Even though the technologies are new, the horror and despair of the current informational carnage are not unprecedented. Since the beginning of the Internet, the unintended consequences of its arrival have been routinely compared to the fallout from the invention of the printing press. The comparison has always been problematic. A more precise historical analogy—though itself as incomplete as any historical analogy—can be found in the pamphlet culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England.