Greg Lukianoff

So what I was studying in law school when I ran out of First Amendment classes, I decided to study censorship during the Tudor dynasty because that's where we get our ideas of prior restraint that come from the licensing of the printing press, which was something that Henry VIII was the first to do, where basically the idea was that if you can't print anything in England unless it's with these Your Majesty-approved printers—

It will prevent heretical work and anti-Henry VIII stuff from coming out.

Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty efficient idea if nothing else.

And I always – so he started getting angry at the printing press around 1521 and then passed something that required prints to be – along with parliament in 1538.

Yeah.

And I always think of that as kind of like where we are now because we have this – back then we had the original disruptive technology.

Writing was probably – but the next one, which was the printing press, which was absolutely calamitous.

And I mean – and I say calamitous on purpose because in the short term, the witch hunts went up like crazy because the printing press allowed you to get that manual on how to find witches.

That the religious wars went crazy.

It led to all sorts of distress, misinformation, nastiness.

And Henry VIII was trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

He was kind of like, I want to use this for good, like I feel like it could be used.

But he was in an unavoidable period of epistemic anarchy.

There's nothing you can do to make the period after the printing press came out to be a non-disruptive, non-crazy period other than absolute totalitarianism and destroy all the print presses, which simply was not possible in Europe.

So I feel like that's kind of like where we are now.

That disruption came from adding, I think, several million people to the European conversation and then eventually the global conversation.

But eventually, it became the best tool for disconfirmation, for getting rid of falsity, for spotting bad ideas.

And it's the benefits, the long-term benefits of

of the printing press are incalculably great.

And that's what gives me some optimism for where we are now with social media, because we are in that unavoidably anarchical period.