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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 men

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.

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.