A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003)

Freedom of speech is the fundamental right from which all other rights derive and upon which all liberty depends. What right does anyone have to deny the right to speech simply because the speaker happens to be "15?" What if the next Einstein or Shakespeare or Galileo are being silenced and their genius blotted out forever in the name of ageism?

What is a "troll?" Who gets to define that term? By what basis is a "troll" differentiated from a "non-troll?" Was Diogenes a "troll?" Was John Locke? Galileo? Jesus Christ? A "troll" is simply anyone who offends the status quo - and all necessary advancement in justice, science, philosophy and enlightenment come from offending the status quo. The "troll" is the "unreasonable man" upon whom all progress depends. The "troll" is the enlightened mind looking beyond the shadows of Plato's cave. In today's world, where all art and culture are manufactured by corporations and manipulated by vast, mind-controlling algorithms, the troll participates in the last pure form of human culture that still exists.

Who appointed the admins of a BBS the Ministry of Truth, with unassailable power to determine what speech is or isn't worth publishing? Why do they get to decide what people can and cannot say, what right do they have to dictate what people can say or do, or who is or is not a "troll?"

Surely a few dollars is a small price to pay to maintain the very lifeblood and ideals of civilization itself. Perhaps if they had stuck to their principles, as Voltaire eloquently put it - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - the entire world wouldn't now be suffering under the iron boot of cancel culture, where even the leaders of sovereign governments can be erased from history for the slightest thoughtcrime by pitchfork wielding internet mobs and the Marxist ideologues controlling the few centralized platforms on which the majority of all human communication now occurs.

We shouldn't be casting the trolls aside, we shouldn't be making them pariahs, we should be on our hands and knees thanking them for holding aloft the bright flame of the Enlightenment's ideals in a world full of blissful ignorance and soulless mediocrity.

My dad teaches a world religion class and does a unit on religious restrictions (kosher, halal, etc.). He says one of the hardest things to get across to people, even non-religious people, is that rule systems like these are not about practical considerations, they are about defining who is "in" and who is "out". In a time where religion is no longer analogous with ethnicity, this is just not something people really understand anymore.

As you seem to suggest in your last para, Law is useful, but also insufficient. It is often too rigid and cold. It is easily subverted, selectively applied or conveniently re-interpreted by whoever has more power. Two cultures can have the same constitution yet produce greatly divergent results. You can see this in the failed democracy revolutions of the last 20 years. You can see this in comparing the state of American democracy today with the state of America democracy in the 60s. Both were tumultuous times, but the culture is far more selfist now than then.

I'm a socialist, but I'd take a socialist culture (defined by people genuinely giving the common good priority) on top of a free-market capitalist economy and political system over a individualist/selfist culture on top of a socialist economy and political system any day. The former will actively work to justly distribute resources and opportunity despite the dark tendencies of capitalism and free markets, while the latter will quickly devolve into a farce of socialism.

Progress is ultimately about the progress of Culture.

"Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity, and principles of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, they can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born, and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment, at each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction."

~ Cloud Atlas

Bravo, sir, madam, or other-gendered person. Bravo. You have successfully parodied the slippery slope of free-speech absolutism by equating fifteen year old children running around saying curse words to the Inquisition hassling Galileo for challenging geocentrism at the tender age of fifty-one. I bow to a true master troll; I have not seen effort like this put into a parody argument since the glorious excesses of talk.bizarre.

IRC never totally died. It's decentralized, free software, and has better clients than anything newer (XMPP, Matrix). I'm in ~100 channels across a few networks. It's also what Twitch chat uses, and you can connect to Twitch chats from an IRC client.

I think the centralized proprietary stuff is bound to die. It was never really built to last. AIM and MSN are truly dead. Hopefully Discord dies someday as well.