A billion ghosts immanentized
You should go read this excellent post on Technosociology, which makes two points, one that I’ve written about before and one that I’ve been meaning to write. The first is a rebuke to the free speech fetishists of the internet who regard their ability to shout at someone as an absolute right rather than a responsibility.
…the common equation between not wanting governments to regulate offensive speech on the Internet and the position “therefore everyone should be allowed to post whatever they want” is not just wrong, it is likely going to be the end of the kind of free speech we want to protect because sooner or later, most governments who do want to ban speech on the Internet for political reasons are going to be able to legitimately point at these sites and most parents and other sane people will come down for strong regulations on the Internet. Yes, I believe that these regulations will then be used to crack down on “unwanted” political speech but be assured that most people in the world, including the United States, will choose “less speech” criticizing the powerful if they are convinced that without such restrictions, there is no way to stop predation of children and violating women’s dignity and privacy from proliferating on mainstream sites. (There is high-quality poll data from the General Social Survey which confirms this–free speech as an absolute value is a minority position in the United States). It is up to the Internet community to make this a false equivalence and this requires that “but it’s free speech” is not the first, intermediate and last and only phrase we utter when faced with offensive or intimidating content.
The internet has an abundance of freedoms and a dearth of accountability and responsibility. Somehow we’ve acquired the notion that because it’s possible to create throw-away accounts and use pseudonyms, it is therefore good to create them at will and discard any sense of identity while still pretending to be a good faith contributor to online discussions. And then we get people who are outraged that you won’t listen to them when they rant under an obscene pseudonym that they will change again when you ignore them; and in fact, they get particularly outraged when you do ignore them, because they think they have the right to speak while everyone else has the obligation to listen. The petty obsessives of internet free speech all have a bit of Dennis Markuze in them.
And further, the Violentacrez case has highlighted another mistaken idea: their privilege to abrogate all other rights held by others in the name of their right to free speech. Suddenly, anonymity also becomes their right and no one else’s — they can splatter the faces of teenagers in their underwear on the web to serve their right to masturbation material, but if you dare to reveal that they are human beings with identities in the “real” world, you’re violating their rights.
That’s the second thing I appreciate in this essay. It’s time to stop thinking of stuff we say on the internet as somehow not part of the real world. For many of us, the bulk of our communication with others is through this medium; we have more friends who we know well and talk to regularly here on our screens than we meet face-to-face.
Another variant of the argument has been that “it’s just the Internet.” Chill. This, of course, rests of on something I’ve long been railing against, the notion that the Internet is somehow not real, that it’s virtual or that it is “trivial.” (My friend Nathan Jurgenson coined the phrase “digital dualism” to refer to this tendency). In fact, a reddit contributor makes the argument that Gawker, by publishing the real name and location of the person behind “creepshot” did real harm they have “purposefully taken this off the internet and into real life” and this affects “violantacrez’s future employment and immediate safety.”
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