Comment by 1cvmask
4 years ago
The last paragraph from the article regarding John Gilmore:
He's widely credited as the source of the famous aphorism "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
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The EFF has routed around John Gilmore now.
A nuance I see missing from the censorship/free speech dichotomy is around what's essentially DDOSing of speech. I think that the free-est speech has something equivalent to the voting idea of "one person, one vote." No one should be silenced, but also everyone should have equal representation.
In the same way that being very rich generally gives you effectively much more power than having a single vote, and so is a corruption of democracy, I think we see a similar thing with online discourse, where those with extra resources are able to essentially "flood the zone" and dominate the discourse.
So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
I don't know what an effective solution _is_ here, but I know what it _looks_ like -- all voices with equal access. I don't think the censorship/freedom framing gets us there.
This is basically one of the oldest problems on the Net, spam, back to haunt us. We got complacent, sitting back while Google filtered the junk out of our search results and inboxes. But who watches the watchmen? Now, v1agra ads and Serdar Argic[0] have evolved under our noses into camouflaged and effective predators glutted on endless Eternal September fodder.
Now that the Net has devolved into a political battlefield, how do you draw the line between a censorship regime and a spam filter? Was there ever a difference?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic
That's really interesting! When I first saw your comment I thought to myself "well sure, spam is kind of like this, but that's more about commercial/marketing," and on clicking the link and learning about Serdar Argic, I see that, actually, the first big spam incident was actually political trolling. Did not know that history.
> So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
It's a good point, but the loud voices that have been driving this "anti-free speech" shift are also a loud minority. The people who got Alex Jones banned everywhere, got YouTube to start demonetising videos, got Trump banned from Twitter, were essentially a small group of influential Twitter users (some of whom also had jobs in the media, giving them huge platforms to put pressure on these companies). It's a "natural law" of human societies that the 1% are disproportionately loud, on any issue, and drive what the other 99% hear and think; not just a feature of online spaces. When you think of a liberal, or a conservative, or a college student, for example, whatever you picture in your head is just the loudest, most visible portion of that group, but is likely a tiny minority of that group. Whatever opinion you have on science, or nutrition, is driven by a very tiny loud minority, whether that's lobbyists, or a few influential individuals (maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson, maybe Al Gore, maybe a prominent scientist, or maybe the Coca Cola company). Without them, the popular mind might think quite differently.
Ergo; the "censorship shift" isn't about giving the minority their voice, it's two warring minorities struggling for control of the Overton window.
> the loud voices that have been driving this "anti-free speech" shift are also a loud minority. The people who got Alex Jones banned everywhere, got YouTube to start demonetising videos, got Trump banned from Twitter, were essentially a small group of influential Twitter users
I had to laugh - this could easily describe Alex Jones and Trump as the proximate cause of their own bans.
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This is the key ingredient missing from most online fora that is not missing in most face-to-face fora and the actual halls of government (well, most of them): equal time.
In a public physical venue, it's much easier to allocate one person, one time slice to present their views. There are exceptions (lobbying is a huge hack on this, and indeed, there's a reason many see lobbying as anti-democratic). But in contrast: online speech is dominated by whoever has either the most leisure time to toss at an online forum or the willingness and resources to sock-puppet up and turn their one voice into an echoing hydra. Factor in state spending on those hydras and the situation turns pretty un-democratic pretty fast.
Differrnt people repeating the same thing over and over without addressing or acknowledging arguments from the other side still results in a ddos.
While I don't know anything about the board's decision, I think someone who is anti-censorship would be out of favor with a Silicon Valley world that increasingly believes in censoring anything someone (in power) considers "misinformation." This is a big, big change from the early days of the Internet when people believed in free flowing information.
John's attitude is so old school. Shaping the attitude of the populace through selective amplification is now.
a) That's not the last paragraph, but the antepenultimate.
b) As far as I can tell, Gilmore was not trying to censor anyone. It seems more like the EFF has put Gilmore on the other side of their firewall.
The reading I take is that Gilmore opposed censorship, and presumably was impeding actions of the EFF which might be interpreted as same, effectively exercising power through veto (see Francis Fukuyama's concept of a "vetocracy", and note that I'm not familiar enough with EFF's governance to know specifically what veto or obstruction powers exist).
The irony is that the EFF routed around Gilmore's presumed obstruction.
For the record, I'm increasingly of the view that free-speech absolutism is very badly flawed. If my reading of the situation is correct, then I'd agree with the action. That said, I'm as much in the dark as anyone whose information is the Register piece itself, so don't read too much into what I'm saying.
Why do you think free speech absolutism is very badly flawed?
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OF COURSE one of the most arrogant posters on the antepenultimate subthread is an anti-free-speech fucking goon. Fuck you.
Well I found my new favorite word of the week antepenultimate. Thanks FabHK.
Honest question: why use words like "antepenultimate" that are not in common use and don't convey any more meaning than a more common form (like third-last)?
Language, like programming skill or physical muscles, develops under use. Failure to extend beyond quotidian usage and trepidation over sesquipedalian terms will result in atrophy.
Someone probably learned a new word today here. Or was reminded of an unfamiliar one.
And yes, there's virtue as well in clarity. Sometimes that comes from precision.
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Antepenultimate is actually in more common use than third last!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=antepenultimat...
Personally, I like fun words like that, much more than pretentious words like "access" and "empower." YMMV.
Good question. While I enjoy witty or even flamboyant writing, there is plenty of writing that is hard to understand on purpose, and I despise that (postmodern French philosophers come to mind). It seems here I've used a word that is less common and more distracting than I had thought (though it seems some people enjoyed it).
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Antepenultimate is perfectly clear while an uncommon phrase like “third-last” is ambiguous, prone to possible fence post error: is it the first of two before the final sentence or third from last (a reasonable interpretation in UK and Australia, at least) which would mean it would be followed by three sentences.
Maybe you grew up speaking a language where penultimate and antepenultimate's cognates are in common use, like Spanish.
I still remember hearing a Mexican friend whose English was, at the time, very basic use the word "polemical" and I could hardly believe it. I'm not sure most English speakers could use it correctly; I'm all but certain that I at the time couldn't.
Just look at the sibling replies to see how delightful this new word is to some other folks here!
Sometimes using a word outside the register [0] or literary style is just a way to include a nice lexical nugget.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
Because people are encouraged to look up and learn a new word!
Because adhering to a 6th grade vocabulary is tedious.
If people never used rare words or poetic turns of phrase, then communication would just be unbearably dull.
It's a class signifier. It informs readers that the person using the word is smart and therefore his opinion should be respected.
It's the same reason a doctor might use words like "etiology" instead of "cause".
Because we're not writing instruction manuals here.
After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still.
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It's for insecure assholes to feel a sense of superiority over anyone dumber than them. They think that if they've "learned" some new word, it means they're smarter than people who don't know this word, which means they're better. It's the obverse of the "might makes right" coin, but brains over brawn.
One asshole typed up you can look this up in a dictionary. He actually thinks everyone who has a problem with this method of communication must be too dumb to have figured out the meaning of the word on their own.
And that's the same kind of asshole who uses the word "utilize" anywhere and everywhere he can because it has two more syllables than "use." Completely insecure about his own intelligence and place in the world, his only recourse is to try to cut down other people by playing the "look at my vocabulary" game. These people never grew up. They still live in the old high school nerds vs. jocks tropes.
Dictionaries exist.
Anyone is welcome to look up words they don’t understand.
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> antepenultimate
And I thought knowing what penultimate meant was fun. For those that don't know, penultimate means second to last and antepenultimate means third to last.
(There's also "preantepenultimate" if you ever want to say fourth to last without saying fourth to last...)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/preantepenultimate
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This aversion to repetition has also engendered such words as quasihemidemisemiquaver—half half half half eighth note.
I have now discovered "preantepenultimate" and my world is a happier place with a bit of faith in humanity restored. Thank you for leading the way :)
Perhaps you'll also find joy in 'demisemihemidemisemiquaver' and friends!
Here, though, the quest for elegant variation must prematurely conclude at 'quasihemidemisemiquaver'.
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So ... propreantepenultimate must have really tipped you over into ecstasy? :-)
Given EFF's recent political leanings, I'd think Gilmore has a good chance of eventually having the high ground.
And sensible people are routing around the current EFF as a response.
I stopped giving money to them a couple of years ago and have started to become highly critical of recent stances they've taken but every time I mention this I get berated/downvoted to oblivion.
It's sort of vindicating to start seeing others feel the same way finally.
Where do you donate your money now? noyb.eu?
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