7 ms·

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings. They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble to kill black men accused of hitting on white women. Not internet “mobs”, actual ones with guns and pitchforks. Literally nothing you’re talking about is new, in fact it has gotten way less bad over the past few decades. In fact, arguing that its new and pernicious requires us to purposefully ignore the history of political and speech based violence throughout the 20th century and earlier.

pessimizer 5y ago
They used to imprison people for sending information about birth control through the mail. I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on. The most common phrase quoted by people to describe a hypothetical rational limit on speech[*] was cribbed from a case that found it was ok to imprison people for passing out pamphlets against WWI. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
- Latty 5y ago
  > I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on. Obviously not always, but often because you are viewing it through the a different lens: there is an unspoken "for people like me" missing from the end of their statement.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I think thats a big part of why powerful writers and journalists are complaining. They’re not used to the masses talking back to them, and they don’t like it very much.
    - _moof 5y ago
      They especially don't like that now, the people they're talking about get to respond directly to them.
- danShumway 5y ago
  There's a huge lack of education and cultural understanding about just how much freedom of speech we have today compared to what it was like in the past. Overall, people in America are more free today to say things than they used to be in the past, period. They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better. I think part of it is that dominant parts of culture were never in a position to experience past censorship. Some of it might just be short memories. Some of it is probably bad faith, or that attacks on Twitter feel more real for some people. But the lack of perspective is a real problem. You don't have to go far into the past to find out that there were tons of taboo topics and ideas that could not be talked about, both because of legal restrictions and gatekeepers, and because of a lack of tolerance from society, and because the mediums through which to talk about them were just so much more centralized and exclusive than they are today. Even today, I find that free speech advocates (and I consider myself to be a free speech advocate) are often uneducated about the scale of censorship that happens outside of mainstream culture. It's really disappointing and frustrating. Academics get a tiny, tiny sliver of the kind of backlash that marginalized groups get when they protest dominant narratives, and it's the end of the world -- because many of them have just never encountered real, hard censorship before and they don't have a frame of reference. Or less charitably, they just don't care about having a frame of reference and it's all just a narrative tool for them.
  - Animats 5y ago
    They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better. Yes. Now everybody has a megaphone and it's too noisy to hear anything. This leads to heavy self-selection of inputs. The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to. For the current war, not much is being censored after the source. You can read all the positions: Russia Today, China Daily, South China Morning Post, One America News Network, CNN, Fox, the Voice of America, the BBC, Reuters, the office of the President of Ukraine... Plus vast amounts of stuff on Twitter. Few people do that. They tend to obtain info from one source they more or less agree with.
jimbokun 5y ago
Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.
- danShumway 5y ago
  I personally don't think even that is true. - Culturally, the 90's were ripe with moral panics over satanism, gender expression, obscenity, etc... That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is that there was a ton of speech suppression happening in the 90's and early 2000's. - Technologically, our mediums today (as problematic as they are) still allow for a greater ease of communication with a wider audience than they did in the 90's. There are developments online since the 90's that I don't like, and I worry about centralization online. But the earlier decentralized Internet was also very insular and inaccessible to a lot of people, and I think that gets lost from conversations about Internet freedom. More people have access to the Internet today and more people have access to publishing platforms today. - In terms of mass media, there is again worrying consolidation happening, but it is nevertheless still the case that getting your message out to a wide audience in 2022 is easier than it was in 1990. Podcasts, video streaming, site deployment, etc... is all easier to do today than it was in the past. Stuff like game development, music production, and so on are also easier today than they were in 1990. That's not to say that they're perfect or can't be improved, but I think back to the Flash boom, and that didn't really start until the early 2000's and it really was a different level of accessibility for making games, including games about political and social topics. In the same vein, a quick reminder that Youtube as a site was not founded until 2005 and until 2010 the max video length was only 10 minutes. Podcasts didn't really start to catch on among the public until the late 2000's. Patreon was launched in 2013, providing a very simple, mainstream way for at least some creators to self-fund their own work by directly interacting with fans. ---- I think people forget sometimes how new all of this stuff is. And again, that ignores how much straight-up censorship and how many moral panics were happening during that time period, but even just from a technological perspective, if I have a message I need to get out, I would rather do it in the 2020's than the 1990's. I could maybe see an argument that we're on a technological downtick from the 2010's, but honestly I don't even believe that. Even with all of the platform problems we have online (and it is a problem for our online communication to be so centralized and there are problems about where some platforms are headed), I still feel like almost everything today about media production and dissemination is just so much easier than it used to be. About the only thing I really miss is Flash, and I don't even really think that's a tech problem, I think many of those developers have just moved over to programs like Unity. Not to say everything is perfect or everything has gotten better, just... I think people have rose-colored glasses that they wear when looking back at those times.
dataangel 5y ago
I'm not convinced that history is just repeating itself. There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go. Bad decisions are far more likely nowadays to be permanently recorded, and moving over to the next town, state etc is no longer enough to escape your history. There were implicit safeguards before in that most people were much less likely to have a wide audience that would remember what they said. It was much easier to change your mind about something and then pretend it was your opinion the entire time and save face. There are organizations with pet issues that dedicate themselves to recording offensive social media posts by college students and then making profile pages for each student on their site to publicly shame them. In the past these kids could graduate and then change their mind years later and no one would be the wiser as long as they never became celebrities or politicians.
- dools 5y ago
  > There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go Just don’t do it on Twitter. Or any social media for that matter. The only difference is that people hadn’t learned yet about vitality and the truth is the statement that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” You can still make all the crass offensive jokes you want around your friends.

pessimizer 5y ago

They used to imprison people for sending information about birth control through the mail. I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on. The most common phrase quoted by people to describe a hypothetical rational limit on speech[*] was cribbed from a case that found it was ok to imprison people for passing out pamphlets against WWI. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Latty 5y ago
> I don't know what planet the "it wasn't like this in the good old days" people live on. Obviously not always, but often because you are viewing it through the a different lens: there is an unspoken "for people like me" missing from the end of their statement.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I think thats a big part of why powerful writers and journalists are complaining. They’re not used to the masses talking back to them, and they don’t like it very much.
  - _moof 5y ago
    They especially don't like that now, the people they're talking about get to respond directly to them.
danShumway 5y ago
There's a huge lack of education and cultural understanding about just how much freedom of speech we have today compared to what it was like in the past. Overall, people in America are more free today to say things than they used to be in the past, period. They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better. I think part of it is that dominant parts of culture were never in a position to experience past censorship. Some of it might just be short memories. Some of it is probably bad faith, or that attacks on Twitter feel more real for some people. But the lack of perspective is a real problem. You don't have to go far into the past to find out that there were tons of taboo topics and ideas that could not be talked about, both because of legal restrictions and gatekeepers, and because of a lack of tolerance from society, and because the mediums through which to talk about them were just so much more centralized and exclusive than they are today. Even today, I find that free speech advocates (and I consider myself to be a free speech advocate) are often uneducated about the scale of censorship that happens outside of mainstream culture. It's really disappointing and frustrating. Academics get a tiny, tiny sliver of the kind of backlash that marginalized groups get when they protest dominant narratives, and it's the end of the world -- because many of them have just never encountered real, hard censorship before and they don't have a frame of reference. Or less charitably, they just don't care about having a frame of reference and it's all just a narrative tool for them.
- Animats 5y ago
  They have more mediums that they can publish to, it is easier than ever before for them to get support and to connect with communities, and legal protections have literally never been better. Yes. Now everybody has a megaphone and it's too noisy to hear anything. This leads to heavy self-selection of inputs. The real battle today is not over who can say what. It's what people should be listening to. For the current war, not much is being censored after the source. You can read all the positions: Russia Today, China Daily, South China Morning Post, One America News Network, CNN, Fox, the Voice of America, the BBC, Reuters, the office of the President of Ukraine... Plus vast amounts of stuff on Twitter. Few people do that. They tend to obtain info from one source they more or less agree with.

jimbokun 5y ago

Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s. But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.

danShumway 5y ago
I personally don't think even that is true. - Culturally, the 90's were ripe with moral panics over satanism, gender expression, obscenity, etc... That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is that there was a ton of speech suppression happening in the 90's and early 2000's. - Technologically, our mediums today (as problematic as they are) still allow for a greater ease of communication with a wider audience than they did in the 90's. There are developments online since the 90's that I don't like, and I worry about centralization online. But the earlier decentralized Internet was also very insular and inaccessible to a lot of people, and I think that gets lost from conversations about Internet freedom. More people have access to the Internet today and more people have access to publishing platforms today. - In terms of mass media, there is again worrying consolidation happening, but it is nevertheless still the case that getting your message out to a wide audience in 2022 is easier than it was in 1990. Podcasts, video streaming, site deployment, etc... is all easier to do today than it was in the past. Stuff like game development, music production, and so on are also easier today than they were in 1990. That's not to say that they're perfect or can't be improved, but I think back to the Flash boom, and that didn't really start until the early 2000's and it really was a different level of accessibility for making games, including games about political and social topics. In the same vein, a quick reminder that Youtube as a site was not founded until 2005 and until 2010 the max video length was only 10 minutes. Podcasts didn't really start to catch on among the public until the late 2000's. Patreon was launched in 2013, providing a very simple, mainstream way for at least some creators to self-fund their own work by directly interacting with fans. ---- I think people forget sometimes how new all of this stuff is. And again, that ignores how much straight-up censorship and how many moral panics were happening during that time period, but even just from a technological perspective, if I have a message I need to get out, I would rather do it in the 2020's than the 1990's. I could maybe see an argument that we're on a technological downtick from the 2010's, but honestly I don't even believe that. Even with all of the platform problems we have online (and it is a problem for our online communication to be so centralized and there are problems about where some platforms are headed), I still feel like almost everything today about media production and dissemination is just so much easier than it used to be. About the only thing I really miss is Flash, and I don't even really think that's a tech problem, I think many of those developers have just moved over to programs like Unity. Not to say everything is perfect or everything has gotten better, just... I think people have rose-colored glasses that they wear when looking back at those times.

dataangel 5y ago

I'm not convinced that history is just repeating itself. There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go. Bad decisions are far more likely nowadays to be permanently recorded, and moving over to the next town, state etc is no longer enough to escape your history. There were implicit safeguards before in that most people were much less likely to have a wide audience that would remember what they said. It was much easier to change your mind about something and then pretend it was your opinion the entire time and save face. There are organizations with pet issues that dedicate themselves to recording offensive social media posts by college students and then making profile pages for each student on their site to publicly shame them. In the past these kids could graduate and then change their mind years later and no one would be the wiser as long as they never became celebrities or politicians.

dools 5y ago
> There does seem to be something qualitatively different about the possibility that nowadays a non-celebrity can spout an offensive joke or political take and have it be much more likely to be recorded and broadcast to the whole world with permanent consequences for them everywhere they go Just don’t do it on Twitter. Or any social media for that matter. The only difference is that people hadn’t learned yet about vitality and the truth is the statement that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” You can still make all the crass offensive jokes you want around your friends.