announced in Erewhon .

     The effect of any kind of technology engenders a new 
equilibrium in us that brings quite new technologies to birth, as 
we have just seen in the interplay of number (the tactile and 
quantitative form), and the more abstract forms of written or 
visual culture. Print technology transformed the medieval zero 
into the Renaissance infinity, not only by convergence—
perspective and vanishing point—but by bringing into play for 
the first time in human history the factor of exact repeatability. 
Print gave to men the concept of indefinite repetition so 
necessary to the mathematical concept of infinity.

     The same Gutenberg fact of uniform, continuous, and 
indefinitely repeatable bits inspired also the related concept of 
the infinitesimal calculus, by which it became possible to