They say you shouldn’t talk about politics or religion at work, but what happens when the workplace is the internet?
Above all else, advertising wants not so much to attract as many people as possible, but to repel as few as possible. Same is true for politicians. And when your marketing campaign plays between YouTube videos, you’ll want those videos to be anodyne and vanilla, but not too vanilla. The result is a race to the kindergarten, where free speech is governed by corporate and bureaucratic fear. Fear makes conversation impossible and it ruins the internet.
Companies have become increasingly aggressive and successful in bullying internet platforms and social media companies. Some countries are even considering laws to make exemptions for social media companies to track their users with the excuse of helping to eradicate child pornography. But ask yourself this: is protecting a tiny minority of kids worth the price of building technology to monitor and control the entire human population?
And don’t get me started on the proposed Covid vaccination ID card.
While you were sleeping the bureaucratic powers behind James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State have been growing exponentially along with Moore’s Law. Everyone who imagined what it would be like one day in the far future to live in a world where large, rich, powerful entities watched every single thing every human does, tend to think that world is still far away. But it was already feasible and practicable years ago. The public/private split is an illusion since companies now possess enough servers, processing units, algorithms and “AI” tools to scrutinise every human sentence for transgression. We are already living in an irreversible tyranny of fashionable elite opinion.
Pick one: conversation or chorus. You can’t have both. Companies will spend billions of dollars to turn all conversations into a chorus of lectures, sermons, harangues, hectoring or, at best, the verbal equivalent of hollow boilerplate disclaimers. And there will always be a busybody to help them out. Hence the joke that “We need to have a conversation” really means: “‘Shut Up!’ she explained.”
Conversation can be painful, but a chorus will have catastrophic consequences for society. A while back, people found out about the “Mike Pence Rule”. The former US vice president never let himself be alone with a woman who was not his wife. Of course, progressives mocked him for his rule as if there were no possible argument in favour of it.
Then #MeToo happened. Suddenly, many men in leadership positions adopted the rule and stopped meeting privately with one woman. Women then complained that because business depends on private, off-the-record, face-to-face conversations between the minimum number of insiders, the rule put them at a disadvantage. And they are totally correct.
However, when a single complaint without the presumption of innocence or due process is all it takes to ruin an entire career – even an entire life – there are no other chess moves left but to shift burdens onto other people, which is how we get trapped in situations nobody likes but also that nobody is able or willing to change. Which is probably how historians will describe the 2020s.
Without freedom from fear of unjust consequences of association, there is no freedom of association. Without freedom from fear of unjust consequences of speech, there is no freedom of speech, and the space of possible conversations collapses.
Our world is quickly resembling a Soviet-like or Cultural Revolution-like reality in which the de facto primary coercive pressure in people’s lives – what is effectively the true sovereign – is the Social Failure Mode in which runaway accusation hysteria, malicious tattle-tales and snitches rule the roost. Everyone is trying to denounce everyone else as fervently as possible, terrified of not being sufficiently enthusiastic. We want the fame and glory of being the first to locate a new heresy and root out hidden blasphemers.
A corporate-backed chorus increases the likelihood that people will inadvertently say things that lead to claims of offence. The problem is that without universal rules on what will or will not cause people to claim they are offended, it’s hard to avoid offending someone until you get to know them first. And getting to know someone requires light, free and easy exchange. You know, conversation. Without a “grace period” there is no possibility of a free and easy exchange.
Yet if one is terrified to step on a hidden land mine of someone claiming offence, resulting in severe and negative personal consequences, the internet becomes boring. People begin to log off or adopt strong pseudonymity to insulate their real life. A boring internet is a paradox for business: if people log off or don’t use their real identities online, then what’s the point of all the advertising?
Libertarians have a hard choice to make.
On the one hand, they could choose market entity freedom and let organisations fire people for socially undesirable speech at zero cost or risk to the company. But freedom of speech, socially, effectively and practically disappears. We can only mildly complain, maybe, but don’t cross the lines, whatever your opponents might claim about you.
On the other hand, libertarians could bite the bullet on just one more centimetre of limits on freedom of association after giving up one thousand kilometres for every other basis of discrimination or “protected class” out there. They might require companies to bear some cost – say ten years’ salary as a “speech severance” pay, for instance – of firing a person due to mob pressure. But where’s the “liberty” in that?
It is ultimately a choice between competitive freedoms. Either we allow the state to prohibit the firings, or free speech is dead. Which kind of unfreedom is worse? If “at-will freedom of association absolutism” were on the table so anybody could discriminate against anybody else for any reason or none at all – even all the bad, terrible reasons – then that is a principled position I’m willing to respect, even if it is so far off the table today as to not even exist in the same universe as “tables”.
Where does this lead? Here is a prediction: by the end of this decade, over 90% of those defending the sacred absolute right of organisations to ban or fire people for speech will realise they made a horrible mistake. Cancel culture, deplatforming and the selective-tolerance firings will become so terrible they will join the efforts to stop them. But, by then it will be too late. It is already too late. However, the regret will come only after the window of opportunity has closed for good.
We’ve already seen the very real consequences of a chorus. A lot of quirky internet commentators were totally right about the Covid-19 pandemic at the start and recommended a lot of common-sense measures which, had they been implemented, would have saved thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. We can look back now and admit they were right and all the bioethics people, public health bureaucrats and epidemiologists were wrong, but, well, too late now. Milk spilt.
We’re going to look back on free speech in the same way. “Yeah, we shouldn’t have let them spill it. Oh well, junior, let me tell you, that milk tasted nice while it lasted. But I guess too bad for you guys, since, by our lack of protecting it for you while we could, you’ll never know.”
Speech is special. Once you lose the ability to express viewpoints, you won’t be allowed to argue to get that liberty back.
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