Comment by renewiltord
5 years ago
Ah no, I advocate the rights of any group of free people to speak - not for any group of free people to rule. Ten thousand of you can speak that you hate me. You have the right. But not one of you may lay a finger on a hair on my head. You do not have that right.
Read my post history. I am consistent on this matter.
* On the matter of W.H.Auden refusing to publish with a publisher who refused to publish Ezra Pound. Here I believed this was perfect reactions on every side. The publisher did not like Ezra Pound because Pound is a fascist sympathizer. Auden felt that this deplatforming and so told the publisher he would no longer be publishing with them. The publisher changed his mind because he wanted Auden to publish with him. All civil, all consistent with free association.
* The NYT insisted on publishing Scott Alexander's real name. He didn't like this and pulled Slate Star Codex. My reaction was that this is bad on the NYT's part and I would prefer not to subscribe to them. Not that they should be legally censured. Simply that we as free people should exercise this and free ourselves from them.
* When David Shor was fired from Civis, I thought that was a mistake. So 'cancel culture' ate itself there. But that's fine. I will simply choose not to associate myself with Civis.
I think we both agree that physical violence is off the table. "Due process" is important not because of physical violence per se, but because the impact of the violence is significant. And so is cancelling someone out - depending on a person's position losing their job could be a disaster. Well-off software engineers may not feel it, but most people do. The mob justice does not follow any sort of due process - accusations fly and Emmanuel Cafferty gets fired. The cancel culture did not eat itself, it ate an utility worker.
My point is that mob justice is not justice. Taking (in)action yourself is well and good, but the farther you want to spread it around the more rigorous your processes and standards should be.
It is not justice. But it is free expression and I'll preserve that easily because I'm not going to stop someone from saying "I will uninstall Firefox unless Brendan Eich is fired". They have that right. And they have the right to say "And you should too". I'll probably say "No thanks, man. I like Firefox" and then they can say "You're a bigot, too" and they have a right to all of these because freedom is more important than protecting your job.
Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it and remake freedom of expression in a stilted image if I give them the chance.
If freedom is used to unjust ends, then the problem lies with the path there not the freedom itself.
> Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it
I suggest self-restraint and holding yourself to a higher standard before passing around harmful judgements. The farther you cast your accusations, the higher the standard. Who are "they" here?
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What do we do when hundreds or thousands of those voices are actually bots controlled by one or two people, but they pose as real people online.
One could argue this is one or two people expressing their freedom of speech, and using technology to do so, but another might argue that since it's not a genuine sentiment of real people in each instance, it might not be called free speech.
I think introducing the fact that online, you can't punch someone in the face and face the consequences is meaningful. I don't advocate violence, but I mean there is no way to know you are engaging with genuine people who are willing to participate in the speech.
I don't have as solution either, a bunch of ideas, and no reason to execute them, and it's also a nightmarish hellscape that I don't really want to wade into :)
Haha, a good point. I think we enable everyone to amplify their speech. When a single person can only talk 1x, tech to make it 100x makes you very powerful. But if everyone has tech to make it 100x, your tech needs to go to 10000x to have the same relative impact it did originally. i.e. tech growth doesn't scale well enough. The early gainers are very powerful.
Maybe when we all have GPT-3 with hecka more params, no one can propaganda-war us because we will be immune because of constant ongoing prop-war.
I don't really know, but I think I bias towards making everyone so powerful that it's hard to get more powerful.
That’s an idealized view - but since there’s not much any individual can do, it’s a decent one :) Though I think it’s fair to say technology has widened the gap between the rich and poor, not shrunk it. Yes, the poor are better off on paper in a lot of ways, but it’s lead to a massive consolidation of wealth that could be much better distributed.
I think my real point is: stop trying to make online discourse like in-person discourse, or, double down and expect the same “proof of work” that being physically present requires.
On top of that, there are limits to the extent and volume of any in-person communication that simply isn’t reproducible online without massive artificial constraints.
I think we need to revisit things we consider valid in person and not try to conflate them to be the same once we are online at a massive scale as a literal species. People forget that there were only millions of people online in the 90s, and there are billions now, this is a new era, and it requires new thinking and new unified action, but that’s really not possible when large swaths of humanity are tribal, nationalistic, scared, hungry, poor, angry, and manipulated.
I almost feel like arguing about free speech online is putting the cart before the horse.