From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century we began to be concerned primarily with access to printed material. The right to read, and the r

From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century we began to be concerned primarily with access to printed material. The right to read, and the right to publish were the central subject of our struggle for freedom of thought for most of the last half millennium. The basic concern was for the right to read in private and to think and speak and act on the basis of a free and uncensored will. The primary antagonist for freedom of thought in the beginning of our struggle was the Universal Catholic Church. An institution directed at the control of thought in the European world, based around weekly surveillance of the conduct and thoughts of every human being. Based around the censorship of all reading material and in the end based upon the ability to predict and to punish unorthodox thought. The tools available for thought control in early modern Europe were poor. Even by 20th’s century standards but they worked. And for hundreds of years, the struggle primarily centered around that increasingly important first mass manufactured article in Western culture: "the book" Whether you could print them, posses them, trafficking them read them, teach from them without the permission or control of an entity empowered to punish thought. By the end of the 17th century censorship of written material in Europe had begun to break down first in the Netherlands then in the UK then afterwards in waves throughout the European world. And the book became an article of subversive commerce and began eating away at the control of thought. By the end of the 19th century, that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance of Christianity itself and European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind it spoke of "liberté égalité fraternité" but actually it meant freedom to think differently. The "Ancien Régime" begun to struggle against thinking and we moved into the next phase of the struggle for freedom of thought which presumed the possibility of unorthodox thinking and revolutionary acting. And for 200 years we struggled with the consequences of those changes. That was then and this is now. [...] Everything we want everything we hope everything we’d like everything we wish we new about is in the search box and they own it. We are reported everywhere all the time In the 20th century you had to build Lubianca you had to torture people you had to threaten people you had to press people to inform on their friends I don’t need to talk about that in Berlin https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...