Printing from Adam afar to the digital age: how man lost the mind that wrote the world
There was a time when a mark engraved in matter was an act of magic.
A time when man—Adam afar, the first being capable of reflective thought—wrote in order to exist.
Every line on the rock, every symbol on the tablet, was a declaration: “I am here, and I know I am here.”
Writing did not originate as a technical tool, but as a cosmic event.
It is the moment when the mind realizes it can translate itself into matter.
And in that instant, man becomes different from every other creature: he not only lives, but leaves a trace.
The man who wrote the world
Adam afar — archetype rather than ancestor — represents the beginning of everything we now call civilization.
His mark already contains everything: language, consciousness, imagination.
When thought becomes visible, reality becomes shareable.
Writing is the first form of external memory, the first cognitive technology.
It is the moment when the mind learns to mirror itself.
Printing: the alchemy of thought
Many millennia later, another revolution: printing.
The magic of the sign multiplies, becomes democratic.
The word frees itself from the body, runs through unknown hands, unites peoples and ideas.
Journalism is born, public thought is born.
Writing is no longer just leaving a trace: it is building the future.
Every article, every book, every printed page is solidified time, memory that does not fear distance.
Then something turned upside down. For centuries, science generated technology; today, technology generates science.
The steam engine was born from a physical idea; the computer, on the other hand, invented the science that studies it: computer science.
It is an epochal reversal. From creators we have become derivatives.
We no longer think in order to build machines: we think in order to understand what they have already built.
The eternal present
In this race, time has lost its depth.
We live in an eternal present: a moment that is renewed and immediately vanishes.
Augustine feared it, Kant sensed it, Taggart described it: without memory and without expectation, man becomes a flat being in time.
Today we do not archive, we update. We do not reflect, we react.
We no longer write to remember, but to be seen.
From words to images
Influencers are the new scribes of a world without writing.
They don’t tell stories, they show them.
They don’t seek truth, but attention.
Journalists were the guardians of language; influencers are the guardians of themselves.
We have exchanged competence for presence,
depth for frequency,
the magic of the sign for the dictatorship of the feed.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s mathematics.
Writing took ten thousand years to spread.
Printing, four hundred.
The telephone, fifty.
Radio, thirty.
Television, ten.
The internet, two.
Social media… zero.
In this exponential curve, human thought has been left behind,
like a traveler watching the trail of their train disappear over the horizo
Man’s last defense
Yet something resists.
As long as a man writes, time does not die.
Every word that springs from the mind and finds its way onto paper—physical or digital—
is an act of rebellion against the moment.
Writing today means resisting oblivion,
defending slow thinking, memory, complexity.
It means returning to being Adam afar: the being who does not merely live, but engraves his mind on the world.
Epilogue
Perhaps the real revolution will not be technological, but symbolic.
When we return to giving weight to signs, when a written word can still stop us in our tracks, we will remember who we are.
And perhaps, then, the machine will return to its place —
under the mind that created it.
