How New Technologies Shape Communication

Everyone thinks the censor will agree with them.

Actually, the censor will censor them.

Important new communication technologies often tear down trust in an existing system. They allow distribution of truths the old system was censoring.

This is another reason technology is a driving force in history. All ideologies have existed for a long time. Read Plato and you will see some of the same political ideas. What changes is communication technology.

The time selects for the technology, and the technology selects for the ideology.

The era of centralized technology had mass production and mass media. The political ideologies enabled by those technologies were Communism, Nazism, and Democratic Capitalism. For the past hundred years, they slugged it out.

In this new decentralized era, those ideologies are not benefited by current technologies. Instead, new ideologies grow through networks, like wokeness or cryptocurrency. These ideologies are transmitted on social media, the opposite of a top-down authoritarian-enabling technology.

If an idea requires censorship to maintain its continued popularity, it may not be a good idea.

The Spanish flu was censored. The Katyn Forest, where the USSR killed a bunch of Poles and Polish leaders and lied about it, was covered up. These truths could have broken trust in the regime if they were public, but they were kept secret.

With the printing press, Martin Luther delegitimized the Catholic Church by calling out things like indulgences (sin forgiveness in exchange for payment). Many people probably had an issue with the practice in private. But when Martin Luther printed and shared his critiques, a new public consensus formed outside the control of the existing regime. That started the Reformation.

With crypto, we have something similar to the printing press.