It took 300 years for Europe to come upon a system to differentiate between “real” and “fiction”, as well as a system of penalizing those who confused the two. By the time of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, this problem had been solved among the intelligentsia, but it took the development and enforcement of copyright laws to make this system society-wide.
It’s really a fascinating subject, how Europe handled the flood of post-press information (and don’t forget the Americas were “discovered” in this period as well, so who knew what was true about THAT?), and it should give us some guideposts as to how to handle today’s world.
Also, lastly, the VAST MAJORITY of printed items from 1453-onward was not “books”, but pamphlets and “one sheets”. We count books because people kept them, not because they were the only thing being printed.
I have a vague notion of what such a system might look like.
“Computer, is the sky blue?”
"Query translated to “given the set of possible wavelengths of light, is the dominant color of the sky in the wavelengths of 450-484 nanometers. There are 1,049,232 credible observations of sky color in my database. In 99.2% of them, the spectrum of the sky fell into the range humans describe as “blue””. However, other possible answers for this query are <list of other ways to translate the english phrase into a falsifiable query>
“Computer, how do you know those observations were credible”
“Computer, what is bayesian statistics”
And so on down the list, where the AI has produced an actual proof of how it answered the question, down to the individual data-points.
I hope we won’t need 300 years to develop such systems.
Of course, the next problem will be that, assuming we can build an automated oracle of “truth” - for questions that have a falsifiable answer - how do we convince or shut up the voices that will claim it’s all a conspiracy…or even worse, they build a “corrupt oracle”, an AI that is programmed to subtly lie in favor of a particular political position or corporation or nation, but all the proofs it give will appear to be correct.
Heh, it was around a looooong time before that… it just wasn’t mass-produced as easily (which doesn’t equal “wasn’t mass-produced”).
The use of “the sky is blue” as something obvious always bothers me. The sky is blue… when it is. Right now, the sky as seen from my location is white. Other times, it’s grey, or black, or black with shiny dots, or multicolored…
But you have to admit; the press made it more affordable for the commoners among us.
The article, if you read it, gave it (the printing press and porn combination) a little more credit than it deserves IMHO (to the point of basically developing the fictional narrative or some such) but like the early days of the internet ---- figure a way to make dirty pictures available and the world will beat – something – to your door.
A lot of people don’t realize there were actually two revolutions in printing technology. The first was in the fifteenth century with the development of the printing press. The second was in the nineteenth century with the development of the rotary printing press (which coincided with the development of steam powered engines). Classical printing presses made it possible to print thousands of copies of a book. Steam powered rotary presses made it possible to print millions of copies of a book.
I think we’ve come full circle in the printing press evolution. Billions of printed books (and digital books, too) with fewer and fewer people reading anymore.
And no use jumping in with, “I STILL READ!”. Yes fine, you still read; here’s your medal. But ask around and see how many people have read a book in the past year.
Eh, the print just moved from paper to light. The volume of information mankind took in using books is now taken in using articles, discussions, research, videos, audio recordings, and, yes, books.
We’ll be OK. As long as we can make it through this transition - the one thing which didn’t exist in the societies destroyed by the Press and the high-speed rotary press was nuclear weapons. Think Europe could’ve made it through 130 years of the Wars of Religion without lighting a single nuke? It may have… but I sure wouldn’t like to be living in Rome, Paris, or even London in such a world.
I think the key thing to understand is that the educated professionals of the time believed a lot of stuff that was totally meatballs. There wasn’t anybody in the 15th through 17th century who didn’t.
Take Isaac Newton. You can credibly argue that he was the most intelligent person who ever lived. He also firmly believed in alchemy and spent vast amounts of time trying to turn other stuff into gold. And he spent years looking for secret coded messages in obscure Bible passages. He never questioned the basic idea that demons existed, as far as we know.
The Royal Society was the first true scientific institution, in that everyone making a presentation to the Royal Society was required to describe an experiment that others could replicate and then give the results of that experiment. Yet as shown in this fascinating book, a lot of the stuff presented to the Royal Society was batty. Many members basically believed in magic and claimed that their results could be replicated.
So the early centuries of the printing press did unleash books on all kinds of stuff such as careful intellectual studies of demons, as well as violently divisive tracts, but there wasn’t any educated elite capable of seeing through all of it.
The UK was kick-starting the industrial revolution and instituting intellectual property protection with strong copyright laws. Publishers could and did get rich by charging a lot for books. Yes, you could gain the latest scientific or engineering knowledge - IF you could afford it.
Germany didn’t exist as a nation then, but was a mostly poor agricultural patchwork of principalities, bishoprics, duchies, etc with no common laws or copyright protection. Publishers could still print pricey books. But they could also copy (steal) material from anywhere and reprint it for cheap distribution. Useful knowledge was widespread.
The result, a century later: Germany was an industrial and scientific powerhouse that nearly defeated the UK. I attribute that ascendancy to intellectual theft.
Wait, what? This is such an ahistoric argument that I feel I have to respond:
British copyright laws were enacted in 1710.
The Industrial Revolution kicked off about 1760 (Huh. There’s that ~3 generation gap again.)
For the next 305 years (from 1710), Britain goes from strength to strength
And, for that matter, so does Germany
When the two meet in war, Britain is 2-0. Don’t know what this has to do with the topic, but felt it should be mentioned.
I have done zero research on the matter because it just occurred to me, but I’m wondering if 1 & 2 might be linked. The protections were weak according to modern day - 14 years, IIRC - and much of the machinery would’ve been covered under the already-extant patent law system, but the timing is a bit coincidental.
Anyway, I digress. Germany didn’t arise because it had a less restrictive copyright system, Germany got its shit together because Prussia and other principalities were smart enough to realize the future belonged to bigger countries.
And in regards to “intellectual theft”, it was rampant, it went all ways, and the country of Benz, Cantor, Hilbert, Hegel, Kant, and more likely would’ve been better served had Germany a system for protecting its intellectual output.
