When Guttenberg made the press, access to it's output had a strong filter: most people couldn't read, and anyone who could read was highly educated for the times. Social media doesn't have a filter like that, and higher levels of education generally correlate to lower levels of belief in things like conspiracy theories.
Also keep in mind that the T+60 years conflict you're referencing, while greatly assisted by the printing press, was also greatly pushed along by the masses being told what to think by their preachers or by powerful elite looking to destabilize the status quo to their own benefit. The peasants of the peasant revolution weren't reading criticisms of the Catholic Church and coming to their own country conclusions, they were given emotional polemics by people like Storch sparking extreme levels of fanaticism.
So, yes, there is a lot in both situations about power struggles with the established order, but most people are being influenced more by emotionally charged arguments and tribal loyalties than they are by increased access to level-headed rational presentations of an issue.
That part seems very much apples-to-apples with what's happening now.
I'm not sure, but there's a different dynamic at play. Both "revolutions" had (and have) great potential to allow individuals to make more informed choices, but in the case of Guttenberg the educational bottleneck to get there was still narrow... These days for some reason the bottleneck is more if a self-imposed barrier.
Although education is still a factor: I try to read news sources from the full range of points of view, but they all may report on something like the latest bit of research-by-PR release differently. I have enough of an education to know I should seek out the research publication itself and I understand how to approach a formal writeup of research to provide me with at least a low pass filter against poor quality work. I have enough of an education to be skeptical of simple solutions to complex problems and instead thing about edge cases and failure modes or poor incentive structure.
I can absolutely still be wrong, but if I'm wrong I will still have failed after going through a more rigorous process in an attempt to figure things out. I'm still more likely to ultimately accept a result that runs counter to my initial-- perhaps emotionally charged-- response on an issue as a result.
And perhaps of equal importance at a time where tribal loyalty often demands complete condemnation if anyone outside the group, I understand enough to realize that people with another viewpoint aren't inherently bad/evil/anti-patriotic because reasonable people can disagree, less reasonable people are still complex and not one-dimensionlly defined by a particular belief, and lines between spectrums if belief and just that-- on a spectrum rather than clear cut all or nothing lines in the sand.
I don't know... Maybe that's just me patting myself on the back. But even if educationally institutions can be inadvertently biased towards specific viewpoints, I still believe they expose people to many more ways of looking at something from multiple directions, in a less emotionally charged venue than social media in the internet. I've had teachers that I consider to be the model for how that should occur when I found out afterwards that the points of view they were encouraging me to consider went completely counter to their own strongly held beliefs.
Absent straw men, you aren't going to get anything near that approach from whatever talking head you're watching on TV or YouTube, or captioned meme photo that comes across your social media feed.
The world isn't necessarily controlled by some illuminati-like organization. That belief comes from a cognitive bias called "Agent-detection bias" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection
It may simply be that free information created a bit of a power vacuum (perhaps the same as with the printing press?) so there's a scramble for power by all the people engaged in the culture war, not just existing powerful people but anyone who sees an opportunity.
Its a free for all. Winner takes all. High stakes in play
Propaganda used to only be achievable by nation states. Now anyone with money can play.
They aren't democratizing access to truth because search costs for finding accurate information are higher.
Dying inherited institutions are grasping to stay relevant with appeals to authoritarianism. Free speech is now a hinderance and a liability to their existence. As their relevance dwindles, tyranny becomes their only tool.
Craigslist killed classified ads (in the US). Twitter and Substack replaced investigative pieces, leaving legacy media companies reduced to peddling outrage for clicks.
> Hollywood is thriving.
The Golden Globes are over. Last year's Emmys saw the lowest viewership of any Emmy ceremony in the Television Academy’s history[1]. COVID killed the cinema[2]. AI is diminishing any production advantages that remain.
> Blockchains have produced nothing of worth, especially if you consider anything outside of cryptocurrency (but let's be real, cryptocurrency is also worthless)
That's demonstrably untrue given Bitcoin has a market cap larger than all but 20 countries[3]. Blockchains allow, for the first time in history, humans to coordinate at scale without human intermediaries. Only dead weight bureaucrats, machiavellian statists, and the innumerate who have been sold lies from the former would argue that blockchains are worthless.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/21/emmys-2020-primetime-awards-...
1. With your ballot: very small chance of changing policies (1 vote)
2. With your wallet: small chance of changing policies (n votes through political donations)
3. With your feet: guaranteed chance of changing policies
The internet facilities 100% democracy as it simplifies voting with your feet (remote work, social networks), allowing likeminded individuals to congregate and influence policy. Blockchain furthers this, unlocking the ability to have a referendum on every issue, which maximises consent.
I'm not sure how blockchains makes more frequent referendums easier. Maybe harder to game the system? Apart from that it seems like a platform for regular referendums could be built without blockchains. It's still relative early days on that tech though, and amidst "Blockchain" being attached to anything anyone wants to hype, I have ended up being a bit skeptical of claims they can fit a given purpose until it goes beyond the conceptual stage.
Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust.
> Political representation becomes obsolete with blockchains that can facilitate a referendum on every issue without the need for centralised trust
The choice of representative democracy was not because of the difficulty of counting votes. The founding fathers very clearly rejected what you're proposing. It's because most people are grossly ignorant about most things, and their opinion shouldn't be counted. If you can't pass a high school math class, I honestly don't care about your opinion on climate change.
The blockchain solves none of that.
1. Vote machines change votes - Great, the blockchain would allow people to verify their vote! Well, the software that sums up all blockchain votes could still miscount them, regardless of what the blockchain contains. Ok! So we can audit the results! Great, we can already do that with paper ballots.
2. Dead people voting - Again, same as the audit before. We see a John Smith voted on the blockchain. We can look up John Smith based on a paper ballot, just as we can with the blockchain.
3. Illegals voting - The same process used for identifying voters and giving out private keys can be used for verifying voters
But what about risks you have introduced?
1. By making everything electronic, you've shifted the risk from local elections, to state actors.
Signing keys are not magic. If a country found a solution to the factorization problem, or solving discrete logarithms, the scheme would collapse and they could forge massive amounts of votes.
2. Getting 300m people to manage cryptographic keys is impossible. Keys will be stolen, just as bitcoin wallets are. Now you need to deal with revocation of votes, and other controls that nobody has yet invented.
tldr: blockchains are dumb
If you mean an open ballot: hard no! It’s much too easy to coerce, bribe or intimidate voters.
No, but mindless post-modernist drivel is annoying.
“Vaccines work” happens to be true. It’s not “the establishment” being afraid to lose power, it’s sane people taking an interest in others’ survival.
We can only hope they win, else the Alex Jones', Tucker Carlsons', and Robert F Kennedys of the world will take us straight to climate destruction.
What we see now is a knee-jerk reaction to reestablish order by the establishment.
This happened too with the creation of the gutenberg printing press. New tech disrupted established information sources.
Approx 60 years after the printing press creation, a relatively minor religious squabble ended up in a huge conflict that engulfed most major powers in europe.
Truth is power. The institutions that that control the truth will fight to maintain their power.