I mean, amateur radio was illegal to encrypt. That encryption ban could have theoretically also happened to the internet with just a few changes in legislation in a different timeline.
If, say the US and rest of North America, and the European Countries, along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, basically if most of the democratic world somehow in an alternate timeline just went batshit crazy and become authoritarian. What would the internet even look like. Would the internet even exist?
I mean, the US was supposedly a liberal democracy tried to ban PGP. A full fledged authoritarian US would’ve imprisoned many of those PGP and Free Software authors. HTTPS would’ve have a government root certificate on every computer, phone, tablet, smartwatch. Signal would’ve been illegal…
Is this alt-timeline too far fetched?
I mean its not even too late for this to happen starting like right now 2025, right?
For the record, the Arab world wasn’t always anti-science. It was religion that got them there.
Not all authoritarian regimes are anti-science. Some would be very interested in things for domestic use, it might be slower, and such, though.
That’s… what? Like do you think the Assabids were atheists during the Islamic Golden Age?
Yup. So during the Abbasid caliphs, religious scholars weren’t as influential. They were definitely Muslim, but they weren’t opposed to science.
But then, the religious scholars became both more influential and more conservative. The secular scholars started asking questions that were, how shall we say, uncomfortable?
You can also see this shift in the transition from a more rationalist Mu’tazilite tradition to Ash’arite.
This is the inevitable shift. As science seeks an understanding of the universe, through observation and experimentation rather than faith it’s finding an understanding that best explains a universe without god.
It is inevitable that the religious mind either abandons their faith, or abandons science. (Unless of course we stumble onto evidence for god. But, I don’t believe that’s gonna happen.)
Ultimately, if god existed and created everything… science would be another form of worship.
Okay that is literally not true. First, Ash’arism is also rationalist so yeah no. Like you do know many prominent Muslim scientists from the time period were themselves Asharite right? Second, the Islamic golden age didn’t die due to the power of religious figures; it died due to the sacking of Baghdad and continued right up until that moment. This happened more than two centuries after the creation of Ash’arism, and again many important developments happened in the Caliphate in the interim. Third, the Timurid renaissance came about a century later in a mainstream Sunni Muslim (so definitely not Mu’tazilite or some such) empire. In short:
That literally didn’t happen.
Yes, as clearly stated in the Quran, that is literally the point.
Sorry my people’s more than a millennium-long history doesn’t conform to your preconceived notions, but can you please not make shit up? Here’s a Wikipedia article. And in the first place, Arab distrust of science is a much more recent phenomenon that came after centuries of Ottoman neglect and is fading away right as we speak despite some of the most conservative mainstream theologies in the history of Islam.