The Inquisition's Problems With Censorship

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In the Roman Inquisition, for example, its major agenda was to make sure that people are constantly aware of and thinking about the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Every book had to be printed with a page in the front that said this has been vetted by the Inquisition,. And a lot of their post hoc censorship, censorship afterwards of books that are printed elsewhere is very visible. But there is no informational change however, every time you turn out an article or any piece of information on what they learned from the inquisition. You can have the lizard, you can have the discussion of the lizard, even if it's against your grain. What I'm trying to get at here is: How do

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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.

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