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In one sense, I'd argue that the feeling of censorship is misguided. People are more free to communicate now with a larger audience than ever before in history.

In one sense, I'd argue that the feeling of censorship is misguided. People are more free to communicate now with a larger audience than ever before in history. Before if you had something controversial to say, unless you were an extremely well-known academic or politician, it didn't get any further than your barstool or bridge club. Now your thoughts can be instantly transmitted to an audience of literally millions. Ideas are being hyper-amplified, not hyper-suppressed. However, it comes with a catch. In pre-Internet days, when your verbal blurts potentially reached dozens, you felt fairly free and unimpeded to reach the limits of your communication bubble, tiny as it was. Even if you were roundly condemned, the area of effect was likely small and the duration transitory. Now that your verbal blurts can reach millions, so many more people can take issue with your words, and they remain part of your dreaded "permanent record" forever. Consequently the stakes have become much higher. Speech doesn't feel free and unimpeded, even though in practice structural impediments have been greatly reduced. It seems to me unfortunately that the lowering of structural impediments to communication ineluctably goes hand in hand with the raising of social impediments. People are becoming cautious because we simply can't take for granted that any speech we generate will stay safely within its intended audience. Private emails can be dredged up years later. Screenshots can be taken without our knowledge. Phones can record videos of us saying and doing things we thought were personal and confidential. Information just wanted to be free, and got its wish, but it's turned people into prisoners in a panopticon. My point being, these are two sides of the same coin. Blaming "Marxism" or "cancel culture" and the like isn't going to change that fact.

raclage 5y ago
I think this is a good analysis and I think too few people consider it this way. I'm not convinced that changes in culture are driving this as much as changes in how information is shared and spread and I'm disappointed how few people, even on Hacker News, seem interested in this angle.
zeouter 5y ago
This makes a lot of sense to me, thank you.
schoen 5y ago
> Even if you were roundly condemned, the area of effect was likely small and the duration transitory. In the past, the duration could be transitory even if the audience was larger! I think that because mass media archives were previously much less available and less easily searchable. If you got on TV or had an article or letter published in a newspaper or magazine, a whole lot of people might have seen it at a point in time, but it would be relatively inconvenient for people to do the research to dig it up on microfiche or VHS tape archives or something in order to try to punish you for what you said later on. So opposition research was mostly done against political candidates, judicial nominees, or whatever, but not necessarily against other people. When I was a college student I wrote a lot of letters to my college newspaper. Many of them got printed, and some of them greatly angered activists on campus, some of whom then expressed strong anger toward me. That was very shocking and upsetting for me, but probably the lifecycle of that anger was on the order of days to weeks, as opposed to having people routinely and easily look up my views in order to get angry at me over and over again months or years later (or even try to get me in hot water with friends or employers). In that case, I sought out a larger audience, but "enjoyed" that audience in a mostly pretty ephemeral way.

raclage 5y ago

I think this is a good analysis and I think too few people consider it this way. I'm not convinced that changes in culture are driving this as much as changes in how information is shared and spread and I'm disappointed how few people, even on Hacker News, seem interested in this angle.

zeouter 5y ago

This makes a lot of sense to me, thank you.

schoen 5y ago

> Even if you were roundly condemned, the area of effect was likely small and the duration transitory. In the past, the duration could be transitory even if the audience was larger! I think that because mass media archives were previously much less available and less easily searchable. If you got on TV or had an article or letter published in a newspaper or magazine, a whole lot of people might have seen it at a point in time, but it would be relatively inconvenient for people to do the research to dig it up on microfiche or VHS tape archives or something in order to try to punish you for what you said later on. So opposition research was mostly done against political candidates, judicial nominees, or whatever, but not necessarily against other people. When I was a college student I wrote a lot of letters to my college newspaper. Many of them got printed, and some of them greatly angered activists on campus, some of whom then expressed strong anger toward me. That was very shocking and upsetting for me, but probably the lifecycle of that anger was on the order of days to weeks, as opposed to having people routinely and easily look up my views in order to get angry at me over and over again months or years later (or even try to get me in hot water with friends or employers). In that case, I sought out a larger audience, but "enjoyed" that audience in a mostly pretty ephemeral way.