20 Dec Kanekoa the Great – Interesting Parallel: The Advent of the Printing Press v. The Internet
Posted at 15:20h
in A C W T Statements
Seeing historical patterns in today’s chaos is actually hopeful…maybe we can get through this…and it brings to mind the Scripture: “there is no new thing under the sun”.
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KanekoaTheGreat
@KanekoaTheGreat
The internet is the most revolutionary information technology since the advent of the printing press.
The printing press triggered a widespread proliferation of books and literacy, fueling the Renaissance, Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
In response to this intellectual upheaval, European Monarchies and the Catholic Church enacted laws to govern the printing press, compiling catalogs of prohibited pamphlets and books.
Copernicus famously leveraged the astronomical knowledge of newly published books to put forward his groundbreaking heliocentric model of the universe.
The Church, threatened by this scientific renaissance, condemned figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Pascal, branding them as heretics and banning their works for centuries.
The contemporary custodians of information, the bureaucrats of the censorship-industrial complex, parallel the actions of their predecessors.
Their mission to control the internet narrative, censoring “misinformation, disinformation, malformation, and hate speech,” mirrors the historical censorship by European Monarchies and the Catholic Church.
Throughout history, those in power have consistently sought to control emerging information technologies to maintain their power.
This always entails suppressing ideas that challenge the existing power structures, ostensibly in the name of protecting the common good.
The likes of Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Milton, John Locke, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Blaise Pascal faced censorship.
Paradoxically, the most censored individuals emerged as the pivotal thinkers of their time, architects of the Enlightenment Era, the Scientific Revolution, and the American Revolution.
What escapes the comprehension of today’s censors is the certainty that, akin to their predecessors, they will stifle the voices of the most critical thinkers of our time.
The powerful will always silence voices that threaten their authority, inevitably hindering the progress of humanity—a timeless pattern of censorship against free speech.
