The Power of People Manipulating Others

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The idea that if you take an idea that's really harmful and is not that popular yet, you might actually be signal boosting it. The ultra-democratization of information on a platform like Twitter where every individual person is empowered to decide whether to repeat or not repeat a sentence has come across your field. We have seen the power of people manipulating others into repeating the toxic sentence that they've produced. And so it's one of the great, this is unique, unprecedented or semi unprecedented among new digital information, information revolution as opposed to earlier information revolutions.

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How does the current information revolution compare to previous information revolutions? What kind of event or set of events counts as an information revolution? Why do new information technologies usually amplify the most extreme voices first? Why are intentions not very useful as a metric for determining whether a particular kind of censorship is good or bad? When, if ever, is censorship appropriate or morally acceptable? Why were officials of the Inquisition much more worried about slight deviations in theology than outright agnosticism or atheism? What are the implications of using AI to censor certain kinds of information? What do people misunderstand about history? Why are there so many more futuristic dystopian stories than utopian stories? What is "plural" agency, and why do we need more stories about it?

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and her first book is Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Find out more about her at adapalmer.com.

Staff