"This, to me, is the difference between censors and freethinkers. For the former, the world is a narrow, obvious, uninteresting place. In their misery as tenants of this uninteresting pile of particles, they become impatient to correct its wrongs."
Thanks for championing free speech. I think this is the most important issue today, because everything else springs from that source.
Rather than championing free speech, perhaps it would be more effective to focus on identifying the people and organizations who are attacking and subverting free speech, and spelling out what they are doing, and why they appear to be doing it. We need to formulate aggressive, specific, counterattacks, keeping in mind that free speech, like most freedoms, is a two-edged sword.
"the latter is stronger" and goes hand in hand with tribalism, the foundational strong urge that is now algorithmically and institutionally amplified. Free speech as a true value is an amazing exception that needs to be continually upheld and argued for.
Well said. I know the republicans deserved to lose, that’s why I stayed home. But the Dems will restart their cancel campaign and identity politics, so they certainly did not deserve to win. We need people fighting for free speech more than ever.
I'm a lifelong Republican except for the years I was pissed off and registered Libertarian. I voted red. I think GOP messaging is awful; but the left has gone so far off the deep end. A writing friend posted that we need to be like Canada because they take care of their people and there are no homeless. WTF? There are nearly as many homeless per capita in Canada than the US ... fewer than the US, but it's friggin' cold up there. And my husband's cousin had to wait 6 months for an MRI, and his other cousin was given a 9 month wait to remove a tumor so he literally drove to upstate NY and paid out of pocket for an out-patient surgery. I'm so tired of the left saying everything is better in Canada.
Right now, we don’t have free speech on any major social media platform.
You have no reliable way to reach your friends on Facebook or followers on X.
They make accessing the ‘following’ feed inconvenient or complex enough that the majority of users can’t utilize it.
Make a post on X and you’re lucky if 1% of your followers see that post
The “For you” feed on X is always front and center. These posts are curated by algorithms and artificial intelligence. This is how they control information and spread propaganda.
It’s sophisticated censorship and it must be addressed.
The problem is, addressing this censorship and challenging Elon Musk will likely result in a shadow ban. And influencers will no longer be able to do marketing and promotion or cash in on ad revenue sharing. 99% will put profit before principles.
Yes, just don't use it if you don't like. Forcing those platforms to conform to anything opens up a whole host of new, worse problems (as you've written about!).
There's a subculture of young people who want to be off social media and desire "in real life" experiences. Some have even returned to flip phones. Fran Leibowitz proclaimed with utmost certainty that "young people just don't go to the movies." She couldn't be more wrong. Movie theaters are coming back, and it's almost all young people. Young people are even buying DVDs and CDs again to some extent.
We should be trying to get more people to return to the offline world. There's reams of people lost forever to Facebook politics, Instagram popularity contests, having their heads shrunk by MSNBC or Fox News, and the like. Having "corrections" implemented by one party or another will just lead to being propagandized in a different direction.
My three youngest (25, 23, 22) are rarely on social media (my youngest has no social media accounts at all.) They consciously give up their phones during Lent, don't bring their phones into their bedroom (doom-scrolling at night) and are not all that interested in partisan politics. However, they are more devout than my two older kids, go to church as young adults (no pressure from me) and one listens to religious podcasts, one listens to religious, political, and philosophical podcasts, and one listens to history podcasts. They watch no television unless it's a specific movie or show they plan for. And they are all super frugal and have no debt. (My two oldest are not frugal and are both in debt.) It's very interesting that I have kids in two different generations and watching their choices.
It's foolish to expect free speech inside the walls of any tech platform whose primary goal is generating income from ads or incendiary posts, or pushing targeted slop meant to keep the user scrolling forever. The incentives aren't there for these platforms to favor openness or neutrality, and I don't think forcing them to do so is prudent. Or feasible; algorithm-free or algorithm-lite social media or video platforms have mostly crashed and burned, because users are addicted to those algorithms. Putting the government's hand in "fixing" these algorithms will only make things much worse.
We should expect and demand free speech in personal relationships, publishing, museums, universities and especially government. People need to build new cultural, educations and media institutions, even at a micro-indie scale, to reflect what they want to see in the world . If you don't like X or BlueSky or TikTok, don't use it. Nobody should accept any world government bullying platforms to conform to official messaging, or making the cost of entry for new players untenable when they're satisfied with forcing the current massive platforms to tow the line.
Commitments to free speech and liberal principles have to start with each individual person embracing those values.
I don't know, but it seems like X and facebook were always kinda shitty ways to communicate anyway. The fact that you are now bemoaning them as inadequate seems to prove that
I think this is somewhat an individuals problem. Not the Tiabis of the world, but the consumers of it. My feed is fantastic. But I curate it like crazy, I block or “dont recommend” heavily, i strategically choose who i subscribe to, if there is something I am curious about but am worried it will mess with my feed I first open it in an incognito window. In fairness I almost exclusively use substack and YouTube. But curating your feed is like curating your diet, and I think both are, not necessarily the sole responsibility of the people consuming, but definitely something they should be doing if they want better (i hate this word) content on offer.
I greatly curate my feed as well and if someone goes off the deep end I just unfollow them. It's also eclectic because I want different opinions, plus a lot of sports.
It always has been. Before the advent of digital media news consumption was channeled through the big tv networks and a few high-profile print sources. Permitting corporate consolidation made the problem worse. It’s easier than ever to source info from different places, but a similar set of circumstances has emerged with the dominant SM platforms crafting ever-sharper ways of exposing users to the ‘product placement’ that started to make itself manifest in the old days (70s & 80s) with the prominence of Coke cans in sit-com establishing shots.
As ever, money is in the driver$ $eat - hey! It’s a tough business!
The difference nowadays is that a formerly familiar materialistic ethos has become utterly dominant. In the 60s the mismanagement of the Vietnam war ultimately lead many to question its moral rationale. And when Walter Cronkite et al started doubting it the sea change in public support for the war was on. In those days media figures themselves retained some moral scruples. The Century 21 bunch seems more interested in preening, and their followers get off on it.
Matt(s): It's too bad political agendas and narratives get in the way of free speech. One 'side' has much more run, cash, and dedication on this than the other.
Free speech is like crime, in that it only becomes a problem when it happens to you. Most people will trade their free speech for a promised free sandwich from the government. Good to know there are still some who will not.
This is being reported as “change election”. The only thing that will change is the newcomers net worth. Any organization that adheres to seniority is designed to fight change. The new majority is preparing to elect a fossilized humped over leader who has spent fifty years slopping a the public trough. What has changed?
There is censorship on the right and left which is why, even though I'm right of center politically, I've always called myself a civil libertarian. In the 1980s I was censored on my college campus when liberals collected my college newspaper (I was editor of The Redwood Review for two years) and threw them in the trash. Because God-forbid we let anyone read something they disagreed with. My intro to law professor was a raging Marxist but he liked me and told me I was the ONLY student of his in years who actually challenged him in class on something he said. Civil discourse used to be fun, intellectually challenging, and part of the human experience. Civil discourse is virtually dead.
I'm Matt's age, I knew a lot of real hippies and liberals growing up in the SF Bay Area, and I'm just shocked that people who had always been true liberals became the speech police today. I hate that I self-censor because of my career -- too many authors I know have been vilified on-line, given bad reviews, because they came out as conservative or for/against an issue that is in vogue. I'm not big enough where an organized effort couldn't damage my career. I'm only recently been more vocal because my kids are all adults so damage to my career affects only me. I had real friends disavow me because I wasn't on board with Black Lives Matter and I defended law enforcement (my oldest is a cop, damn straight I'm going to defend cops when her life is in danger every day.) COVID was the tipping point for me. Too many of my liberal friends were willing to give up liberty for safety so I called them on it. And lost more friends. (Not Facebook friends, I'm talking people I actually know and grew up with or worked with.)
Thanks Matt for the blizzard of quotes from free thinkers wanting to be heard. That resonates with all of us.
What I don’t see in much of todays demands to be heard isn’t the expression of wanting to go their own way as much as the expressed threat that we Americans stand in their way (which is preposterous) and the only way for them to express themselves is the elimination of everything we know as American.
Indeed or that a POV once expressed should have political consequences.
The law has a purpose in a society that’s why laws are adopted by extensive discussion and finally by vote of representatives responsible to the people.
Because being miserable is easy. It rhymes with being bored. Being happy requires you to constantly find and then participate in things you enjoy (and, just as important, to keep seeking out new things to enjoy after you grow restless from doing the old stuff).
"Life has more possibilities now, not fewer. Why are people determined to be miserable?"
I'm sure there are any number of answers to that question, but I suspect much of it comes down to our contemporary culture of victimhood. We've reached the peculiar point where happiness is almost suspect, while grievance has become something of a social credential.
Consider the traditional Caucasian housewife who is happily married, loves her children, and finds fulfillment in raising a family. She seems to be among the most reviled creatures on social media. She's hopelessly naive, hopelessly oppressed, and hopelessly unaware of her own misery. If only someone could explain to her how exploited she is, she might finally have the decency to be unhappy.
Meanwhile, we're invited to admire the fiercely independent, empowered woman who arrives at the gym with professional video equipment, lighting, and enough cables to stage a network television broadcast. She then records herself screaming at some unfortunate fellow who glanced in her direction, apparently because he was trying not to trip over her equipment. Naturally, she's the victim, and naturally, we're supposed to applaud her courage.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have confused being happy with being oblivious, being offended with being oppressed, and being obnoxious with being brave.
Perhaps the problem isn't that life offers too few possibilities. Perhaps it's that we've made being miserable one of the most rewarding possibilities of all.
Free speech has always been dangerous to the powerful. Perhaps the culture of safetyism has something to do with why young people who were raised on it are fearful of the free exchange of ideas.
A great essay, but may I offer a moderate reframing of this question? - “Why are people determined that no one be less miserable than them?” The cultural collectivist has an equation for the proper distribution of unhappiness and you are to be governed by his dismal calculus.
I'm not sure I believe free speech even factored in to the mid-terms. Not that it shouldn't have, just that it's totally eclipsed by endless wars at the behest of Israel and Trump's generally being a disappointment to everyone across the board other than border enforcement.
He's not stupid, and I'm sure he saw this massacre coming. That implies he knowingly sacrificed our future to appease the Israelis. It's hard not to conclude they have something particularly juicy on him, perhaps from Epstein's years of efforts.
I believe the generation got messed up by being told that being called bad names was bullying. It got defined away from being physically beaten up. I can remember the first time I heard a kid call another a bully. When I asked the kid what happened, he had been called bad names. In my era it was "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Adults would get involved any time a kid said something another did not like.
"This, to me, is the difference between censors and freethinkers. For the former, the world is a narrow, obvious, uninteresting place. In their misery as tenants of this uninteresting pile of particles, they become impatient to correct its wrongs."
Thanks for championing free speech. I think this is the most important issue today, because everything else springs from that source.
Rather than championing free speech, perhaps it would be more effective to focus on identifying the people and organizations who are attacking and subverting free speech, and spelling out what they are doing, and why they appear to be doing it. We need to formulate aggressive, specific, counterattacks, keeping in mind that free speech, like most freedoms, is a two-edged sword.
Doesn't the act of doing this champion free speech?
Matt -- thanks for the great quote from Nat Hentoff:
“There are two innate human urges, the urge to procreate and the urge to say shut up,” Hentoff once said. “Unfortunately, the latter is stronger.”
"the latter is stronger" and goes hand in hand with tribalism, the foundational strong urge that is now algorithmically and institutionally amplified. Free speech as a true value is an amazing exception that needs to be continually upheld and argued for.
"hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe"
----𝐀𝐫𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚; 𝐀 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐫. 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐜'𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝 (𝟏𝟔𝟒𝟒)
Full text at the Milton Reading Room: https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/areopagitica/text.shtml
Milton’s Areopagitica—one of my old favorites!
Well said. I know the republicans deserved to lose, that’s why I stayed home. But the Dems will restart their cancel campaign and identity politics, so they certainly did not deserve to win. We need people fighting for free speech more than ever.
I agree, but I didn't stay home, for just that which you stated. cancel culture, identity politics............
I'm a lifelong Republican except for the years I was pissed off and registered Libertarian. I voted red. I think GOP messaging is awful; but the left has gone so far off the deep end. A writing friend posted that we need to be like Canada because they take care of their people and there are no homeless. WTF? There are nearly as many homeless per capita in Canada than the US ... fewer than the US, but it's friggin' cold up there. And my husband's cousin had to wait 6 months for an MRI, and his other cousin was given a 9 month wait to remove a tumor so he literally drove to upstate NY and paid out of pocket for an out-patient surgery. I'm so tired of the left saying everything is better in Canada.
wondering if your friend has been to Ottawa or Toronto lately......
Matt,
Right now, we don’t have free speech on any major social media platform.
You have no reliable way to reach your friends on Facebook or followers on X.
They make accessing the ‘following’ feed inconvenient or complex enough that the majority of users can’t utilize it.
Make a post on X and you’re lucky if 1% of your followers see that post
The “For you” feed on X is always front and center. These posts are curated by algorithms and artificial intelligence. This is how they control information and spread propaganda.
It’s sophisticated censorship and it must be addressed.
The problem is, addressing this censorship and challenging Elon Musk will likely result in a shadow ban. And influencers will no longer be able to do marketing and promotion or cash in on ad revenue sharing. 99% will put profit before principles.
I’m deamplified on X so much, it’s not even worth using anymore.
Social media is only part of the landscape. The big goal is keeping a full-blown speech bureaucracy from forming.
Yes, just don't use it if you don't like. Forcing those platforms to conform to anything opens up a whole host of new, worse problems (as you've written about!).
There's a subculture of young people who want to be off social media and desire "in real life" experiences. Some have even returned to flip phones. Fran Leibowitz proclaimed with utmost certainty that "young people just don't go to the movies." She couldn't be more wrong. Movie theaters are coming back, and it's almost all young people. Young people are even buying DVDs and CDs again to some extent.
We should be trying to get more people to return to the offline world. There's reams of people lost forever to Facebook politics, Instagram popularity contests, having their heads shrunk by MSNBC or Fox News, and the like. Having "corrections" implemented by one party or another will just lead to being propagandized in a different direction.
My three youngest (25, 23, 22) are rarely on social media (my youngest has no social media accounts at all.) They consciously give up their phones during Lent, don't bring their phones into their bedroom (doom-scrolling at night) and are not all that interested in partisan politics. However, they are more devout than my two older kids, go to church as young adults (no pressure from me) and one listens to religious podcasts, one listens to religious, political, and philosophical podcasts, and one listens to history podcasts. They watch no television unless it's a specific movie or show they plan for. And they are all super frugal and have no debt. (My two oldest are not frugal and are both in debt.) It's very interesting that I have kids in two different generations and watching their choices.
It's foolish to expect free speech inside the walls of any tech platform whose primary goal is generating income from ads or incendiary posts, or pushing targeted slop meant to keep the user scrolling forever. The incentives aren't there for these platforms to favor openness or neutrality, and I don't think forcing them to do so is prudent. Or feasible; algorithm-free or algorithm-lite social media or video platforms have mostly crashed and burned, because users are addicted to those algorithms. Putting the government's hand in "fixing" these algorithms will only make things much worse.
We should expect and demand free speech in personal relationships, publishing, museums, universities and especially government. People need to build new cultural, educations and media institutions, even at a micro-indie scale, to reflect what they want to see in the world . If you don't like X or BlueSky or TikTok, don't use it. Nobody should accept any world government bullying platforms to conform to official messaging, or making the cost of entry for new players untenable when they're satisfied with forcing the current massive platforms to tow the line.
Commitments to free speech and liberal principles have to start with each individual person embracing those values.
I don't know, but it seems like X and facebook were always kinda shitty ways to communicate anyway. The fact that you are now bemoaning them as inadequate seems to prove that
The majority of people under the age of 50 get information from social media.
Every major social media platform is tightly controlled.
Like I said, you have no reliable way to reach your followers on X. Make no mistake, this is by design.
Comment sections are sorted by “relevance”. Which means artificial intelligence decides what information is relevant to you.
This is a very serious problem.
I think this is somewhat an individuals problem. Not the Tiabis of the world, but the consumers of it. My feed is fantastic. But I curate it like crazy, I block or “dont recommend” heavily, i strategically choose who i subscribe to, if there is something I am curious about but am worried it will mess with my feed I first open it in an incognito window. In fairness I almost exclusively use substack and YouTube. But curating your feed is like curating your diet, and I think both are, not necessarily the sole responsibility of the people consuming, but definitely something they should be doing if they want better (i hate this word) content on offer.
I greatly curate my feed as well and if someone goes off the deep end I just unfollow them. It's also eclectic because I want different opinions, plus a lot of sports.
I am neither under 50 nor braindead enough to use media that are so obviously flawed and skewed to someone else's priorities
biased AI - good luck with that.
It always has been. Before the advent of digital media news consumption was channeled through the big tv networks and a few high-profile print sources. Permitting corporate consolidation made the problem worse. It’s easier than ever to source info from different places, but a similar set of circumstances has emerged with the dominant SM platforms crafting ever-sharper ways of exposing users to the ‘product placement’ that started to make itself manifest in the old days (70s & 80s) with the prominence of Coke cans in sit-com establishing shots.
As ever, money is in the driver$ $eat - hey! It’s a tough business!
The difference nowadays is that a formerly familiar materialistic ethos has become utterly dominant. In the 60s the mismanagement of the Vietnam war ultimately lead many to question its moral rationale. And when Walter Cronkite et al started doubting it the sea change in public support for the war was on. In those days media figures themselves retained some moral scruples. The Century 21 bunch seems more interested in preening, and their followers get off on it.
Matt(s): It's too bad political agendas and narratives get in the way of free speech. One 'side' has much more run, cash, and dedication on this than the other.
Free speech is like crime, in that it only becomes a problem when it happens to you. Most people will trade their free speech for a promised free sandwich from the government. Good to know there are still some who will not.
"We're all part of the same hypocrisy, Senator".
This is being reported as “change election”. The only thing that will change is the newcomers net worth. Any organization that adheres to seniority is designed to fight change. The new majority is preparing to elect a fossilized humped over leader who has spent fifty years slopping a the public trough. What has changed?
There is censorship on the right and left which is why, even though I'm right of center politically, I've always called myself a civil libertarian. In the 1980s I was censored on my college campus when liberals collected my college newspaper (I was editor of The Redwood Review for two years) and threw them in the trash. Because God-forbid we let anyone read something they disagreed with. My intro to law professor was a raging Marxist but he liked me and told me I was the ONLY student of his in years who actually challenged him in class on something he said. Civil discourse used to be fun, intellectually challenging, and part of the human experience. Civil discourse is virtually dead.
I'm Matt's age, I knew a lot of real hippies and liberals growing up in the SF Bay Area, and I'm just shocked that people who had always been true liberals became the speech police today. I hate that I self-censor because of my career -- too many authors I know have been vilified on-line, given bad reviews, because they came out as conservative or for/against an issue that is in vogue. I'm not big enough where an organized effort couldn't damage my career. I'm only recently been more vocal because my kids are all adults so damage to my career affects only me. I had real friends disavow me because I wasn't on board with Black Lives Matter and I defended law enforcement (my oldest is a cop, damn straight I'm going to defend cops when her life is in danger every day.) COVID was the tipping point for me. Too many of my liberal friends were willing to give up liberty for safety so I called them on it. And lost more friends. (Not Facebook friends, I'm talking people I actually know and grew up with or worked with.)
The Tennessee “meme-lord” got $835,000 for 37 days confinement, about $22,500 per day. That may be a trend worth cashing in on.
Thanks Matt for the blizzard of quotes from free thinkers wanting to be heard. That resonates with all of us.
What I don’t see in much of todays demands to be heard isn’t the expression of wanting to go their own way as much as the expressed threat that we Americans stand in their way (which is preposterous) and the only way for them to express themselves is the elimination of everything we know as American.
Hmmm. Interesting take. I read about free people just wanting to be free. Nothing in the first amendment about your right to be heard
Indeed or that a POV once expressed should have political consequences.
The law has a purpose in a society that’s why laws are adopted by extensive discussion and finally by vote of representatives responsible to the people.
Because being miserable is easy. It rhymes with being bored. Being happy requires you to constantly find and then participate in things you enjoy (and, just as important, to keep seeking out new things to enjoy after you grow restless from doing the old stuff).
"Life has more possibilities now, not fewer. Why are people determined to be miserable?"
I'm sure there are any number of answers to that question, but I suspect much of it comes down to our contemporary culture of victimhood. We've reached the peculiar point where happiness is almost suspect, while grievance has become something of a social credential.
Consider the traditional Caucasian housewife who is happily married, loves her children, and finds fulfillment in raising a family. She seems to be among the most reviled creatures on social media. She's hopelessly naive, hopelessly oppressed, and hopelessly unaware of her own misery. If only someone could explain to her how exploited she is, she might finally have the decency to be unhappy.
Meanwhile, we're invited to admire the fiercely independent, empowered woman who arrives at the gym with professional video equipment, lighting, and enough cables to stage a network television broadcast. She then records herself screaming at some unfortunate fellow who glanced in her direction, apparently because he was trying not to trip over her equipment. Naturally, she's the victim, and naturally, we're supposed to applaud her courage.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have confused being happy with being oblivious, being offended with being oppressed, and being obnoxious with being brave.
Perhaps the problem isn't that life offers too few possibilities. Perhaps it's that we've made being miserable one of the most rewarding possibilities of all.
Free speech has always been dangerous to the powerful. Perhaps the culture of safetyism has something to do with why young people who were raised on it are fearful of the free exchange of ideas.
Writing like this is exceptional. Grateful to have your eloquent takes on our generational experiences and challenges.
“Why are people determined to be miserable?”
A great essay, but may I offer a moderate reframing of this question? - “Why are people determined that no one be less miserable than them?” The cultural collectivist has an equation for the proper distribution of unhappiness and you are to be governed by his dismal calculus.
I'm not sure I believe free speech even factored in to the mid-terms. Not that it shouldn't have, just that it's totally eclipsed by endless wars at the behest of Israel and Trump's generally being a disappointment to everyone across the board other than border enforcement.
He's not stupid, and I'm sure he saw this massacre coming. That implies he knowingly sacrificed our future to appease the Israelis. It's hard not to conclude they have something particularly juicy on him, perhaps from Epstein's years of efforts.
/rant
I believe the generation got messed up by being told that being called bad names was bullying. It got defined away from being physically beaten up. I can remember the first time I heard a kid call another a bully. When I asked the kid what happened, he had been called bad names. In my era it was "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Adults would get involved any time a kid said something another did not like.