They tried to regulate the printing press too—thank god for Milton and others.

'In 1644, Milton made a speech to the English Parliament, later printed as Areopagitica, arguing against the official licensing—and therefore potential censorship—of printing. It is one of the great,…

“you essentially trick yourself into never learning how bad things get better.”

The way a lot of ppl seem to see the world is:

- if things are getting bad, that's news
- if things have been bad but are getting better, that's also bad news
- if things are good, that's boring so it's not news

The problem with this approach isn't just that you persuade…

30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place in the late 1980s about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers
newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotte…

Xerox + Fair Use = A whole lot of legal drama.

Me writing at NEWART: newart.press/p/the-copier-w…

It far predates Reddit though - look at Pessimists Archive

People have been using the cheap gravitas of pessimism to elevate their own status relative to those trying and building things, more or less for all of history

In the late 80s and early 90s there was a moral panic about kids and pagers:

- Senate passed pager ban
- Motorola rallied kids to fight back

Remind you of anything?

newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotte…

Time travel would really ruin nostalgia

This crazy moral panic has almost been completely memory holed. This is why our archive exists. newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotte…

Where are the pager having child criminals now?

newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotte…

“Hampton University, as part of an effort to prevent drug selling, is requiring students with beepers to register the devices with campus police”

🧵 The Forgotten War on Beepers newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotte…

📟 Through the 1980s pagers became popular with young people, and also... drug dealers.

This dragged beepers into a moral panic about adolescent drug use...

1) I did a deep dive on the debate over whether social media is ruining teens' mental health. TLDR: The evidence is much weaker than Jonathan Haidt suggests, but not as negligible as his critics claim.

vox.com/24127431/smart…

Probably worth reflecting on the fact everyone was convinced beepers would increase teen drug use.

Laws were passed, 1000s of kids arrested.

Then cellphones made bans irrelevant, teens all started texting and drug use went down massively…

In 80s/90s America was convinced pagers 📟 would increase teen drug use.

Laws were passed to ban them for under 18s and in schools. Then, cellphones made laws irrelevant, many teens were texting by late 90s.

Drug use plummeted since then… (newsletter: newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotte…)