The printing press didn't just spread knowledge — it first spread chaos. Kehlmann's point is quietly devastating: the Thirty Years' War, one of Europe's bloodiest conflicts, was partly a media crisis. People suddenly had access to an overwhelming flood of competing narratives, with no way to distinguish a serious text from a political hit piece. Sound familiar?

What's striking is the structural inevitability of it. It's not that bad actors uniquely exploited the press — it's that every new medium has a phase where the infrastructure of trust hasn't caught up with the infrastructure of distribution. Gutenberg before fact-checkers. Facebook before content moderation. TikTok before anyone agreed on what "real" looks like.

Kehlmann is oddly optimistic: societies do eventually build those structures. The chaos has an end. But his caveat is the one that stings — back then, it took thirty years of war and a third of Germany's population. We got the internet in the 90s and we're still mid-carnage.

The uncomfortable implication: we may not be living through a crisis of bad actors or broken platforms. We may just be living through the standard transition period — the one that always happens, always hurts, and always eventually passes. The question is what gets lost in the meantime.