Political discourse, in Mill's time, was a very different beast than it is today.
Tech and Liberty
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Re: Tech and Liberty
#12A powerful and provocative article. I love the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." I am a bit of a libertarian when it comes to civil liberties -- I flinch at any circumscription of speech, even when it is noxious. Still, for a v…
When you consider how the common man behaved during the rise of Nazism, and even during the height of its power, you have to conclude that the truncheon really wasn't necessary.
As hard as it may be for us to accept today, there were normal, regular women who would swear out completely false statements against some poor woman down the street to get that woman a free trip to a camp. Normal, regular, everyday guys swearing out statements against a small business rival across town.
As horrible as it may sound, the system was convenient. If you wanted a woman gone, there was a surefire method by which you could do away with her. We have the archives. (The ones that weren't burned that is.) We know the names of both victim and accuser. And it all paints a picture of a people that were not physically beaten into submission. They weren't shamed into Nazism. In all honesty, they weren't even terribly political. The picture the archives paint are of a populace that was, in modern day terms, simply "petty". I think that's probably just human nature.
I still support letting people say whatever they please though. If a population mired in pettiness becomes enamored with Nazism? Well, their punishment will be that they have to live under Nazism. Just wish them good luck with that.
Re: Tech and Liberty
#13A powerful and provocative article. I love the quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." I am a bit of a libertarian when it comes to civil liberties -- I flinch at any circumscription of speech, even when it is noxious. Still, for a v…
> There is a part of me that is afraid of a patently false but persuasive idea gaining currency in a liberal democracy, when it ought to have been quelled in the cradle somehow.
Anti-vaxxers come to mind from some points of view, although on the face of it it's not as odious as something like actual Nazis.
Anti-vaxxers are terrible though... they pile on social media to drown out opposing points of view. There is a local representative here in Oregon who was involved with a bill that said you had to have vaccinations to send your kids to public schools, and any time she posts anything online, dozens of those people come out of the woodwork to shriek at her and post their garbage science.
Re: Tech and Liberty
#14Political discourse, in Mill's time, was a very different beast than it is today.
How so? And is it different in a way that invalidate Mill's points?
Re: Tech and Liberty
#15The First Amendment was written at a time when the constraints of the available technology created "natural" boundaries as to what kind of speech could spread in a society. The very fact that publishing an opinion anonymously (edit: I should say without peer-review of any sort), at scale, was nearly impossible, prevented the development of many sordid, dark, and "evil" thoughts from reaching the point of public discourse. I would argue that this sort of "natural limit" on certain kinds of speech is a biologically evolved defence mechanism against some of the darkest capabilities of human minds - if we didn't have it, some of our darkest tendencies would go unchecked affecting the overall healthiness and survivability of the population. We are a social species, and our physiological wellbeing is deeply tied to social acceptance.
The unique problem of the internet is that it allows bad ideas to infect, fester, and mutate in the minds of others at a speed never seen before, without the natural safeguards that we've always had: peer-review and social acceptance. That leads to a spill-over of bad ideas into the public discourse which, in turn, resets society's definition for what kind of ideas are acceptable. A few rapid cycles of this, and we got our Post Truth World - it's not that truth doesn't exist anymore, but rather the speed at which the public discourse could verify, analyze, and accept ideas is simply not fast enough to keep up with the pace of new ideas that can reach the public discourse. In short, the immune system is overwhelmed, both at the individual and societal level, and we have a raging pandemic.
Yes, I am not an American, and I am arguing that the uniquely American religion of defending the "right" to "free speech" is misplaced in the era of the internet. This is one of the reasons I get a fall-of-Rome feeling in America.
Re: Tech and Liberty
#16I feel that the biggest problem with social media isn't a matter of liberty but one of control. Individual consumers don't have enough control over what they see. For example, if I'd like not to see anything political whatsoever on my Facebook that right is often not respected. And it should be respected. It is my account. If someone says something I don't like or don't want to be affiliated with I should take steps to remove myself from that. If they come to me after doing this it's Facebook's fault.
Re: Tech and Liberty
#17The fundamental problem is the near monopoly powers enjoyed by a select few social media and tech companies. If Facebook and Twitter's social networks were federated like email, it wouldn't matter whether they refuse to propagate one opinion or another. Unhappy users or anyone who feels silenced could simply switch to a different provider. The problem isn't that Facebook or Twitter are allowing or not allowing free s…
> The fundamental problem is the near monopoly powers enjoyed by a select few social media and tech companies.
That seems to be Stratechery's point as well:
> Facebook’s decision about ads wish the company would wield its power in their favor; my question is whether such power should even exist in the first place. Facebook can close Munroe’s door on anyone, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Re: Tech and Liberty
#18It's quite funny how stereotypical American Ben's blog is. The most important idea that is made explicit in the post (but not justified) is that of the marketplate of ideas, or that 'connecting people' (Zuckerberg) provides meaning, and that speech and an increase in information is a means to mount resistance against the powers that be.
one alternative view was presented by Baudrillard in 1985, talking about the 'uncertainty of reality'.
>"[It] results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information. It is information itself which produces uncertainty, and so this uncertainty, unlike the traditional uncertainty which could always be resolved, is irreparable. … Overinformed, it [the masses] develops ingrowing obesity. For everything which loses its scene (like the obese body) becomes for that very reason ob-scene.
The silence of the masses is also in a sense obscene. For the masses are also made of this useless hyper-information which claims to enlighten them, when all it does is clutter up the space of the representable and annul itself in a silent equivalence. And we cannot do much against this obscene circularity of the masses and of information. The two phenomena fit one another: the masses have no opinion and information does not inform them"
His point being that it is not a lack of discourse but precisely our constant rehashed and fractured discourse and feedback loops between what is real and representations of the real that make either indistinguishable from another. Viewed through this lens speech is not liberation, it's merely participating and destabilizing truth and feeding the very system that it is supposed to criticize. Autocratic lone empires without resistance always fall down, real systems of control allow for their antagonists to persist within them, without of course ever accomplishing anything other than simulating resistance. Think of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial.
Re: Tech and Liberty
#19Political discourse, in Mill's time, was a very different beast than it is today.
How so? And is it different in a way that invalidate Mill's points?
igammarays' comment says what I didn't have time to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21455211
I don't necessarily think this invalidates Mill's points, but Mill believed in exceptions[1], and the dynamics of discourse on social media today would likely give him pause.
1. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bul...
Re: Tech and Liberty
#20I don't quite understand how one can laud Facebook for refusing to be the arbiter of truth in one specific instance, when their entire business is based in large part on filtering what information people do and don't see.