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How is that even possible?

• nabla9 7y ago
  It's not anymore. In the the early last century Vienna it was.
  • asdff 7y ago
    I wonder how you would be perceived in that cafe in vienna if you looked neither austrian nor hungarian? The proportion of who even got their hands on literature in the first place was tiny. The majority of Vienna's brightest minds over the course of history likely died forgotten and illiterate, never having an opportunity to turn their intelligence into action and progress. The 1800s and first half of the 1900s were extremely toxic environments for sharing ideas, driven by massively inflated egos of a few people cornering their fields who wanted to hoard their theories and ideas for themselves, while also being at the ready to shoot down any dissenting opinion from someone in the same field who could have been a collaborator in saner times. Even Darwin suffered so much toxic abuse from his peers that he walked back a lot of his master work by his death. We harp that people use the internet to waste their time, but that is such a privileged and myopic stance to blame societies shortcomings on the rising internet. Misinformation and propaganda weren't invented by mark zuckerberg. We fixate on the bad and ignore the benefits to people in different situations than ours. So many more people around the world have access to knowledge that would have otherwise been impossible to ever receive, simply because they came out of the wrong womb on top of the wrong speck of dirt.