How did a comic tale of redundant porn workers get Tom Hodgkinson thinking about Murdoch, Meta and medieval scribes? Read on to find out…

The biggest cheer of the Idler Festival came for poet Murray Lachlan Young after he performed what he called his semi-erotic folk poem, “The Fluffer’s Demise”.

Sung in the style of Ewan MacColl, “The Fluffer’s Demise” is told from the point of view of a fluffer, that is, for those of you who don’t know, the member of staff on porn films whose job was the revive the male organ in preparation for a new scene.

In Murray’s telling, the fluffers all lost their jobs when Viagra came along. The fluffers complain that in the good old days they drank of the finest champagne. But now they are reduced to penury. (You can see Murray live in London on the 28th of this month).

It’s an old tale of course. When the printing press appeared, the trade of the medieval scribe, who produced those beautiful, witty, surreal manuscripts, came to an end.

Christian Brett, the Idler’s typesetter, is fond of the following quote which comes from a letter called “The Scribe’s Lament” written in 1473 by a monk to the Doge of Venice. The writer, Fra Filippo de Strata, complains that the printers are undercutting him and are producing filth:

I, a scribe of good reputation, have been driven out of house and home by cunning printers. They print with no shame, and at a very low price, matter that inflames men’s passions, while we scribes die of hunger. Cure this plague, if you will, by getting rid of printers. They persist in their wicked paths, setting Tibullus in type, while young girls read Ovid to learn about sin. These printers incite this behaviour because they make such huge profits from it. They flood the market with anything that hints of lasciviousness. Destroy the printing press I beg you, or these evil men will triumph.

In 1980s Fleet Street it was the turn of the printers to exchange champagne for water when the new technology arrived, and was gleefully embraced by barons like Murdoch because it reduced his costs and enabled him to smash the unions.

Then the appearance of Facebook and Google saw scribes lamenting everywhere. I was one of the lamenters: my income from freelance journalism and books took a steep dive and then almost vanished completely. The newspapers cut their rates savagely. Why? Because the advertising money was all flowing to the two new monopolies.

The Internet is often compared to the printing press, but the comparison doesn’t actually work. Thousands of printing presses sprang up around the world from the Renaissance onwards, and put the power of literary production into a wide range of hands. The Internet, by contrast, saw a wholesale theft of the world’s advertising revenues by two gigantic corporations. In 2022, Meta sold £116.6 billion of ads, and Google sold £279.8 billion. That’s money that used to be spread out over thousands of media outlets across the world.

Speaking personally for a moment, I was always snooty about jobs in ad sales and preferred to become a journalist. However my school chum Nick Clegg had no such compunctions and he is now drinking of the finest champagne while I scrabble around in the Coop looking for bargains on beer.

Not complaining, I’m very happy. Just saying.

PS Do check out our new online course, which is a brilliant guide to Milton’s Paradise Lost by author Anna Beer. See the trailer here. Forget Lee Child: put Milton on your holiday reading list!