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Catholic Church headline in 1500s: "How a handful of Gutenberg press printers radicalized the world." Distributing a Gutenberg bible was punishable by death a
by narrator 8y ago
Catholic Church headline in 1500s: "How a handful of Gutenberg press printers radicalized the world."
Distributing a Gutenberg bible was punishable by death at one point. Plenty of war and persecution resulted from the conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
Availability of printed bibles in the vernacular played a major role in magnifying the conflict.
- happytoexplain 8y agoThat's a pretty dramatic metaphor. Can you describe why you think it applies?
- narrator 8y agoThe Ottoman Empire banned printing presses because they were blasphemous and politically destabilizing and they fell dramatically behind the west leading to their eventual total defeat. Free speech enabled by new technologies has good and bad parts, but it's more good than bad. The desire for political stability and maintaining the status quo over everything else is a really lousy way to run things and it's just better to accept that the benefits of free and open communication are better than the risks or a pervasive A.I enabled censorship state like they have in China.