Episode 135: Transcript
Episode: 135: The Myth of Free Speech
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] So, Charlie Jane, what are you gonna do now that speech is free? I mean, we don't even have to take loans out to get it anymore.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:07] I know! I am just gonna go completely wild on, like, a speaking spree. I'm just gonna be speeching it up all over the place, and nobody can stop me, or charge me high interest balloon payment loans in order to speak my mind. It's just, it's all free. As soon as I pay the $8, I can say whatever I want.
Annalee: [00:00:31] It's amazing. Yeah. And it’s just the one annual fee. Well, I think what I'm going to do is use all that free speech now as padding in my shirt to make myself look like I have really big biceps. Because I don't think that anyone's gonna mess with a really like muscly enby. So, I'm gonna get up to like, Hulk size.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:55] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:00:55] All the free speech padding just like all over my shirt. It’s gonna be really intimidating, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:01] Pump it up, pump it up. Yeah, I mean, I basically have just been surrounding myself with a gaseous cloud of free speech and it's slowly expanding. And at this rate I figure within about like 15 or 16 years it's going to envelop the entire solar system and the gaseous cloud of my speech is going to… Basically, it’s going to create atmospheres on all the other planets in the solar system. They'll be toxic atmospheres, but there'll be atmospheres. And, like—
Annalee: [00:01:26] And the ones that already have atmospheres, who cares about them?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:31] Who cares? Yeah, exactly. My speech is going to wipe that out. And that's how I'm going to occupy Mars and Venus and Jupiter and Mercury and basically all of them. I'm just going to like, you're welcome. Here is my speech.
Annalee: [00:01:45] In case you have no idea what's happening right now, you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a show about science fiction, science, and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest novel, which you can get anywhere that fine novels are sold, is called, The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:05] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My latest novel is Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the third book in my Young Adult Space Opera trilogy that started with Victories Greater Than Death. I'm also reviewing science fiction and fantasy books every month in The Washington Post, and I've been writing for Marvel Comics. You can still get New Mutants: Lethal Legion.
Annalee: [00:02:26] So, today's episode is part of our occasional series, “Silicon Valley vs. Science Fiction,” which is where we focus on all the ways that tech companies misunderstand and appropriate science fiction to sell products. So today we're looking at the myth of free speech and how George Orwell's novel, 1984, has been used to justify free speech extremism in Silicon Valley.
[00:02:52] We're going to talk about what the novel is really about. And, more importantly, we're going to talk about how George Orwell identified a key connection between what ultimately became social media and fascism. And this is a connection that the captains of tech industry really seem to have missed. And yes, we're going to talk about Twitter.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:14] Hell yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:15] Hell yeah. We are going to start tweeting.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:19] We're going to go there.
Annalee: [00:03:22] And also on our mini episode next week, for patrons only, we will be talking about how 1984 actually became its own science fiction subgenre and has spawned a whole world of stories that are exploring its particular kind of dystopia.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:40] Yeah, and you know, that reminds me, did you know that this podcast is not owned by Twitter? It's not owned by, like The Zarb Corporation. None of the gargle, plugal corporations out there that are trying to like own everything own Our Opinions Are Correct.
Annalee: [00:03:56] We're not in the pockets of Big Electron.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:59] We are not. This podcast remains completely independent, completely like, our own bag. And that is thanks to you, our listeners, who support us through Patreon. We just can't even tell you how much it means to us. And if you were to become a patron and support us on Patreon, you would be getting a mini episode every other week when we're not putting out another episode. And you can hang out with us on Discord because we're in there all the time and we're sharing some of our opinions that are nearly as correct as the opinions that we put in this podcast. They're like asymptotically correct.
Annalee: [00:04:33] Yeah, they're approaching correctness. You could help us make them more correct.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:37] They’re asymptoddling towards correctness. And you could be part of our community. You could be part of the, Our Opinions Are Correct community for just a few bucks a month, you know, just a few bucks! But, if you can give more, that's also really appreciated. And anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct.
[00:04:58] So you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right, let's talk free speech.
[00:05:10] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:05:41] So, let's start off by talking about what this episode is not about. We're not talking about government censorship of speech. We're not talking about the first amendment. We're not talking about the feds busting down your door, right?
Annalee: [00:05:52] No, we're not. We're talking about Silicon Valley, which means we're talking about private industry and how private industry regulates speech.
[00:06:00] We're looking specifically at social media in Silicon Valley. And there’s this longstanding confusion in the United States because we do have an amendment to our constitution that deals with free speech and with how the government can't interfere with speech. And I think when people talk about free speech in Silicon Valley, that's the first confusion they have is they're like, oh, but it’s my legal right.
[00:06:23] And that's not true because when you're talking about a privately owned company that has a speech platform, you don't have any rights because the company owns it and there's no right to recourse to the law if you feel like your speech is being infringed on.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:41] Yeah. Okay. So, what exactly are we talking about then? What is free speech? What do we mean when we say free speech?
Annalee: [00:06:48] So, that is the problem. And again, this is a problem that really plagues Silicon Valley because there actually isn't a good definition of free speech. And that's because we don't really have a good definition of freedom. So, because we're not talking about legal definitions of free speech, we're talking about kind of an ideal of free speech, we have to consider the fact that freedom is something that has been defined and redefined over and over for thousands of years. And different people have different ideas about what it is.
[00:07:23] And so, when we talk about free speech, the word “speech” is really doing a lot of work. And it reminds me a lot of the first episode we did in this series where we looked at artificial intelligence, and people were talking about it as if we knew what intelligence was, but we don't, and yet we're trying to build an artificial version of it.
[00:07:43] And I think we have the same problem with free speech, where we don't really have a good definition of freedom, but we're trying to build speech machines based on it.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:52] Yeah, and I guess, in the States, a lot of it comes down to the stuff we talked about in our episode on rugged individualism, the idea that like, I can say what I want to, I'm a rugged individual, I'm out there expressing myself, and nobody can tell me what to do. And often that kind of goes back to a lot of our myths that come out of settler colonialism. And there's embedded in that the idea of who gets to be a rugged individual and who gets to express themselves fully.
Annalee: [00:08:19] Yeah, I think one of the things that often gets left out of free speech discussions in Silicon Valley is that imbalance of power and that, in fact, as long as you can speak that somehow you have freedom, but of course, some people are more free than others and that's really, really important.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:39] Yeah, I mean, you know, in the United States, a lot of it comes from the Enlightenment where we sort of, you know, had this idea that there should be a robust exchange of views. And it's a beautiful idea, the idea that like everybody gets to have their say and we're all going to be expressing ourselves.
[00:08:55] But some people just want to kind of piss in the pool and make it impossible to reach any real understanding because that's not their goal. Their goal is to actually have us never come to a clear understanding of stuff.
[00:09:08] Okay, so we have this idea of free speech, which is very slippery and very kind of hard to pin down and make sense of. And when Silicon Valley companies talk about it, they often cite the novel 1984 by George Orwell. What is it about that book that's so important to people? What happens in that book?
Annalee: [00:09:24] So, 1984 is always brought up as the book that lays out a terrible dystopia that we want to avoid. It's viewed as a warning. And so, when Silicon Valley takes it up and kind of turns it into a prop in conversations about free speech, they're always saying like, well, everything in this book is what we want to avoid doing. And so, all of our machines, everything we're making is kind of a back formation from this book. And, lots and lots of us had to read this book in high school or in college, so I'm not going to go too deeply into the plot, but what I will say is that, for those who've forgotten, it's a tale of a future version of England, which has suffered through horrible atomic wars. The city of London has been destroyed by atomics, and is now ruled by a totalitarian socialist government that's called Ingsoc, or English socialism, and the head of the ruling party is a shady figure called Big Brother.
[00:10:27] We actually never know if Big Brother is real or not. Big Brother might just be propaganda. And Big Brother is often making announcements and pronouncements that we hear in the background. And one of the slogans of Ingsoc is, “War is peace.” Another slogan is, “Freedom is slavery.” So you get the idea that this is a regime built on really bonkers propaganda.
[00:10:50] And our main character, Winston Smith, is a member of the party who starts to question the values of the party. And he starts to keep a diary where he records all his thoughts. He eventually has an affair with another person who is questioning the party named Julia. And they have this forbidden love affair. It's called a sex crime because you're not supposed to have non-procreative sex, if you're in the party. And, of course, eventually they're caught. And a big part of the book is devoted to Winston Smith's ordeal as he's being tortured and brainwashed by the regime, by Ingsoc, and specifically by, this one guy who's having a long conversation with him about how he's going to empty his brain out and fill it with the love of Big Brother, and indeed the book ends in this very dark place where Winston Smith does come to love Big Brother, and that's right before we assume he's going to be, killed, so his mind is taken away from him.
[00:11:49] And the thing about 1984, I think, to keep in mind, is that it gives us this connection between three basic horrors that lead to this dystopia.
[00:12:06] One is that the world is full of these omnipresent surveillance devices called telescreens that can see everything, but also are constantly broadcasting. So, they're basically social media, and every member of the party has one of these telescreens in their room at home and all throughout their workplaces.
[00:12:21] It also has very totalizing fascism, run by Big Brother. And crucially, this is a racist, anti-Semitic fascism. There's this imaginary enemy of the state called Emanuel Goldstein, who everybody is expected to spew hatred at for two minutes every day. They have the “two minutes hate.”
[00:12:42] And then the final piece of that, of the horrifying fascist world is sexual repression because, controlling sexuality is a really big part of Ingsoc. And so these are ideas that mostly don't get taken up by Silicon Valley. That's what's interesting, is Silicon Valley seems to have really only gotten one message out of this, which is that Winston Smith just feels bad because he's not able to communicate.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:10] Yeah. And obviously Orwell didn't have access to Instagram, as far as we know. So, do you think he wanted this to be a warning about specifically the technologies we have or about the free speech dilemmas that we're facing now?
Annalee: [00:13:25] Yeah, I mean, it's complicated. I mean, Orwell was a leftist writer who felt really betrayed by what had happened in the Soviet Union. He really believed in the Russian Revolution, and when Stalin came to power and started propagandizing in this really ham fisted, thuggish way, and disappearing people, and sending people to labor camps, he really wanted to lodge a complaint, as it were.
[00:13:52] And so, I think it's funny because in Silicon Valley, I think that 1984 is often kind of appropriated as like a right-wing criticism of a leftist regime gone too far, but actually the book itself is a leftist criticism of a leftist regime that has become basically fascist. And it's, it's kind of an anti-war book more than an anti-free speech book.
[00:14:16] There's a really interesting essay from 1961 by Eric Fromm, who's a social psychologist. And Fromm thinks that the book is about the lie of nuclear deterrence and that it's an anti-atomics book, and that this slogan, “War is Peace,” is Orwell's attempt to criticize the idea that always readying yourself for war, like in a state of nuclear deterrence, is actually how you keep the peace.
[00:14:46] Which when you think about it, is kind of double think. It is this weird idea that you build up weapons in order to have peace. And so, I think, I mean, it’s hard to say what Orwell would make of the world we're in now, but I think at the time Orwell was much more focused on the horrors of wartime propaganda and totalitarianism.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:08] So, there's a lot going on in this book, and I'm not sure, why have people seized on it as just a story about freedom of speech?
Annalee: [00:15:16] You know, I think it's because the book does deal so much with language and with Winston Smith keeping a diary and how much that diary is meaningful to him. there's this really interesting comment, from Michael Warner, who's a cultural critic, and in 2002, he published this book called Publics and Counterpublics, and he talks specifically about the irony of people viewing the book as being about speech when it's really about something else.
[00:15:45] So, I'm going to send you this quote from him and have you read it.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:49] “The image of 14 million copies of Orwell's books lighting up the UPC scanners of the free world certainly contrasts oddly with Orwell's own image of Winston's diary hidden in a drawer with a speck of dust carefully placed on top so that it will be possible to tell when the police have read it.
[00:16:13] “Winston Smith writes, ‘It was not by making yourself heard, but by staying sane, that you carried on the human heritage.’ And somehow Orwell has come to stand for the opposite of that sentiment, that carrying on the human heritage requires that one be heard by as many people as possible.”
[00:16:36] Wow, that quote cuts like a knife.
Annalee: [00:16:38] I know, because it really that really gets to the heart of the mistake, I think, that Silicon Valley is making, is that the issue is that Winston Smith just wasn't being heard by enough people. When in fact, the issue was that he was going to be tortured and killed. He had no freedom and that he lived in a bombed-out landscape where there's no food and very little resources. You know, it's funny because I had forgotten how much… When I reread 1984 to prepare for this episode, I had forgotten how much of the book is about language and about, the creation of Newspeak, which is the language of Ingsoc, which is intended to, kind of evaporate thought and evaporate freedom.
[00:17:32] And so the book is in a sense about why speech is terrible, and why speaking can be incredibly harmful and abusive.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:41] Yeah, but I feel like what people miss in Newspeak is the power dynamic where it's about the powerful telling the rest of us what we're allowed to think about and trying to elide realities that they don't want us to be aware of and trying to kind of create a false reality that supports their worldview.
[00:18:01] But it's not just about prohibiting certain ideas. It's about creating a coherent worldview that is basically its own kind of prison.
Annalee: [00:18:10] Yeah. I mean, I'm going to actually read you a little bit from an appendix to 1984 that George Orwell wrote that's called “The Principles of Newspeak.”
[00:18:20] And actually, it’s really worth going back and reading this if you're interested in the language of this book. So he is describing the creation of this dictionary of Newspeak, and this is what he says. “Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a party member could properly wish to express while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
[00:18:51] “To give a single example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as, this dog is free from lice, or this field is free from weeds. It could not be used in its old sense of politically free or intellectually free since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore of necessity, nameless, quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive.
[00:19:27] “Newspeak was designed not to extend, but to diminish the range of thought.”
[00:19:34] So here he's really criticizing the idea of speech as freedom. He's saying, actually, there's a form of speech that destroys freedom, destroys thought, destroys your ability to have democratic debate.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:46] Yeah, and it really does get to that idea that sort of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language shapes thought, and that if you can't say something, you can't think about it. Or if you say something a specific way, it shapes the way you think about it.
Annalee: [00:20:04] Yeah, and I think that that's, again, something that is being left out of Silicon Valley's view of free speech, is sort of forgetting about how language is constantly being shaped by people in power.
[00:20:19] You know, Newspeak is the creation of the party. And what you're allowed to say is completely determined by politics and ideology. And so, even if Winston Smith had completely free Newspeak, he wouldn't be able to do anything with it. And so, again, I think that's why it's so funny to me that Silicon Valley seized on this book as the thing that was going to lead them toward free speech and democracy, even if the idea is that, okay, the book is telling us what to not do.
[00:20:57] I mean, one of the things the book is saying not to do is like, assume that language makes us free. Like that's one of the messages of the book.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:07] Yeah… So okay, when did Silicon Valley first kind of seize upon 1984 as an important touchstone?
Annalee: [00:21:14] It's really funny because it was in a commercial for the Apple Macintosh that was coming out in January of the year 1984. And Apple made this bonkers commercial, which I think people still scratch their heads over. You can watch it online and we're going to play a little clip from it, but basically it's this dystopian world where all of these people in chains, in black and white, are watching Big Brother on a giant telescreen. And you can hear in the background, like, Big Brother sort of muttering about defeating our enemies.
[00:21:49] And then into this giant auditorium runs this woman in full color carrying a giant hammer and she runs in and she throws her hammer at the screen and it shatters and then once that shatters you'll hear what Apple has to say about that.
Apple Ad Clip: [00:22:06] Big Brother: Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail.
[Explosion]
Announcer: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
Annalee: [00:22:31] I love how this ad is like very Newspeak-ful. Like what does it mean? 1984 won't be 1984 ?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:39] I mean…
Annalee: [00:22:39] How is the Apple Macintosh gonna rescue us from Big Brother? I'm not sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:44] I mean, I had a Macintosh, or at least I… Actually, I didn't have a Macintosh. I used Macintosh's at my school computer lab at some point in the late eighties. And I never felt like they were saving me from totalitarianism. That never seemed to be one of the features that you could pull up, by like, you know, going to the menu and clicking your mouse.
[00:23:05] Annalee, how was I using my Macintosh wrong? How was I supposed to use it to stop totalitarianism?
Annalee: [00:23:10] Drop-down ideology menu? I don't know. So, I think the idea was just, technology sets us free and that the Macintosh is going to be the good technology that leads us into this glorious late 20th century moment. But I think that it really is, in the last 20 years, the sort of social media era, maybe I would say even the last 10, 15 years that you've really started to see 1984 used in discussions about free speech instead of just sort of like vaguely saying like, we're gonna do nice stuff and it won't be like 1984 .
Charlie Jane: [00:23:49] Mm-Hmm. And so now, obviously, social media has become a much bigger deal in the last 10, 15 years. And we do have this question of how to balance free expression with moderation, which means how do you have free speech without hate speech or without that example I gave earlier of running into a room full of people having a serious conversation and being, “Farts, farts, farts!” And like shutting down all other conversation.
[00:24:16] And you know, it feels like what Silicon Valley says, at least, it's not what they actually put into practice, but what they say is that we should not limit any speech at all, right?
Annalee: [00:24:26] Yeah, and the idea is that by not limiting speech, you're preventing Big Brother from coming into existence, and Big Brother…
Charlie Jane: [00:24:35] I don't get it.
Annalee: [00:24:37] Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like…
Charlie Jane: [00:24:37] I don't see the linkage.
Annalee: [00:24:40] You know, the idea, and if you hear, for example, Mark Zuckerberg gives speeches when he talks about free speech, he says what we're doing is we're lifting up everyone's voice and that that automatically produces democracy, which is some great double think right there because we know what happened in Myanmar and various other places, thanks to Facebook, lifting up people's voices. But I think the notion is we're going to head off this world of censorship where no one is able to speak except for Big Brother and the Ingsoc government.
[00:25:11] But instead, I mean, it's a classic Silicon Valley story where they wanted to be the ones to defeat Big Brother, but instead they built the telescreen. And we have surveillance, we have censorship by algorithm, it's not exactly a free world there on, social media.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:31] So what's the problem with having just unlimited speech? Like, why can't we just do that?
Annalee: [00:25:35] Yeah, it's a question that a lot of Silicon Valley companies are asking right now, and I read this interesting history of free speech called Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media by a Dutch social scientist named Jacob Mchangama, and he leans heavily on this idea of the Weimar fallacy, which is something that gets thrown around a lot in these debates, and that fallacy is basically the claim that if we could limit, Nazi propaganda, that it would have prevented the Nazi regime from coming to pass.
[00:26:08] So, the Weimar fallacy is that if the Weimar government had just somehow not allowed Hitler and his buddies to talk, that they never would have come into power. And, a lot of people believe that's a fallacy because they think that, it doesn't really matter if you limit speech, you can't prevent political events from coming to pass.
[00:26:29] And then that becomes kind of just overall, the fallacy of limiting hate speech. Because if you limit hate speech, it's going to be the same problem that the Weimar Republic ran into, which is that you just can't stop Nazism. It's going to come to pass. Even if you try to try to moderate this conversation.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:49] That’s a very dark view of, of history. That horrible things are just inevitable and we can do nothing about them. That's like, I find that incredibly depressing, and also clearly not true because you do have to be able to organize and spread harmful ideas in order to create these destructive movements.
[00:27:09] And there is, you know, we can see how social media has, actually made that easier to do and kind of facilitated that. So let's talk about Twitter.
Annalee: [00:27:20] Yep. We gotta talk about Twitter, and we gotta talk about cancel culture.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:25] Woo hoo!
Annalee: [00:27:26] All right, well, when we come back from the break, we're gonna get into it.
[00:27:28] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:27:36] So I wanted to think about Twitter as a case study in how the lessons of 1984 are being basically misapplied to social media.
[00:27:43] So, Elon Musk has said that he wants Twitter to be a free speech space, and he's described that as, “People you don't like saying things you don't like.” And that means, based on what's happening on Twitter now, allowing people to post abuse, hate speech, conspiracy theories, misinformation, child sexual abuse materials, and all kinds of other stuff.
[00:28:08] And, on a recent interview, Elon Musk summed up his position in one tweet length statement.
Elon Musk Quote: [00:28:18] Who is to say that one person's misinformation is another person's information?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:24] Wow. Wow.
Annalee: [00:28:23] To me, that just sounds like, “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.” And, you know, Musk himself has become a kind of Big Brother figure who forbids the use of certain words like, “cisgender”. He bans people who disagree with his party line.
[00:28:41] And that's why I want to very gently suggest that Twitter is veering toward becoming something like the fascist media that Orwell describes in 1984. And yet, if anyone suggests that, Musk and his comrades claim they're being threatened with “cancellation.” What the heck does that even mean?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:59] I mean, so, cancel culture, much like free speech, is one of those phrases that can kind of mean what you want it to mean, depending on who you are and how you stand in relation to power.
[00:29:12] It actually came out of a 1981 song by the band Chic, the sort of famous disco band who had a song called “Your Love is Cancelled.”
[00:29:19] And the idea of like being cancelled became a kind of meme in the Black community and then slowly percolated to the rest of us.
[00:29:28] And it's just sort of this vague idea that if you say the wrong thing or, you know, often they conflate it with like harassing people or actually assaulting people. But if you say or do the wrong thing, you could suffer huge professional consequences.
[00:29:40] And often, it's really vague. And they'll lump together really heinous examples of people behaving really badly and losing their jobs with examples of people saying really horrible stuff and being disinvited from speaking somewhere or being just criticized. Even just being criticized can be described as cancellation if people feel sensitive enough about the way that they're being criticized.
[00:30:04] And I actually wrote a piece for my newsletter, which we can link to in the show notes about cancel culture, where I kind of try to peel apart all the different ways that people think about it. And it's actually, it's so sticky and so kind of goopy.
Annalee: [00:30:16] Yeah. I mean, I think it's a way of trying to talk about censorship, in a certain sense, and this kind of comes back to the fear of Newspeak, which is that, you know, I think what cancel culture believers think is that they are not allowed to criticize anyone.
[00:30:36] And at the same time, what they're doing is creating an environment where no one is allowed to criticize them. We all have to engage in double think and only say that they're good because we don't have the word for bad anymore. The word bad is no longer allowed on Twitter. You can only say ungood.
[00:30:52] You know, the other thing that I think is happening in Silicon Valley is that cancel culture and concerns around that have led to this idea that there is a crisis in free speech and Nesrine Malik, who's an amazing journalist, has a book out called We Need New Stories where she talks about this exact system where we create this idea of a free speech crisis, and it's actually a myth.
[00:31:21] And I want to play this clip where she talks about why it's a myth and how the myth works. She was on BBC talking to Krish Guru-Murthy about how the myth works.
Nesrine Malik: [00:31:31] It's made every objection to a hate speech or an inciting comment or a violent inciting comment by politicians or people with a public profile, it has legitimized that view because any objection to it is immediately framed as a free speech issue.
[00:31:51] For example, when Boris Johnson said that Muslim women look like letterboxes and hate crimes against Muslim women rose after he made those comments a Telegraph column. The responses to that column and people pointing out that it has actually, on the ground, increased hate crimes against Muslim women and has made life more dangerous for people.
[00:32:15] The response to that was, “But it's his right to say what he wants. It's free speech.” And the response to that is. I'm not saying it's not his right to say what he wants, but we need to engage with the repercussions of that in the real world. What free speech crisis mythology does is it very effectively manages to find a way not to engage with the repercussions of hate speech by saying, well, it's just about free speech, isn't it?
[00:32:41] Okay. No, no, fine. He has free speech. We all have free speech. But we need to actually understand how that speech affects people and then think about is that regulated? Is that something that needs to be punished? Is that something that needs to be moderated in a certain way?
Charlie Jane: [00:32:57] Yeah, I love what she has to say. And it really is true that, like, if you can't talk about the real world consequences of speech, like that hate speech provably leads to violence, you are actually putting a chilling effect on important discussions. Like you're the one who's trying to shut down a conversation.
Annalee: [00:33:14] Yeah. I mean, I think this gets to one of the myths about free speech and that whole idea of forgetting what freedom really means, because we kind of forget about the listening part of free speech.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:28] Right.
Annalee: [00:33:28] I think on these social media platforms, there's this idea that if people are all yelling, that somehow we're having democratic debate and listening to each other. But free speech, as it's formulated on Twitter, doesn't usually lead to listening. And even when it does, we forget about how the listener is affected.
[00:33:51] We just, we completely leave out the listening aspect of what's happening here and how lives are being affected. And I think that's where these questions around moderation have to come back into the conversation.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:04] Yeah, and it is very Orwellian that you have these tech leaders who will… I feel like any time a tech leader starts saying, you're free, you can do what you want, you can say what you want, really, if you peel back the layer of what they're saying, it always comes back to, obey, conform, listen to your betters, don’t contradict the people in charge. It's actually just one millimeter below the surface, that's what they're really saying most of the time.
Annalee: [00:34:32] There's also a whole rhetoric of sex crime going on in this, too. and that's what I think is so interesting about Elon Musk's Twitter is that he's banned words like cisgender. And it really is, again, it's a lot like Newspeak where we're not allowed to discuss anything that's outside the norm of cis heterosexuality, and anything beyond that is unspeakable.
We have to have sexual repression in here, in order to fully create the world of free speech, somehow. And yet that's, of course, antithetical to freedom in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:11] Yeah. And, you know, I feel like the opposite of free speech for a lot of these people is the idea that we will be in an echo chamber or a filter bubble where we're only going to hear opinions we agree with. And yeah, it's good to be challenged. It's good to hear opinions that challenge your worldview. But it's not always good to just have people screaming at you that you don't deserve to exist. And those aren't challenging, useful opinions.
[00:35:35] I also think that the kind of basic problem that we're talking about here is that tech promises to empower us. That's always the thing that tech says it'll do. It'll empower us. It'll make us more able to accomplish the things we want to accomplish, more able to express ourselves. But then often the result of all that surveillance and all of the algorithms that are kind of manipulating our conversations is that we're extremely disempowered.
Annalee: [00:36:02] Yeah, the other thing is just to go back to the language aspect of it one more time is that we think a lot about the speech part of free speech and very little about the freedom, and that's how we end up with this idea that all speech is equivalent. And as long as we're engaging in speech, that we are free, and we never have to worry about the content of the speech, as Malik was saying. Like, we don't have to worry if Boris Johnson's opinions are affecting the lives of Muslim women, because it's just free speech. He can say whatever he wants. Muslim women can say whatever they want, even though, of course, they don't have the same platform that he does. And that as long as everybody's talking, we're free. But actually, freedom, also means freedom from abuse, freedom from torture, freedom from being stalked, freedom from being called names on the street.
[00:36:59] I mean, if you want to think about the freedom that Winston Smith needed in 1984, it was not Twitter. He needed freedom from a government that was going to kidnap and torture him. He needed freedom from oppressive systems that didn't allow him to have sex with whoever he wanted to have sex with. And that's not the kind of freedom that Elon Musk is talking about. He's only talking about just, I get to speak. And, of course, he's the only one that really gets to speak because if anyone contradicts him, they get vaporized.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:39] Right. And I can't go on a lot of social media places and say, “I'm happy to be trans, being trans is wonderful, it's made my life so much better,” without having this giant blowback from a bunch of assholes who basically are going to shut down my ability to express myself. I'm going to lose my freedom of speech so that they can have theirs.
Annalee: [00:37:57] Yeah. You're going to, and here's the thing, you're going to lose your freedom. You won't lose your ability to speak. You can talk as much as you want. But your freedom will be severely circumscribed by the reaction of your listeners.
[00:38:10] And that's why I think as we move forward and think about what free speech means, we need to focus a lot more on what do we mean by freedom? Because we can't have freedom in a world that's unmoderated. It’s not freedom to have people screaming at you and abusing you and threatening you with the loss of your job every day.
[00:38:32] That's, you know. That is actually the opposite of freedom. That is living in a precarious terrifying situation where you are scared that you might be killed and that's exactly what Winston Smith feared and it wasn't because of his inability to speak, it was because of his inability to live, his inability to stay sane because he was constantly being gaslit with double think.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:57] I think that more noise doesn't necessarily lead to more understanding. And the idea of free speech doesn't always include the component of listening and actually paying attention to what the other person is saying and getting something useful out of it.
Annalee: [00:39:13] Yeah. I want to return to Eric Fromm, whose essay I was talking about earlier. He says that the novel 1984 is a mood. It's not just a story. It creates a mood and it's the mood of fascism. It's lonely. It's hopeless. And it's interesting because those two emotions are ones that people often report feeling when they stay on social media for too long. Like the emotion of doom scrolling is a kind of lonely hopelessness.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:47] So true.
[00:39:47] And so I think it's worth thinking about how 1984 does give us a key to understanding what's happening with social media in Silicon Valley and fascism or authoritarianism. That's a big part of what's going on and what's creating that doom scrolling mood. And it goes back to the fact that Silicon Valley looked at Winston Smith's problem in 1984 and decided that free speech was the solution. But the solution was actually freedom from abuse and propaganda.
[00:40:21] And propaganda? It is a form of speech. Sure, people should be free to engage in it, but when all you're exposed to is propaganda, it becomes no longer freedom. It becomes speech without freedom, and that's what we really need to be revisiting, I think, as we move forward with social media and Silicon Valley.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:43] I love that. That's a really good way to, yeah, that's awesome.
Annalee: [00:40:48] All right. Thank you so much for listening. This has been another episode of doom scrolling with Our Opinions Are Correct. Remember that you can actually find us on social media. Not on Twitter, but we are on Mastodon on Wandering Shop. We are also on Patreon, of course, and you can find us on Instagram as @OurOpinions.
[00:41:11] You can also find this podcast anywhere where fine podcasts are purveyed and we would love it if you could leave a review for us, in some form of social media to help people find the podcast.
[00:41:24] Thank you so much to our wonderful producer Veronica Simonetti for painstakingly going over all the mistakes that we make in every episode and making them make sense.
[00:41:33] Thank you so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music, and thank you for listening. And if you're a patron, thank you so much for supporting us and we'll see you on Discord. Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:41:45] Bye.
[00:41:45] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]