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Interesting. The analogy I reach for is the invention of the printing press. It saw an explosion of pamphlets in Germany, around the Reformation. Luther was one

by dash2 6y ago

Interesting. The analogy I reach for is the invention of the printing press. It saw an explosion of pamphlets in Germany, around the Reformation. Luther was one of the great authors. But by the 1520s the ideological opening had led to the Peasants War, and the disaster of Münster (think Waco on a larger scale). Luther himself became disillusioned, and turned more towards the power of the civil authorities and away from unrestricted Bible reading. Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it. Will the same be true this time?

phoe-krk 6y ago
The printing press still required costs to operate - and these costs were huge compared to the costs of required to post on the Internet nowadays. This post mentions that it is the posts done by usual people that do the most harm, usually due to their sheer amount first and foremost: this is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet the power of having a printing press of their own and multiple free places to hang their pamphlets for other people to see. The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
- dash2 6y ago
  That is absolutely true. But compared to what went before, the printing press was a huge advance too. Going from 0 to 1 can be a bigger deal for society than going from 1 to 100.
  - phoe-krk 6y ago
    It definitely was - I'm not negating the fact that the discovery and implementation of printing press was a giant net positive for human civilization as a whole. I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
- nicbou 6y ago
  It's pretty crazy that you can now serve hundreds of thousands of people on less than your grocery bill.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  > The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press. True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network. If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.
keiferski 6y ago
The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The universalist ethic is also the same; i.e. letting other parts of the world have differing ethical views on certain issues is unacceptable and must be eliminated. There cannot be more than one opinion on X social issue, just as there could not be more than one interpretation of Christianity. I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.
- dash2 6y ago
  To be fair, when the ideas include what’s on 8chan, you can see why they worry - like the article author.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I don't know, I think it just betrays a deep insecurity. Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat. Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      > Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Because it gets to the point where it becomes young adults planning mass shootings on the Internet.
      - keiferski 6y ago
nicbou 6y ago
The Ottoman Empire banned the use of the printing press for 270 years. "This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write." (excerpt from Why Nations Fail)
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire should not be ascribed solely to the lack of the printing press. It also had to do with the standard written language used in the Empire: written Ottoman Turkish was an artificial mixture of Turkish and Persian that was specially taught to a small elite. The average Turk would not have been able to make sense of Ottoman Turkish texts even if he did become literate (in the sense of knowing the letters and being able to read things aloud). This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
  - bgilroy26 6y ago
    Hello, Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so. I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.

by dash2 6y ago

phoe-krk 6y ago

The printing press still required costs to operate - and these costs were huge compared to the costs of required to post on the Internet nowadays. This post mentions that it is the posts done by usual people that do the most harm, usually due to their sheer amount first and foremost: this is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet the power of having a printing press of their own and multiple free places to hang their pamphlets for other people to see. The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.

dash2 6y ago
That is absolutely true. But compared to what went before, the printing press was a huge advance too. Going from 0 to 1 can be a bigger deal for society than going from 1 to 100.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  It definitely was - I'm not negating the fact that the discovery and implementation of printing press was a giant net positive for human civilization as a whole. I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
nicbou 6y ago
It's pretty crazy that you can now serve hundreds of thousands of people on less than your grocery bill.
cinquemb 6y ago
> The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press. True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network. If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.

keiferski 6y ago

The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The universalist ethic is also the same; i.e. letting other parts of the world have differing ethical views on certain issues is unacceptable and must be eliminated. There cannot be more than one opinion on X social issue, just as there could not be more than one interpretation of Christianity. I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.

dash2 6y ago
To be fair, when the ideas include what’s on 8chan, you can see why they worry - like the article author.
- keiferski 6y ago
  I don't know, I think it just betrays a deep insecurity. Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat. Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Because it gets to the point where it becomes young adults planning mass shootings on the Internet.
    - keiferski 6y ago

nicbou 6y ago

The Ottoman Empire banned the use of the printing press for 270 years. "This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write." (excerpt from Why Nations Fail)

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire should not be ascribed solely to the lack of the printing press. It also had to do with the standard written language used in the Empire: written Ottoman Turkish was an artificial mixture of Turkish and Persian that was specially taught to a small elite. The average Turk would not have been able to make sense of Ottoman Turkish texts even if he did become literate (in the sense of knowing the letters and being able to read things aloud). This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
- bgilroy26 6y ago
  Hello, Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so. I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.