Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…A new censorship regime responds. The censorship regime is very effective at shaping what is printed in books, but can never keep up with pamphlets. In the same way that the government can pressure CNN, the government can’t pressure random people on a social media network. You’re not going to be able to keep up with that speed. One of the funny problems that the Inquisition always had when trying to persecute printers is that printers worked in the information distribution industry. They were the people who paid the news writers, whose job it is to move as fast as humanly possible between cities. Which meant that news always reached them first. If a printer was ever convicted by the Inquisition, they would find out before the Inquisition could possibly get there to arrest them. The Inquisition never succeeded at arresting printers. They’d always skipped town by the time the Inquisition got there, because if you employ the news writers, you find out first what’s going on. The Inquisition can’t keep up. When we look at censorship, there’s an intersection of four factors as to whether censorship is possible. One of them is law: Is it legal for the censorship to happen? Another one is the technology. Is it actually possible to censor this thing? You cannot censor whatever moves the information fastest because it will move the information faster than you can move. Even if that one printer had to skip town, he will set up shop somewhere else, a new person will take over his shop, and the information will still move. So pamphlets become unpoliceable. You can try to police them, you can partially police them, but keeping pamphlets from moving around… They’re anonymous, they’re quick, they’re produced overnight, they move quickly. You just can’t keep up with them. Couldn’t they just punish print shops for publishing things? Just say, “This is what we like, and if you do something we don’t like, we’ll punish you,” which is how censorship in China works, for example. They did. So the printer skips town. The printer moves to the next town. There is a cost to that. There’s a human cost to evading that. You’ve had to leave your home and friends behind and move to a new place, but they don’t get you. It’s also very easy to deny that the pamphlet came from you at all. The print industry proves very difficult to censor, and we’re experiencing the same thing with social media. Everyone is like, “Censor the pornography on this social media channel,” and they’re like, “We just can’t. It’s too fast. There’s too much.” Or, “Censor the hate speech.” “We just can’t. It’s too fast, there’s too much.” There are too many pamphlets, and they could crack down on one particular pamphlet shop. We have records of this. There’s a brilliant analysis in Anton Matytsin’s book, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. He has a great description from the notes of a raid on a clandestine bookshop. This wasn’t the printer, this was the underground bookshop that was selling illegal books, and they’re raided. It has all the details of how angry the people were about different things that the shop had. So there was censorship and there were crackdowns, but it was a censorship that could not actually prevent circulation. It could restrict it, it could make it harder, it could make it scary, but it couldn’t prevent it.…

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