Well, it's not like we haven't seen censorship in this hemisphere under Pinochet which may have had a little help from his friends. This was pre-Internet but shows the effort governments will make if they do not like what you are saying. See what the Chilean military did to a novel by Gabriel García Márquez in 1987:
"Once you recognize that you no longer treat every expression of this inevitable far-right impulse like a constitutional crisis but rather look at it dispassionately as a problem to be confronted without breaking our system."
A sentiment any 18th-century Burkean parlor and most sensible 21st-century conservatives could heartily endorse.
If this were an action movie, Nitro Freddie would be going through the NY Times building with a flamethrower, roasting all the weak, insipid, self indulgent writing.
Exactly. Someone might say it's "low-hanging fruit," but the flipside of that is the low-hanging not only applies to critique, but how accessible it is for others to partake of it and, without discernment, absorb it into their framework, so to speak. We aren't talking about Freddie critiquing some random Wordpress blogger.
the emergent "misinformation" beat is a sham panic, doing its part to send progressive on a weird tangent whence they may well never recover. but I think progressives are more or less right to be terrified by the internet. not bc it will create some global right-wing hellscape; that's silly. but bc the internet, for all its development and all our familiarity, continues to confront ppl with ambiguities about its workings and scale. it's not new but it's still not as well defined as the other mass media channels. it retains an unsettled quality. in contrast, Fox News is nuts but it's not a black box. of course there's the deeper political q about the appeal of Fox News that's harder for progressives to answer, but that one question alone overwhelms progressives. they spend a quarter century being unproductively defensive about just that one question.
and then the internet comes along and slathers more questions -- some stupid, some not -- on top of that. after Christchurch, ppl rushed to make sense of 8chan. but where do you even begin with that? you'd read 10 articles and none of them could even confidently answer super basic questions about this one website: how many ppl are we talking about here? who are they? where are they? etc.
imagine you're [insert yr favorite "online culture" expert], your whole brand is "I know how to internet," but you look up one day to find the internet confronting you with a dreadful realization: you don't really understand the internet in quite the same sense that, say, a TV critic can claim to understand TV. the TV critic knows where TV ends. the internet critic has no idea where the internet ends. and now the internet has gotten quite wild and hostile abt confronting you, day in and day out, with your own ignorance. it's increasingly influential while you're increasingly wrong/uncertain and constantly wrong-footed. that's emasculating after a point. one way or another, you need to make these ambiguities go away.
There's a 20-year-old book by Lisa McGirr called "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right" that addresses how political information spread back in the old days of the 50s and 60s. Full disclosure: I got about 1/3 of the way through and then set it down and wandered off. Here's Amazon's little summary blurb:
"Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism."
Love the snide reference to "tract houses." If they'd had lovely old Craftsman houses with Brazilian cherry built-in bookcases then they would never have supported Goldwater, presumably. But she argues that people had friends over to socialize and showed them filmstrips(!) and articles about the importance of being conservative and that's how Orange County became the conservative stronghold that it is today.
Any time you get people together in groups, at church, at coffeeshops, at sports bars, at each others' houses, they're going to talk politics and ideas will be spread. Many of those ideas will be Very Bad Indeed. I don't know what Egan thinks we're going to do about that, other than declare another pandemic and shut down all social venues. Good luck with that.
I think this is an interesting read: https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1377665960622977027?s=20 that helps question a lot of the received wisdom about facebook being filled with conservative propaganda because of algorithms that need to be sanitized vs because there are lots of conservatives who like to post conservative stuff.
I'm in broad agreement with you on this subject. But what gives me pause is how the decision by a few dudes in Silicon Valley to kick Trump off social media really did seem to trap a genie in a bottle. It's hard for me to say that was a bad thing. While I don't think there is anything special about Trump's reactionary politics and the current batch of right-wing conspiracies, there was something new about his ability to endlessly capture news cycles by creating a postmodern entertainment/politics hybrid.
I'm very curious what you think about the current Leftist talking point re: adding more states and breaking the Senate? Seems similar to Egan's call to destroy free speech -- i.e. let's just work the refs and break everything instead of trying to make people agree with us -- but I'm curious if you think that this is a good idea insofar as it will give the Left (very temporary) power.
"I know that the nice world is never coming and I know that the far right is an inevitable consequence of human nature."
2,600 years ago the Buddha demonstrated that there was no such thig as human nature. The very changes you wish to bring about, you foreclose the possibility of achieving by clinging to the notion of an intrinsic human nature.
He demonstrated that there was no intrinsic being. If there is no intrinsic being, how can there be a "human nature"? There are potential human natures, but none that are inevitable--they are all dependent on causes and conditions, which are impermanent.
You're confusing different things. "No intrinsic being" refers to the absence of a coherent and continuous individual self, the non-existence of what people usually call "I" or "the ego". It doesn't mean that human life is not constrained by its essential nature (which would be a ridiculous thing to argue), certain aspects of which we conventionally represent by the term "human nature". In any case this is more in the nature of an insight and a philosophical viewpoint than a "proof" or "demonstration" in a modern sense.
"It doesn't mean that human life is not constrained by its essential nature...certain aspects of which we conventionally represent by the term 'human nature'."
Which aspects? This is where I am disagreeing. Yes there are constraints, but these constraints do not produce a consistent human nature across all people. Freddie wrote that "the far right is an inevitable consequence of human nature." I have a human nature (presumably), and yet I am not part of the far right. Human beings are capable of behaviors that lead to the emergence of the far right, but it is not inevitable that these behaviors arise. Certain causes and conditions must be present for the behaviors to occur. The "it's human nature" argument is used to buttress the "it's a question of power" approach, where one inevitable human nature is pitted against another. Since they are both inevitable (though opposed), it becomes a matter of brute strength.
Well, the constraints that come from being human apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human. This doesn't mean everyone will be a political extremist, but the characteristics that we associate with extremism in general (whether left, right, or otherwise) always seem to be present in a wide range of societies. You could argue that a society of enlightened beings would not have this problem, but I think you'd be hard pressed to cite any examples in the real world.
Thinking about what you wrote, I realize that I do not see the restraints common to human beings as "human nature." When I hear the term "human nature," I think of some quality that all people possess, and which will lead them to act in a particular way (and which they need either to cultivate or to repress).
I agree that extremist behavior can be found in all societies and cultures, but for me, it arises because of particular causes and conditions, not because it is some tendency that each person has within themselves. Rather it is a potential behavior that can arise in a human being given the presence of certain causes and conditions--both with and outside the person. I sometimes think that the concept of human nature is an idea some people use to maintain the notion of "soul" without being theistic/supernatural (and not saying that this is what you are doing).
I also agree that there has yet to be a society of enlightened beings, but there have been beings who have achieved varied degrees of enlightenment. It takes discipline to follow a middle path, and Western culture is given to valorizing extremes, but I think a case can be made for hope.
A better argument for “things are different now” would be to look at information spread like an epidemiologist. When we say some memes spread “virally,” take the metaphor seriously.
Just as air travel increases the speed of propagation for viral infections, social media increases the speed of propagation of gossip. But no fancy features are needed; email would do. The main difference is that people carry cell phones and check for new content more frequently throughout the day. Blackberries were an early example of this.
It used to be that you might check personal email once a day, putting it on par with daily newspapers, and you wouldn’t get news that way. Gossip might travel faster by telephone. TV or radio news could actually be ahead of everyone else.
If there were some consensus that it’s a good idea, it might be possible to slow this down a bit just by delaying some notifications?
By the “Bill Maher segment” he means a bit on Bill Maher’s show called ‘I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true’: https://youtu.be/ALoEfG5HOaA
He doesn’t mean that there’s an echelon of society he thinks of as the “Bill Maher segment”.
So a couple points. You repeatedly use the word "censorship" but nowhere in the article does Egan call for censorship, i.e., the government banning speech. Not even close. The most he advocates for is a repeal of section 230, which would allow websites to be sued for defamatory content posted by users. A repeal of section 230 is not "censorship" by any stretch of the imagination no matter how much you and Glenn Greenwald desperately wish it to be.
And yes, of course radicalization and misinformation happened pre-Internet. But that doesn't mean we should just throw up our hands and say, "guess that's human nature, nothing to be done!" There's plenty to be done. For instance, the business model these platforms use is disgusting. Pacific Bell made the same amount of money when I made a phone call no matter the contents of what I'm saying. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. their business models mean they make more money the more false, inflammatory content appears on their platforms. So of course they are incentivized to promote false, inflammatory content over true, boring content. That's a real issue that can be solved with regulation. Again, none of this is "censorship."
Finally, I can't believe Dio has been gone eleven years, one of the best heavy metal vocalists of all time. Man that photo took me back.
The new, liberal-approved definition of "censorship" you are using is a modern distortion. For centuries the word "censor" meant to materially obstruct speech, not only when the government does it. That's a bullshit idea that was conceived of by modern progressives to make arguing easier on them. And I may demonstrate so in a post soon.
Well when you define it that broadly, then yes just about everything, including the repeal of section 230 and changing algorithms to deprioritize false content, is censorship.
Any sort of private party stopping or preventing any sort of communication on their property is censorship? What if a graffiti artist tags the side of my house and I paint over it? Is that censorship? Is that really what you're saying?
When you define it that broadly, then the word becomes near-useless because so many reasonable things are censorship.
Is the government repainting the side of a graffiti tagged, government owned building censorship? This supposed problem doesn't come from allowing private acts to count as censorship.
Freddie, here's what we're kicking around with TX / FL Govt: Free State Messaging™ a public service to take back the Internet.
It's an OpenSource taxpayer funded "backend": User ID (Anon or each state can tie to a legal ID), Login, Follow list, Post/Get. Using off shelf tested OSS libraries.
We model costs at $3 per user per year anchored at the Texas DIR datacenter (about 500MB a year). Bandwith is biggest part of the $3.
Publishers use the public resource and can curate (block) and monetize (keep all the ad money) at their Domain, so Trump's coming SPAC has no backend costs, neither does NYT or whoever else offers Free State.
Public funding = SAY ANYTHING (up to SCOTUS), no ads from govt, no data mining, user alone has their history.
So if you are at NYT as your default for your Free State, they can block Morgan, but over at Breitbart, when you login to your Free State, Morgan is back!
There's some killer privacy stuff and legal rights stuff, but the key thing is, you now can have a state issued digital ID that can log in to any service that wants that level of security, and store copies of your transactions there. Govt talks to you on Free State... and again, the publishers get to gut FB and Twitter and keep the booty.
Great piece, and as an aside, I flipped my shit with the Black Sabbath pic.
Love the article, but that's Geezer Butler, not Tony Iommi, in the pic
Ah will correct!
Well, it's not like we haven't seen censorship in this hemisphere under Pinochet which may have had a little help from his friends. This was pre-Internet but shows the effort governments will make if they do not like what you are saying. See what the Chilean military did to a novel by Gabriel García Márquez in 1987:
https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/nobel-prize-author-gabriel-garcia
"Once you recognize that you no longer treat every expression of this inevitable far-right impulse like a constitutional crisis but rather look at it dispassionately as a problem to be confronted without breaking our system."
A sentiment any 18th-century Burkean parlor and most sensible 21st-century conservatives could heartily endorse.
If this were an action movie, Nitro Freddie would be going through the NY Times building with a flamethrower, roasting all the weak, insipid, self indulgent writing.
Nice article, but isn't it shooting fish in a barrel to look for idiotic articles on the NYT opinion page?
When a good chunk of our society still takes NYT seriously, it's probably worth pushing back on. These aren't isolated opinions.
Right, this take about speech (and the philosophy behind it) isn't unique to Egan at all.
Exactly. Someone might say it's "low-hanging fruit," but the flipside of that is the low-hanging not only applies to critique, but how accessible it is for others to partake of it and, without discernment, absorb it into their framework, so to speak. We aren't talking about Freddie critiquing some random Wordpress blogger.
i'm torn.
the emergent "misinformation" beat is a sham panic, doing its part to send progressive on a weird tangent whence they may well never recover. but I think progressives are more or less right to be terrified by the internet. not bc it will create some global right-wing hellscape; that's silly. but bc the internet, for all its development and all our familiarity, continues to confront ppl with ambiguities about its workings and scale. it's not new but it's still not as well defined as the other mass media channels. it retains an unsettled quality. in contrast, Fox News is nuts but it's not a black box. of course there's the deeper political q about the appeal of Fox News that's harder for progressives to answer, but that one question alone overwhelms progressives. they spend a quarter century being unproductively defensive about just that one question.
and then the internet comes along and slathers more questions -- some stupid, some not -- on top of that. after Christchurch, ppl rushed to make sense of 8chan. but where do you even begin with that? you'd read 10 articles and none of them could even confidently answer super basic questions about this one website: how many ppl are we talking about here? who are they? where are they? etc.
imagine you're [insert yr favorite "online culture" expert], your whole brand is "I know how to internet," but you look up one day to find the internet confronting you with a dreadful realization: you don't really understand the internet in quite the same sense that, say, a TV critic can claim to understand TV. the TV critic knows where TV ends. the internet critic has no idea where the internet ends. and now the internet has gotten quite wild and hostile abt confronting you, day in and day out, with your own ignorance. it's increasingly influential while you're increasingly wrong/uncertain and constantly wrong-footed. that's emasculating after a point. one way or another, you need to make these ambiguities go away.
There's a 20-year-old book by Lisa McGirr called "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right" that addresses how political information spread back in the old days of the 50s and 60s. Full disclosure: I got about 1/3 of the way through and then set it down and wandered off. Here's Amazon's little summary blurb:
"Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism."
Love the snide reference to "tract houses." If they'd had lovely old Craftsman houses with Brazilian cherry built-in bookcases then they would never have supported Goldwater, presumably. But she argues that people had friends over to socialize and showed them filmstrips(!) and articles about the importance of being conservative and that's how Orange County became the conservative stronghold that it is today.
Any time you get people together in groups, at church, at coffeeshops, at sports bars, at each others' houses, they're going to talk politics and ideas will be spread. Many of those ideas will be Very Bad Indeed. I don't know what Egan thinks we're going to do about that, other than declare another pandemic and shut down all social venues. Good luck with that.
nice one
I think this is an interesting read: https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1377665960622977027?s=20 that helps question a lot of the received wisdom about facebook being filled with conservative propaganda because of algorithms that need to be sanitized vs because there are lots of conservatives who like to post conservative stuff.
I'm in broad agreement with you on this subject. But what gives me pause is how the decision by a few dudes in Silicon Valley to kick Trump off social media really did seem to trap a genie in a bottle. It's hard for me to say that was a bad thing. While I don't think there is anything special about Trump's reactionary politics and the current batch of right-wing conspiracies, there was something new about his ability to endlessly capture news cycles by creating a postmodern entertainment/politics hybrid.
I'm very curious what you think about the current Leftist talking point re: adding more states and breaking the Senate? Seems similar to Egan's call to destroy free speech -- i.e. let's just work the refs and break everything instead of trying to make people agree with us -- but I'm curious if you think that this is a good idea insofar as it will give the Left (very temporary) power.
"I know that the nice world is never coming and I know that the far right is an inevitable consequence of human nature."
2,600 years ago the Buddha demonstrated that there was no such thig as human nature. The very changes you wish to bring about, you foreclose the possibility of achieving by clinging to the notion of an intrinsic human nature.
Buddha did no such thing.
He demonstrated that there was no intrinsic being. If there is no intrinsic being, how can there be a "human nature"? There are potential human natures, but none that are inevitable--they are all dependent on causes and conditions, which are impermanent.
You're confusing different things. "No intrinsic being" refers to the absence of a coherent and continuous individual self, the non-existence of what people usually call "I" or "the ego". It doesn't mean that human life is not constrained by its essential nature (which would be a ridiculous thing to argue), certain aspects of which we conventionally represent by the term "human nature". In any case this is more in the nature of an insight and a philosophical viewpoint than a "proof" or "demonstration" in a modern sense.
"It doesn't mean that human life is not constrained by its essential nature...certain aspects of which we conventionally represent by the term 'human nature'."
Which aspects? This is where I am disagreeing. Yes there are constraints, but these constraints do not produce a consistent human nature across all people. Freddie wrote that "the far right is an inevitable consequence of human nature." I have a human nature (presumably), and yet I am not part of the far right. Human beings are capable of behaviors that lead to the emergence of the far right, but it is not inevitable that these behaviors arise. Certain causes and conditions must be present for the behaviors to occur. The "it's human nature" argument is used to buttress the "it's a question of power" approach, where one inevitable human nature is pitted against another. Since they are both inevitable (though opposed), it becomes a matter of brute strength.
Well, the constraints that come from being human apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human. This doesn't mean everyone will be a political extremist, but the characteristics that we associate with extremism in general (whether left, right, or otherwise) always seem to be present in a wide range of societies. You could argue that a society of enlightened beings would not have this problem, but I think you'd be hard pressed to cite any examples in the real world.
Thanks for responding.
Thinking about what you wrote, I realize that I do not see the restraints common to human beings as "human nature." When I hear the term "human nature," I think of some quality that all people possess, and which will lead them to act in a particular way (and which they need either to cultivate or to repress).
I agree that extremist behavior can be found in all societies and cultures, but for me, it arises because of particular causes and conditions, not because it is some tendency that each person has within themselves. Rather it is a potential behavior that can arise in a human being given the presence of certain causes and conditions--both with and outside the person. I sometimes think that the concept of human nature is an idea some people use to maintain the notion of "soul" without being theistic/supernatural (and not saying that this is what you are doing).
I also agree that there has yet to be a society of enlightened beings, but there have been beings who have achieved varied degrees of enlightenment. It takes discipline to follow a middle path, and Western culture is given to valorizing extremes, but I think a case can be made for hope.
"He demonstrated that there was no intrinsic being."
Demonstrated? Or argued? These are not the same thing. When someone demonstrates something, I expect error bars and equations.
For me, he demonstrated without error bars and equations (which do prove some things, but not others).
A better argument for “things are different now” would be to look at information spread like an epidemiologist. When we say some memes spread “virally,” take the metaphor seriously.
Just as air travel increases the speed of propagation for viral infections, social media increases the speed of propagation of gossip. But no fancy features are needed; email would do. The main difference is that people carry cell phones and check for new content more frequently throughout the day. Blackberries were an early example of this.
It used to be that you might check personal email once a day, putting it on par with daily newspapers, and you wouldn’t get news that way. Gossip might travel faster by telephone. TV or radio news could actually be ahead of everyone else.
If there were some consensus that it’s a good idea, it might be possible to slow this down a bit just by delaying some notifications?
Great article.
By the “Bill Maher segment” he means a bit on Bill Maher’s show called ‘I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true’: https://youtu.be/ALoEfG5HOaA
He doesn’t mean that there’s an echelon of society he thinks of as the “Bill Maher segment”.
So a couple points. You repeatedly use the word "censorship" but nowhere in the article does Egan call for censorship, i.e., the government banning speech. Not even close. The most he advocates for is a repeal of section 230, which would allow websites to be sued for defamatory content posted by users. A repeal of section 230 is not "censorship" by any stretch of the imagination no matter how much you and Glenn Greenwald desperately wish it to be.
And yes, of course radicalization and misinformation happened pre-Internet. But that doesn't mean we should just throw up our hands and say, "guess that's human nature, nothing to be done!" There's plenty to be done. For instance, the business model these platforms use is disgusting. Pacific Bell made the same amount of money when I made a phone call no matter the contents of what I'm saying. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. their business models mean they make more money the more false, inflammatory content appears on their platforms. So of course they are incentivized to promote false, inflammatory content over true, boring content. That's a real issue that can be solved with regulation. Again, none of this is "censorship."
Finally, I can't believe Dio has been gone eleven years, one of the best heavy metal vocalists of all time. Man that photo took me back.
The new, liberal-approved definition of "censorship" you are using is a modern distortion. For centuries the word "censor" meant to materially obstruct speech, not only when the government does it. That's a bullshit idea that was conceived of by modern progressives to make arguing easier on them. And I may demonstrate so in a post soon.
Well when you define it that broadly, then yes just about everything, including the repeal of section 230 and changing algorithms to deprioritize false content, is censorship.
Any sort of private party stopping or preventing any sort of communication on their property is censorship? What if a graffiti artist tags the side of my house and I paint over it? Is that censorship? Is that really what you're saying?
When you define it that broadly, then the word becomes near-useless because so many reasonable things are censorship.
Is the government repainting the side of a graffiti tagged, government owned building censorship? This supposed problem doesn't come from allowing private acts to count as censorship.
Freddie, here's what we're kicking around with TX / FL Govt: Free State Messaging™ a public service to take back the Internet.
It's an OpenSource taxpayer funded "backend": User ID (Anon or each state can tie to a legal ID), Login, Follow list, Post/Get. Using off shelf tested OSS libraries.
We model costs at $3 per user per year anchored at the Texas DIR datacenter (about 500MB a year). Bandwith is biggest part of the $3.
Publishers use the public resource and can curate (block) and monetize (keep all the ad money) at their Domain, so Trump's coming SPAC has no backend costs, neither does NYT or whoever else offers Free State.
Public funding = SAY ANYTHING (up to SCOTUS), no ads from govt, no data mining, user alone has their history.
So if you are at NYT as your default for your Free State, they can block Morgan, but over at Breitbart, when you login to your Free State, Morgan is back!
There's some killer privacy stuff and legal rights stuff, but the key thing is, you now can have a state issued digital ID that can log in to any service that wants that level of security, and store copies of your transactions there. Govt talks to you on Free State... and again, the publishers get to gut FB and Twitter and keep the booty.