Phil Cockfield on Warpcast

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Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) was on @bankless a few months ago, talking about why truth is so hard to find these days. I tend to agree that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but Harari makes a few points I keep thinking about: (Paraphrasing from memory) - we think about the time after printing press as a time of enlightenment but scams and lies spread much faster and for a long time (did he say 200 years?) - truth is expensive, hard to get to, and can be messy, inconvenient and not entertaining. Truth can hurt - lies are cheap, are entertaining, make us feel good. So of course lies will spread faster and take over social media Eventually, maybe tens or hundreds of years, I believe AI and social media will be a huge benefit to society. But today, well, we live in messy time. https://www.bankless.com/will-ai-kill-democracy-yuval-noah-harari

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I think the "it took 200 years after the printer press before <xyz>" is such a good timeframe to keep in mind - it's so helpful, as in we all naturally want shit to have happened, or will happen, within a timeline we are personally/biologically on. But 200 years, completely refactored Europe (meaning, a total shit show)...and then slowly, "Scientific method"...but only after ALOT of porn and mis-information was spread via those high-tech paper pamplets. I think of it in terms of digital computing. We've only had these for like 80 years, and more like 40 years from a "personal" computing standpoint. And the impact digital computing can have over what the printing press bought to the table is order of magnitude. My favorite story from this historical frame of reference is that the idea of a "book" didn't even show up for like 30 years after the printing press. Aldous Manucius was like "hey, hey....I got an idea...a <portable book>....whadaya reckon?"

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