Been thinking that the people who freaked out about the printing press, saying it would destroy society, were absolutely right. The proliferation of information irrevocably destroyed society as they knew it within a few hundred years. https://twitter.com/atroyn/status/1316436211725107203

Here on the other side of that revolution, I strongly prefer this society to an illiterate one. But the transition must have been terrifying and tumultuous. A period in which the old world is dying, but a new one has not yet arisen to take its place...

"We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire."

"Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not." - Adrien Baillet, talking about Fake News in 1685

Adrien's approach to addressing the crisis he perceived was to publish a fact checking site - I mean, a nine-volume "collection of judgements." He wanted to establish a source of truth, because the masses were confused by the proliferation of information, both true and false.

And it's true, they were. Cults, heresies, and uprisings flourished like never before. Out of this profusion, new states and faiths arose. Law, religion, everything changed - though not without a lot of bloodshed.

It's one of those times again. Now that we're living through it, how can we make it safely through to the other side? This door that's been opened, will trying to shut it cause more suffering or less? Can we trust that, given more freedom, people can make wise decisions?

I can't see down the road, but the fact that the few centuries after Adrien feared a return to the dark ages were filled with unprecedented advances in science, art, and prosperity is a cause for hope that things will sort themselves out.

My working hypothesis is that new media which introduces new ways of social sense-making causes an initial period of conflict, confusion, and chaos, but this can be followed by a burst of progress if new structures arise that make use of these expanded capabilities.

Nothing is guaranteed. Civilization is fragile. The only certainty is the pivotal weight of the present. Do times of change always feel like this? From an 1855 poem:
"Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born."
- Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse