6 ms·

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.
ssully 5y ago
What are things that you would say in the 1990's that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying today?
- dataangel 5y ago
  Can't speak for parent but I have refrained from discussions of things people have been cancelled for even when I agree what is leading to the cancelling is horrific, because the consequences of getting misinterpreted are too grave. Even asking a clarifying question for something you genuinely don't know could be misinterpreted as a dog whistle. It's hard to blame people for that because sometimes clarifying questions really are feigned ignorance meant to sink time or provoke, but at the same time there is a growing sentiment on Twitter and elsewhere that choosing the most charitable interpretation in discussion is actually bad and empowers bad actors. What you get is a situation where nobody trusts anybody.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  Lol, obviously if I typed it here it would mean I'm comfortable saying it, so it's a Catch-22 isn't it?
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    If you can't explicitly say it, can you at least describe in what ways it is "less free than, say, the 1990s?" If not, the comment loses value.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”. Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed. R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards. Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool. Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
lazide 5y ago
Eh, ‘it depends’ - plenty of people got harassed, sent to jail, or outright killed for being openly gay during that time, among many other things. Not everywhere, but a great many places in the US. Anti-obscenity laws were also going nuts around that time. The internet was relatively mellow on that front, but that was because it was mostly unknown and super niche. society was still trying to apply it’s rules to it, it was just far less competent at doing so.
kbelder 5y ago
I'd agree. I'd also say race relations are on the same trajectory, and that's probably not a coincidence.
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I can see an argument for it, but it's worth noting that there was quite a lot of censorship in the 90s that people don't often remember nowadays. Remember when MTG and D&D completely removed "demon" and "devil" from their lexicon? Remember when Nintendo localization policies required removing every cross from every game?
tptacek 5y ago
In the 1990s, my ability to speak was restricted to high school essays, zines that 12 people read, and FIDONet BBS boards.
- noduerme 5y ago
  That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      Another commonly cited consequence of cancel culture is losing your job or ability to earn money.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate. The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ. I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression. As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.
ashtonkem 5y ago
How old were you in the 1990s? I’ve noticed that for a lot of people, the golden age of no strife just happens to be right before they became aware of how people actually behave in public. I too looked fondly back on the 1990s, but I was also a child. Looking back as an adult I can tell that my recollection of the era was colored by my inexperience. To draw one example, I totally missed all the moral panics of the 1990s, and how many people that harmed just for liking D&D.
gilbetron 5y ago
If you were white, straight, cis, and particularly male, then this is true. Everyone else, eh not so much!
- jimbokun 5y ago
  “Fight the Power” rap groups were incredibly popular then, and enjoyed a lot of support across races. The movement for same sex marriage started in earnest then. Feminism didn’t start in the 2000s. All of those groups had a lot to say in the 90s, and the norms protecting free speech enabled them to say it, even when it was unpopular.
  - gilbetron 5y ago
    And they were "canceled" like crazy. People spoke up about all these issues, and were fired, beaten, jailed, killed, and worse. But a white dude totally could say what he wanted to, kinda.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      This is a really toxic, ahistorical attitude that pays no attention to the many individuals of all races and genders who sacrificed for greater equality. It also fails to address the situation of a nonwhite person now who is cancelled for disagreeing with woke sloganeering, or explain how that's justified just because someone else was evil to someone else in the past.
      - gilbetron 5y ago
        I disagree. Believing the 90s were more free speech and ignoring the context of that era is the toxic, history-ignoring attitude. That's not to say we don't have problems currently, but it is better than it was in the 90s, overall.

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.

ssully 5y ago

What are things that you would say in the 1990's that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying today?

dataangel 5y ago
Can't speak for parent but I have refrained from discussions of things people have been cancelled for even when I agree what is leading to the cancelling is horrific, because the consequences of getting misinterpreted are too grave. Even asking a clarifying question for something you genuinely don't know could be misinterpreted as a dog whistle. It's hard to blame people for that because sometimes clarifying questions really are feigned ignorance meant to sink time or provoke, but at the same time there is a growing sentiment on Twitter and elsewhere that choosing the most charitable interpretation in discussion is actually bad and empowers bad actors. What you get is a situation where nobody trusts anybody.
jimbokun 5y ago
Lol, obviously if I typed it here it would mean I'm comfortable saying it, so it's a Catch-22 isn't it?
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  If you can't explicitly say it, can you at least describe in what ways it is "less free than, say, the 1990s?" If not, the comment loses value.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”. Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed. R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards. Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool. Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.

lazide 5y ago

Eh, ‘it depends’ - plenty of people got harassed, sent to jail, or outright killed for being openly gay during that time, among many other things. Not everywhere, but a great many places in the US. Anti-obscenity laws were also going nuts around that time. The internet was relatively mellow on that front, but that was because it was mostly unknown and super niche. society was still trying to apply it’s rules to it, it was just far less competent at doing so.

kbelder 5y ago

I'd agree. I'd also say race relations are on the same trajectory, and that's probably not a coincidence.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

I can see an argument for it, but it's worth noting that there was quite a lot of censorship in the 90s that people don't often remember nowadays. Remember when MTG and D&D completely removed "demon" and "devil" from their lexicon? Remember when Nintendo localization policies required removing every cross from every game?

tptacek 5y ago

In the 1990s, my ability to speak was restricted to high school essays, zines that 12 people read, and FIDONet BBS boards.

noduerme 5y ago
That was, for many of us, our ability to be heard. Our ability to speak was not hindered by fear of having our lives ruined for holding an unpopular opinion or asking an incorrectly phrased question.
- tptacek 5y ago
  The most common battlefield on which these "cancellation" debates happen is people's access to Twitter, a service that did not exist in the 1990s (you could, obviously, get banned off a BBS for any or no reason). You see it in this very thread: people writing appeals to the amount of control tech companies have over speech, and how unprecedented that is.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    Another commonly cited consequence of cancel culture is losing your job or ability to earn money.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      Sure. And there are certainly disproportionate social and economical responses to speech, such as Colin Kaepernick finding himself unable to sign anywhere as a free agent after Donald Trump called for him to be fired for kneeling during the National Anthem, or David Shor losing his job at Civis Analytics after questioning the political effectiveness of violent riots protesting police misconduct. I'm sure if we dig, we can also find economic responses to speech that we'll agree aren't disproportionate. The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ. I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression. As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.

ashtonkem 5y ago

How old were you in the 1990s? I’ve noticed that for a lot of people, the golden age of no strife just happens to be right before they became aware of how people actually behave in public. I too looked fondly back on the 1990s, but I was also a child. Looking back as an adult I can tell that my recollection of the era was colored by my inexperience. To draw one example, I totally missed all the moral panics of the 1990s, and how many people that harmed just for liking D&D.

gilbetron 5y ago

If you were white, straight, cis, and particularly male, then this is true. Everyone else, eh not so much!

jimbokun 5y ago
“Fight the Power” rap groups were incredibly popular then, and enjoyed a lot of support across races. The movement for same sex marriage started in earnest then. Feminism didn’t start in the 2000s. All of those groups had a lot to say in the 90s, and the norms protecting free speech enabled them to say it, even when it was unpopular.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  And they were "canceled" like crazy. People spoke up about all these issues, and were fired, beaten, jailed, killed, and worse. But a white dude totally could say what he wanted to, kinda.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    This is a really toxic, ahistorical attitude that pays no attention to the many individuals of all races and genders who sacrificed for greater equality. It also fails to address the situation of a nonwhite person now who is cancelled for disagreeing with woke sloganeering, or explain how that's justified just because someone else was evil to someone else in the past.
    - gilbetron 5y ago
      I disagree. Believing the 90s were more free speech and ignoring the context of that era is the toxic, history-ignoring attitude. That's not to say we don't have problems currently, but it is better than it was in the 90s, overall.