The Internet and Its Consequences
Stop Demanding Free Speech Part II - Shorts
A continuation from part 1.
Assuming unlimited free speech where to be granted to all and sundry; what would it be like, what would it do to the value of speech and expression in society, and to whom would it ultimately benefit?
I believe the internet, and more generally social media, provides us a glimpse at what such an approach to speech, and consequently expression may look like. As an aside from here on expression is to be taken as a use of speech, with explicit political goals in mind. This is of course a broad definition, but the distinction around explicit goals and the more abstract uses of speech invoking virtues, or the need to be part of the crowd. One could further suggest that speech is for the masses, the disorganised. Expression is for the organised, The Vanguard, The Party, The Agitators.
Although not perfect, the internet has provided something akin to a near universal guarantee of speech to those who have access to it. Most importantly in the dimensions that we take for granted today. Speech can now be transmitted globally, in a matter of seconds at a near relative cost of zero, providing of course one has the appropriate equipment—which under the conditions of globalism is almost 60% of people worldwide. One doesn’t even need to know how to read and write, post a letter, or work a radio transmitter. Speech has conquered time, space, borders, and even governments—with the help of another government’s expression.
The internet and its consequences have lead to the democratisation of speech to a level unforeseen in history. Now any old idiot can bumble on to the social media soap box and wax lyrical to the masses at large about the ills of our time—I too being full well a hypocrite of this nature. The sad truth to it all is that some of us pull in a willing, but mostly meagre crowd, to gather around our soap boxes. The vast majority do not. Even up to the level of large social media influencers, it is in the scope of world and national affairs noise. It is only with the help of Middle or the High, that Low influencers can be organised into a manner which makes them capable of turning their speech into expression. More often than not carried out without the individual Low actors knowledge.
Unorganised speech is just that, speech. It cannot be actionable or effective in politics because it is not oriented towards a particular goal. In this sense an individual alone can organise their own speech into effective expression. Either by organising speech of theirs into a form that allows them to publicly attack, blackmail or dox and individual. This of course sounds a lot closer to espionage, but words like that don’t apply to those loyal servants of higher powers. An individual can even organise other people’s speech in terms of reporting, a petition, or polling. As the collation of speech complexifies with scale an organised group becomes necessary, further widening the scope of expression to protests, conferences, all the way to media outlets and propaganda bureaus.
The speech of the unorganised group, and for that matter the mass, is worse than speech, it is noise. It carries with it negative social effects. A conversation you don’t want to hear on the phone, hang up. Terrible chat at the pub, go to the next one. Crap music on the radio, change the channel. Woke adverts on the TV, turn it off. But what if all the phone calls where scams? What if every pub is dead and boring? What if no end of channel surfing gets you to good music? I could go on. It is already hard enough today to avoid noise, to avoid the unorganised waffle of the masses and seek organised speech, or silence when it suits.
The legacy of free speech as a concept, outside of the civics classroom and the chatter of unserious politicos, will be one of misery. When its name is not being invoked during the attack of an group, institution, or Western intellectual heritage as a whole. It has produced a maddening cacophony, all the knowledge we could ask for, all the sounds and sights ever seen and recorded by our fellow man. Access to all of it has reduced it to less than nothing, internet-man is a know it all, his arrogance is detestable. He is a fervent materialist-atheist, the facts and the science are his pantheons, and they are all at his fingertips. Ready and armed he engages in battle with his religious and reactionary foes, as is his right. Duelling, physical competition, even hairy pub brawls, if only instead they had argued about Kantian ethics, Roman pre-history, or whether or not Michelle Obama is a man. Ignorance really was bliss.
I never knew all things I never wanted to know.