could only receive state broadcasts, and Goebbels used that captive audience to lay the psychological groundwork for genocide.

The canary in the coal mine

Antisemitism is not just randomly part of this story. There is a reason it shows up first, and there is a reason the correlation holds across all four of the cases outlined above. It is noteworthy, but it is also worth trying to understand. One explanation, developed by historians and researchers who study conspiracy theory, is that antisemitism does something most prejudice doesn't. It personifies power that would otherwise stay abstract and invisible. Capital, finance, media control, and now algorithms are systems people can feel controlled by without being able to see or name what's actually controlling them. For centuries, antisemitic conspiracy theory has supplied a hidden hand to put behind that facelessness. That's why it doesn't depend on Jews occupying any particular social position at a given moment. It depends only on a new, murky system of power becoming suddenly hard to ignore. This is what a printing press, a mass newspaper trade, a broadcast network and now an algorithm each did in turn.

That association isn't arbitrary. For close to two thousand years, Western thought used "Judaism" as shorthand for materialism, hidden meaning, and the letter over the spirit, a habit of mind the historian David Nirenberg traces back to early Christian theology. Centuries later, when Christian law pushed Jewish communities into moneylending and trade, that theological script found a real-world target to attach to. So when a society needs to put a face on an abstract, invisible system of power, whether that's finance, mass media, or an algorithm, this is the script that is already sitting to hand.

In each of the cases above, that early spread lined up with the same gap. Print outran the church's control over publishing. The penny press outran readers' habits of scepticism. Radio outran any regulation built to manage it. It's a pattern worth noticing across four very different moments in history, not a law that has to hold every time.

Generative AI lowers the cost of producing text, audio, image and code close to zero, and it is already showing the same early signal. Automated tools can generate convincing deepfakes and synthetic articles in seconds. Bot networks can distribute them faster than any human moderation team can keep pace with. Large language models risk repeating the biases buried in the data they were trained on if the safeguards around them are not doing their job. None of this is unprecedented. It is the same pattern, moving faster.

Every information revolution has expanded what people can say and who gets to say it. That expansion has always come with a shadow side, and prejudice has consistently been the first thing to exploit the gap between fast technology and slow social norms. Generative AI hasn't changed that story. It has just sped it up. The question this time isn't whether the gap will open. It's how quickly we notice it, and what we do once we have.

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