Dwarkesh Patel

It's awful for the city.

Note that the industrialization of the Industrial Revolution was mostly outside of the

wealthier centers of England in the second-tier towns, right?

They grow massively into huge industrial areas like Lancaster.

So those are a plural bunch of reasons.

I mean, it's pretty clear.

This is not going to sound plausible to anybody, but it's true.

We've been looking at some documents recently which pretty much confirm that they did figure out how to make industrial looms in the 1400s, and they didn't want to.

They wanted to make luxuriant artisanal fabrics.

So the first printed fonts look like handwritten scripts.

and often have a blank space to illuminate it so that it looks just as fancy as the printed, as the manuscripts.

Yeah, I mean, a huge amount rests on whether you have a cheap writing surface.

And here, rather than looking first at the Renaissance, let's look at what we think of as fall of Rome.

Because one of the biggest things that happens there is that Western and Northern Europe lose access to papyrus.

So papyrus is the cheap writing surface of antiquity.

It is an easy plant-based writing surface.

You take this tall, thin water reed that is fibrous like asparagus.

You slice it into ribbons.

You set them out in the sun, a bunch of them parallel to each other sitting on a stone like noodles.

You put a second row of noodles perpendicular to that on top, and then they dry in the sun, and they're naturally sticky.