The Cost of Expression

Published: 10 min read

TL;DR:

The most important thing technology does isn’t make things faster. It makes things cheaper. And when it makes something cheap enough, people who were never supposed to do it start doing it.

That’s the real story of every communication revolution. Not the technology itself — the people it unlocked.

I went to a bog standard secondary school in the north west of England. The kind where only 40% of pupils achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A to C, which was considered the pass threshold by age sixteen. It wasn’t rough exactly, but it wasn’t a place that produced writers.

For many of my friends, school was a burden. By fourteen or fifteen they couldn’t wait to leave and never think about maths or English again. They associated writing with formality. Authority. Evaluation. Failure. An essay wasn’t an opportunity to think — it was a test you could get wrong, graded by someone who already knew the right answer.

Post-school, most of them expected to write only when they had to. Government forms. Job applications. CVs. Writing was a tool for compliance, not expression. Something you did because someone with power over you required it.

I was part of the minority that went on to university, to study French, in 2005. It was around this time that Facebook was created.

A few years later, when I finally joined the platform, something surprised me.

The same people who had hated English — who had associated writing with red ink and judgment — were expressing themselves in ways I hadn’t expected. Status updates. Arguments. Jokes. Observations about their kids, their jobs, their lives. Some of it was raw and unpolished. Some of it was genuinely sharp. A few of them were funnier in writing than they’d ever been out loud.

None of them would have called themselves writers. They weren’t writing. They were just… talking. The platform had made the cost of expression so low that the question of whether you were “allowed” to write never came up.

That was the revelation. The problem had never been ability. It had been cost — social cost, psychological cost, the friction between having something to say and having a place to say it where you wouldn’t be judged by the standards of people who went to better schools than you.

This is the principle that sits underneath every genuine shift in communication technology: it doesn’t create expression. It removes the barriers that were suppressing it.

Expression is the natural state. Silence is what requires explanation. People want to say things, share things, work things out with each other. When they don’t, it’s almost always because the cost is too high — the risk of judgment, the effort of formality, the lack of a platform, the absence of anyone who might listen.

Lower the cost, and expression floods in. Every time.

This has happened before. The printing press is the obvious parallel, and it’s obvious because it’s right.

Before Gutenberg, writing was the domain of monks, scholars, and aristocrats. Not because only they had thoughts worth recording, but because the means of reproduction were so expensive that only institutional interests could justify the cost. A handwritten manuscript took months. Distribution meant physically carrying it. The entire system selected for orthodoxy — you don’t invest six months of a scribe’s labour in a hot take.

The printing press collapsed those costs by orders of magnitude. And within decades, people who had no business writing — by the standards of the old system — were writing. Pamphlets. Broadsides. Vernacular Bibles. Martin Luther didn’t have better theology than a hundred monks before him. He had cheaper distribution.

The establishment’s response was predictable. Moral panic. Censorship. Claims that letting ordinary people express themselves would lead to chaos. And some of it did lead to chaos. But it also led to the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the slow, uneven democratisation of knowledge that we now take as a baseline condition of civilised society.

The old system wasn’t irrational. When the cost of reproduction is high, you need gatekeepers. Someone has to decide what’s worth the investment of materials and labour. That function — curation through scarcity — produced real value. It’s why we have libraries full of texts that survived centuries of filtering.

The gatekeeping worked because the economics demanded it. You couldn’t give everyone a printing press, so you had to choose whose ideas got amplified. The system selected for quality, but also for conformity, for institutional alignment, for the kinds of ideas that powerful people found useful or at least non-threatening.

It was functional. It just wasn’t the only possible arrangement. And the moment the economics changed, so did everything else.

What changed is that each successive technology lowered the cost further — and each time, a new layer of people gained access to expression.

The printing press gave us pamphlets. The typewriter gave us personal correspondence at scale. The photocopier gave us zines. Email gave us instant written communication without postage or delay. Blogs gave us publishing without publishers. Social media gave us audiences without editors.

Each step removed a specific friction. Production cost. Distribution cost. Access cost. Permission cost. And each step was met with the same objection: this will lower the quality of discourse. Too many voices. Not enough filters. The barbarians at the gates of publishing.

The objection was always partially right and entirely beside the point. Quality did drop in aggregate. But access expanded in ways that surfaced voices, ideas, and perspectives that the old system would never have reached. The trade was always the same: less curation for more participation. And every time, participation won.

AI is the next step in this sequence, and it may be the most significant one since the printing press itself.

Here’s why. Every previous technology lowered one specific cost — production, distribution, access. AI lowers the cost of composition itself. The cognitive cost. The part where you have to take a half-formed thought and wrestle it into coherent language.

For someone who went to a good school, studied at university, spent years reading and writing — that cost is manageable. You’ve been trained. You have the muscle memory. The gap between thinking something and expressing it clearly is small enough that you can cross it without much friction.

For someone who left school at sixteen associating writing with failure, that gap is enormous. Not because the thoughts aren’t there — they are. But the tooling isn’t. The vocabulary, the structure, the confidence that what you’re putting down is “good enough” to share. That friction is invisible to people who never experienced it, and paralysing to people who did.

AI closes that gap. Not by thinking for you, but by meeting you where you are. You can speak your thoughts into a tool that helps you structure them. You can write rough and have it clarified. You can ask it to challenge your reasoning, or to explain why your intuition might be right. The half-formed idea that used to die in the gap between thought and expression can now survive the crossing.

This is where the printing press parallel becomes more than analogy. Gutenberg didn’t create new ideas. He made existing ideas movable. AI doesn’t create new thoughts. It makes existing thoughts expressible.

And just like in the 1450s, the gatekeepers are nervous. The objections sound familiar. It will flood the world with low-quality content. It will devalue real writing. It will let people say things they haven’t earned the right to say. The same fears, repackaged for a new technology, aimed at the same outcome: keeping expression expensive enough that only the right people can afford it.

Some of those fears are legitimate. AI-generated noise is real. But the signal it unlocks is also real — and it comes from people who were never going to write a blog post, never going to draft a business plan, never going to articulate the idea that’s been sitting in their head for years, because the cost of crossing that gap was just too high.

The part that interests me most isn’t the technology. It’s what happens to people when the friction disappears.

Something shifts when you can express yourself without asking permission. When you write something — even something small, even something imperfect — and put it somewhere others can see it, you learn something about yourself. You discover what you actually think, as opposed to what you assumed you thought. You find out which ideas survive contact with language and which ones dissolve the moment you try to pin them down.

And when other people respond — when someone you haven’t spoken to in years reads something you wrote and says “I think about this too” — something else happens. You discover that the thoughts you assumed were private or trivial or too half-formed to matter are actually shared. That the gap between you and other people was never as wide as it felt. That the silence wasn’t absence of thought — it was absence of channel.

My old school friends on Facebook weren’t becoming writers. They were becoming more visible to each other. And in that visibility, they were becoming more real to each other. More connected. More known.

That’s what reducing the cost of expression actually does. It doesn’t just produce more content. It produces more connection. More self-knowledge. More of the raw material that relationships, communities, and cultures are actually built from.

We’re standing at the beginning of the largest reduction in the cost of expression in human history. Not just cheaper printing, not just cheaper distribution — cheaper thinking-out-loud. The friction between having an idea and sharing it is approaching zero.

The question isn’t whether this will be messy. It will. It always has been. The question is what we lose if we let the mess scare us into keeping expression expensive.

I think about the kids at my old school. The ones who decided at fifteen that writing wasn’t for them. Whose thoughts and observations and hard-won understanding of the world stayed locked inside because nobody ever gave them a tool that met them where they were.

AI is that tool. Not for everyone, not perfectly, not without problems. But for the first time, the cost of saying what you think is low enough that the question isn’t “can I?” — it’s “will I?”

That’s not a technology story. That’s a human one.