Fiat Lies with the Printing Press
Concurrence on the History
This is wonderful article for me because it confirms what I had independently concluded based on careful historical study about the effects of the printing press on human kind.
I’ve been on the Internet since its first day around 1988 when some of us realized we could use one terminal to email anyone on any other machines that we could think of, from our haven in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In my book on “How to Get Your Privacy Back” (on Amazon) I document numbers of various predictions where we were right despite the fact that very few people believed us. In a second book “How to Get Your (good) Lies Back: The Internet Court of Lies” I conclude the same solution to getting our privacy back: Person to person enforced moderated natural language dialogue is needed for lies, misinformation, and disinformation on the Internet.
Recent computational cognitive neuroscience has confirmed that there is a computational hole in how humans talk to each other and lie that had become paramount once before after the rise of the printing press. Fiat lies are suspect lies for which dialogue to explain the lie is infeasible for any reason. You cannot have a clarifying conversation with a piece of paper.
It is called Fiat lying, and Descartes help provide the solution (about a hundred years into widespread printing of misinformation … most of it religious false narratives). Descartes arguably led the beginning of the Age of Reason.
See my article below on Descartes’ arguments, which also summarizes my lies book, because it concurs that the ‘age of printing’ brought about the same kind of human disaffections that the ‘age of the Internet’ has brought. It also argues that these effects are not escapable because of our brains unique ability to communicate with full mammalian neocortex to neocortex fidelity with our natural language…but not without the feedback that dialogue provides. You cannot ask a web page or a facebook page to explain itself.
The solutions developed in the Age of Reason included “Rules of Evidence” in Courts and Replicability in Science in order to keep the balance of Truth against rampant Fiat Lying. These same solutions would work today on the Internet as they have done with the presence of print media.
Thank you for this piece. I did not know about this lady.
