The root cause of what makes us believe what we read online?

Every now and then I come across something I feel it’s wrong, but can’t define why. Not with a few simple words at least. “Why is the West so concerned with free speech?", by P. Dingra, is one of those cases.

Dingra argues that the West’s concern with free speech is both the cause of its success for the past 500 years, but also potentially its limiting factor for the next 500. Here is why, according to Dingra (emphasis mine):

• The West adopted the printing press early, and on a large scale, because western alphabets have many, many less characters to print than, say, Chinese
• that rise of words cheaply printable in large volumes brought a whole host of Western staples, including share corporations, contract law, constitutions, and mass media, all of which have become essential to liberal economies and democracies
• the success of western empires (Spanish, French, Dutch, German, British, and American) inherently justified their commitment to not just producing text, but also obeying text. Hence, the West’s obsession with free speech is now deeply embedded in its culture.

The downside of all this is the endless debate in city council meetings or courtrooms, where the minutiae of written laws and procedures are argued ad nauseam. The result is that Western cities can’t evolve and scale: to get anything built in San Francisco, “you would have to expend 10,000 times the number of words to accomplish the same things as you could in China”. And “if success is defined by the ability to sustain billion-level populations with low levels of friction, then all signs in the East are telling them that what they’re doing is right”.

Obeying text? Wait a minute…

As I said, Dingra’s main point feels wrong, or at least partial to me in a number of ways. But I think he’s onto something when he speaks of western commitments to “not just producing text, but also obeying text”, even if it’s not what he was after.

Commitment to “not just producing text, but also obeying it” may be just what explains why we fall so much for producing, and above all trusting, the endless rants written and read on social media. Rants that, by the way, are much easier to store, filter and index, exactly because they are text, instead of videos or audio. Interesting, isn’t it?