What Tyrants Actually Want When They Erase Things
What historian and novelist Ada Palmer taught me about censorship, fear, and the long-term power of resistance.
Time does something strange when Ada Palmer is on the microphone. You look up and realize you have been sprinting through centuries, jumping from Machiavelli’s Florence to modern Florida, from the printing press to AI, and somehow it all feels like one continuous argument about power, fear, and what we do next.
Ada is a University of Chicago historian of the Renaissance and also a science fiction novelist. She studies what happens when societies fracture, and she imagines what people build in the wreckage.
It was an unexpectedly optimistic take on what many of us struggle to hold in our bodies right now: huge catastrophe and great progress can coexist.
Here’s a quick excerpt from my recent interview with historian Ada Palmer
Listen to the full podcast here:
https://www.wmnf.org/rethinking-the-renaissance-ada-palmer-on-myths-power-and-the-future-were-fighting-for/
“If you don’t finish the history, they’ll never believe how bad it was.”
In 1506, Niccolò Machiavelli received a letter urging him to finish the history he had begun of the decade around 1500. The fear, as Ada Palmer explained it, was that even as events were unfolding, their severity was already being blurred by time and convenience. According to Ada, his friend worried that history itself would erase the scale of what was being lost: “If you don’t finish your history of this time, future generations will never believe how bad it was, and they will never forgive us for having lost so much so quickly.”
This is the same era that gave us Michelangelo’s David and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The part we package as the golden Renaissance. But living inside it felt apocalyptic.
That is one of Ada’s central points. We compare our lived reality to the museum version of someone else’s time, then wonder why we feel like we are failing. We forget that the people we admire were panicking too.
Our brains are trapped in short time
Ada has a phrase that stuck with me: Century Time. She makes the case that our sense of history, the present, and the future are hampered by our unwillingness to think across longer time frames. We live on “week timescales and month timescales.” Our politics rarely stretch past the four-year cycle. Corporations think in quarters. News moves at breakneck speed. But the longer view allows us to see steady progress, even if it comes in fits and starts, even if it is accompanied by chaos.
She gave examples of slow, grinding good news that rarely trends: public health, clean water access, vaccines, huge life-saving shifts that get almost no cultural credit because they do not arrive as a single dramatic event. That does not cancel the emergency we are in. It does help explain why despair feels omnipresent.
Bad news travels farther than good news. The information environment trains our nervous systems to perceive collapse.
Information revolutions are a permanent condition
The information revolution did not happen once and end. Since the printing press, every new way of spreading information has set off another round of disruption. And every wave does a predictable thing. It democratizes communication, and it intensifies fear.
New platforms always come with an early cost, whether it’s money, time, or attention. That cost shapes who shows up first. The people most likely to adopt a new channel are often those who had the least access or visibility under the old one. When that happens, voices that were previously muted can suddenly be heard at full volume. Sometimes that means LGBTQ people, linguistic minorities, or religious dissidents. Sometimes it also means extremists and conspiracy communities.
Change triggers panic, and politicians harvest that panic with a familiar promise: I will silence the scary group you fear.
AI and the warehouse full of nonsense
I asked Ada about AI, about media and technology consolidation, and about the fear that information gets absorbed into a system that can be shaped to serve the oligarchy.
She pointed me to the final scene of Indiana Jones, where the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled into a warehouse lined with identical crates. The object itself remains intact, but its significance evaporates. It isn’t destroyed or seized. It’s filed away, overwhelmed by accumulation. That, she argued, is the risk to watch for. Not only centralized control, but a volume of synthetic material so vast that genuinely human work becomes difficult to locate at all.
We have lived through “too much information” crises before.
By the late 1500s, scholars ran into an unexpected problem. There were simply too many books. For generations, being learned had meant reading nearly everything that existed. When that became impossible, it wasn’t just an inconvenience. It upended how knowledge itself was understood and triggered a real intellectual panic.
So they invented tools: specialization, encyclopedias, digests.
In the 1700s, newspapers created another overload, contradictory reports, too much to consume. So they invented magazines as summaries and comparison engines.
Her point was not “relax.” It was “do not confuse the gap for the end.” Information-sorting norms and tools evolve in response to overload. The work is building those tools instead of surrendering to the flood.
“You never know you’re in the last republic”
When I asked what this means for people living under censorship and erasure, Ada shifted us to Florence, the focus of her research.
Florence was a republic surrounded by monarchies. It watched neighboring republics fall one by one to strongmen and ruling families, sometimes through conquest, sometimes through capture from within. Florence fought to remain a republic through tumults and bloodshed. Machiavelli worked in the later stages trying to push back. And then it fell.
There was a brief resurgence Ada calls the “last republic.” It lasted about a year and a half. When you are living through it, you do not know it is the last republic, she said.
You do not know whether this is the moment you win or the moment you lose for generations. Future historians draw neat lines and give tidy names. People living through it experience a long blur of fear and uncertainty.
Even if you lose, resistance matters. Ada argued that resistance can carve out protections that persist even under tyranny. It creates lines that tyrants will not dare cross because crossing them risks stirring new rebellion.
She told a story about the Vasari Corridor, an elevated passageway built so the Duke could cross Florence without ever walking its streets. It was meant as protection from assassination, but it was widely understood as a symbol of his fear of the determined people of the last republic. Other rulers mocked him for it. One neighboring duke made a show of strolling his own city naked, a deliberate taunt meant to signal that he did not fear the rabble Cosimo would not face.
Most Florentines complied when the corridor cut across their homes. But one old and powerful family refused to move their tower. Cosimo, aware that a brutal response might trigger a fresh wave of rebellion, relented. The corridor bends around that tower to this day, a small but visible reminder that even then, power adjusted itself around resistance.
Even in the worst case, resistance matters because it changes what the tyrant dares attempt.
Humor is a political technology
I asked about street theater and mocking protest, the kind of humor that punctures the intimidation vibe of militarized power.
Ada took me to Renaissance Rome and its “talking statues,” especially Pasquin. People plastered satire and commentary on the statue’s base, dressed it in costumes to mock what the pope was doing, and created a public channel for dissent built out of wit and audacity.
She described discourse as an ecosystem. You need the long, careful essays. You need the furious catharsis. You need the memes that hit like darts. You need the warm voice that keeps a community human. Different voices reach people in different moods, and the ecosystem is what makes resistance durable.
When I asked for prescriptions, what works on which tyrant, she rejected the fantasy. Media environments shift too fast. A tactic that lands today may fail in three months. We rest, and we keep experimenting.
Censorship is about fear, not deletion
We talked about the wave of censorship, and Ada asserted that it isn’t primarily about erasing the book, film, or idea being banned. The powers that be know it will spark interest and often increase the work’s popularity. The real aim is to stop the next dozen ideas. It discourages publishers from printing books that draw scrutiny, pushes writers toward less controversial topics, and sends an upstream message that chills those who lack the reputation or power to push back. We know the books that were banned. We don’t know how many ideas were smothered in the crib.
She told a story from the Inquisition that made the logic visible. The Church “expurgated” an encyclopedia of animals because the author praised Protestant scholars as “learned and excellent.” The censors required readers to cross out those words everywhere they appeared.
They didn’t want to erase information; they wanted to leave visible scars on the page so that every time you turned it, you saw the mark and remembered the state was watching. They turned a neutral book into a daily reinforcement of power.
That is what erasure does. The blank space where the mural used to be is part of the message. The goal is not simply to remove the image. It is to make you feel the removal, and then do the next removal yourself in your own mind before they even ask.
What’s in your information diet?
At the end, I asked Ada whose words give her hope most right now. She did not name a philosopher or a poet. She named a newsletter, Fix the News, a weekly digest of underreported good news from Australia. Clean water access, malaria progress, solar rollout, the slow, grinding wins that never trend.
If your information diet is designed to keep you afraid, you have to actively retrieve evidence that humans are still solving problems.
High-paced media floods your brain with stress chemicals, and those chemicals linger unless you have a conversation with another human being. Talk to someone, and your nervous system clears faster. I’ve added that bit of research to my own survival manual.
And talking with Ada was proof that the research was spot on.
Follow Ada Palmer: She’s at adapalmer.com, with links to her blog Ex Urbe (E-X-U-R-B-E). Her newest book is Inventing the Renaissance, and her science fiction series is Terra Ignota.
Australia is always doing something good!