by mitte90
I don’t have to tell anyone here about the rash of new and upcoming online “safety” bills being introduced in many western countries presently. Basically these amount to increasing censorship of ordinary people whose speech is portrayed as harmful or dangerous, and at the same time increasing the ability of governments to impose a single narrative about any current topic and surveilling and shutting down speech that is critical or strays outside its bounds.
There’s already a major chilling effect on free speech with the degree of surveillance and censorship we already have. There are obvious reasons why governments and deep state in these countries would want to crush dissent, limit speech and generally repress free thought and expression in the population. OTOH, the open internet has always been a useful resource for the powers that shouldn’t be, because it allows them to take the temperature of popular opinion about areas of current special interest, or to watch new trends and currents of thought as they emerge. Of course, they also use the internet to try to influence and shape these trends. Bot armies, paid-for shills and agenda-friendly influencers are deployed and ideas are seeded with the aim of persuading ordinary people to pick them up and spread them “organically” on their social networks.
So far, the interent has always been sort of ours and sort of theirs. There’s an understanding on both sides that it’s good and bad, it’s not really one thing or the other. The open web is incredibly useful but also slightly dangerous to the rulers and would-be rulers of this world, who want to shape and control our speech, but also want to listen in to what we would say if we thought no-one was listening. Of course, it’s been a long time since anyone thought that the deep state wasn’t listening. But despite the surveillance, the walled gardens, the filter bubbles, the bots and shills (and the genuine idiots), despite the slightly oppressive atmosphere created by the existing degree of internet censorship, the manipulation of search results and the “fact-check” and “disinfo” labels which appear on anything remotely “off-message” – often in practice, this means anything which is remotely true – despite all this, the internet is still incredibly useful to most ordinary people, while we recognise it is not free of problems or risks.
Up to this point, we’ve had a kind of balancing act between the good and the bad things about the internet, and the scales have mostly tipped in favour of it being useful enough that we continue to use it. But if governments – operating typically via behind-the-scenes “arrangements” with the tech companies – get any more heavy-handed with their censorship – or if new laws give them more powers to censor more directly or overtly – then the internet is going to get a lot less appealing and a lot more hostile for ordinary people, and it’s going to get that way fast. Sure, some of the usual “NPC” types will be ok with that. (I put “NPC” in quotes because I’ve always had reservations about calling people that name, it seems dehumanising, but tbh, in this context, it also just seems like the most appropriate word to use. )
The thing is, people might go on using the internet, but the chilling effect on free speech is going to be so icy cold that online speech will no longer resemble anything freely expressed from the heart, or from the hip. It will all have to be carefully considered, and limited, and clipped. Even if the consideration of what’s safe to say becomes so routine that we’re barely even conscious of censoring ourselves, we’ll still be doing it. You could say that’s exactly what they want. It’s a very effective way of silencing dissent, effectively getting people to silence themselves, getting them to instinctively steer clear of controversial topics and make sure to express the “right” opinion or not to express one at all. But with that chilling of speech, the “monitors” also lose the rich source of information that the internet provided them with previously. Try taking the temperature of public opinion after several years of laws that chill free speech. All you’re going to find is that the social temperature is… chilly. And the speech isn’t free.
Historians and commentators always say what a huge surprise the collapse of the Soviet Union was. Apparently, there was no real, strong signal that it was all going to fall apart.
A regime can be taken down – suddenly and without warning – when its people are so used to having to chill their speech that they can understand how cold everybody else is feeling without even having to say a word about it. Yes, they might be afraid to speak because snitches go among them, yes, paranoia and distrust might make it hard for them to organise collectively. Yes, yes, but still. People find a way to communicate even when they can’t speak freely. When people are not allowed to protest, criticise, or express dissent, the regime loses it’s sense of the population, no longer hears its dissatisfaction or knows what makes it tick, what it loves or lives for, what pisses it the fuck off. In the USSR, the party lost its sense and then its grip on the population, slowly at first, and silently, and then suddenly. Their grip was too hard and too total and the people slipped from it like water.
Western politicians and their tech platform puppets and their media mouthpieces have long ago lost touch with the people. They surveil us and monitor and spy on us, but they do’n’t fucking hear us, because they don’t fucking listen to us. They manipulate the marketplace of ideas, they rig the game, they lie and distort and misinform, then tell us that the public square needs to be policed to keep us safe from misinformation. But the “public square” isn’t even somewhere they can identify or reach anymore. We’re already conscious in a place beyond them. They’ve lost touch, so they’re trying to hold on by tightening their grip. They’ll get their dead internet perhaps, they’ll make it so inhospitable, so devoid of any spark of free expression, a place populated by zombies and corpses, which the living will pass though like ghosts, and they won’t know us, or see anything but the sheets they made us cover ourselves with, the blank pages of our decoy “Lifebooks”, the joyless scribbles that we pass off as our literarture. Ha ha, if they kill our internet, we’ll be elsewhere anyway. We already are. Life grows in the cracks between the concrete blocks. Life finds a way.