Dwarkesh Patel

We can coordinate our resistance movement against the Catholics.

Boom.

The Reformation happens.

That wasn't possible even a decade earlier when it took months to get a pamphlet from one end of Europe to the other.

So –

It's best to think of these very much in parallel, the print revolution and the digital revolution, as one big technological change in information that then has successive applications as that one technology finds new forms and disseminates more deeply and keeps having consequences over decades.

But it's not multiple separate revolutions.

It's one ongoing information revolution.

Yeah, and then it has a bunch of tumults that flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, so that every decade feels different.

Yeah, and here you are in 1506 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 1490.

Right.

And you're like, that's pretty fast.

And here we are in 2026 often feeling nostalgic for how things were in the year 2000, right?

It's more that history has always moved fast.

But when we teach it in high school, we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly.

And so we pretend that it moved slowly.

We have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation.

But you can zoom in anywhere, and you're going to find every decade feels different.

And people in the 1320s are nostalgic for people in the 130-aughts, right?

And it's always felt like history was moving very quickly and things rose and things fell.