The freedom of speech

E: But, like, for example, when someone’s talking on the internet about drinking bleach as a way to kill a virus, and not even necessarily the sociopath president, the thing is that some people are gonna try to drink bleach, and that’s dangerous and scary and there has to be a mechanism to moderate that kind of speech, because it literally kills people.

J: But how can you say that and also argue for democracy?

E: What do you mean?

J: How can you say democracy works while at the same time arguing that the idiots who drink bleach deserve to vote?

E: I mean, fair point, but that’s the foible of democracy, that it has to safeguard not only itself but also its people.

J: Which is why I will argue to the death that a person should be allowed to say all sorts of dumb shit on the internet without being censored.

E: That’s because you care about idealistic truth more than harmony and human suffering.

J: I’d say it’s because I think systems based on thoroughly-considered ideals and truths ultimately limit human suffering.

E: But this is why the argument of content moderation versus community notes is such nonsense. Community notes don’t work. It’s a system that literally does not limit human suffering. It creates more. In spite of the fact that there’s this idealistic argument for open discourse as an answer to whatever. But people will be, have been, are right now, being hurt by bad information. Facebook helped fuel the genocide in Myanmar. Like actually. And so Elon and Zuckerberg are saying I don't like the cultural back-and-forth because I keep getting in trouble for not doing the right thing, so now I choose to stop caring and fuck you guys and good luck out there. It's not a goodwill exercise to stop content moderation and leave it up to the so-called town square to decide. It’s laziness and greed.

J: I mean yeah, but my point is that the collective is actually smart. And that’s keystone to the whole experiment of democracy. You just have to zoom out, give it a chance.

E: Huh?

J: You know that thing in sociology 101, where the professor puts a big jar of marbles at the front of the room, and all 300 of your fellow freshman take out a piece of paper and write down a guess about how many marbles are in the jar.

E: Come on.

J: That’s like community notes. No individual ever guesses exactly how many marbles are in the jar, but when you average all 300 guesses you get remarkably close to the actual number of marbles. It’s a miracle honestly. And I think free speech is so important because it does—

E: Nobody is reading 300—

J: the same thing! We need as many voices as possible! The more voices, the more accuracy. Otherwise who gets to decide what’s dangerous and what’s not? If you start telling people what to guess or how to look at the jar then it sabotages the whole miracle of collective intelligence.

E: Yeah I understand and that's metaphorically beautiful or whatever, but the way we’ve allowed monopolies and wealth and disparities in access means it’s not possible for people to even have free perspectives. They’re not speaking freely at all, is my point. There is no democracy of information anymore. The systems make us think we have access to information that’s actually just total bullshit, full of lies. It’s sculpted algorithms that do real harm to real people whose real safety is on the line. So the ability to even see the jar and guess how many marbles is fundamentally tainted because we’re all siloed and influenced by forces that put profit motive ahead of safety and harmony and truth.

J: I’ve lost my marbles.

E: It’s so cute when you admit defeat.

J: No.

E: The whole ideal of capitalism is that people create the market because the demand is coming from the people, but that’s not actually happening anymore. People just go to the thing that gets reinforced and reinforced, while thinking it’s a choice. But the options are already decided, and rigged, and—

J: I mean—

E: also why government intervention is important. Why regulation is important. All the antitrust stuff. You have to go in and break that shit up, but now those people are so powerful and entrenched that they’re running around screaming free speech while actually limiting open information through their fucking disaster apps. It’s crazy because they also censor things, and what they censor is everything that doesn’t lead to profit. And profit drives us apart and stokes rage and anger. So Elon and Zuck are screaming free speech while limiting free speech. Or screaming free speech while also screaming you’re not allowed to say DEI. Or fuck you for insulting my limp ego so I’m gonna sue you, but also FREE SPEECH!

J: Yeah shareholder value being aligned with destruction is also why the private prison thing is such bullshit and why healthcare is such bullshit, and I agree that if information streams are treated like that then we’re all fucked. But regulation isn’t the only answer, because then it’s just the government deciding what’s true and who’s to say that’s better than social media companies deciding. Just as scary. And also comes with fucked up power structures and incentives for control.

E: But like the bleach example, the government goes oh shit we need to censor this because our citizens are unsafe and our job is to maintain their safety. But along the way we really screwed that up and now these dingdongs are getting fed streams of misinformation. And it’s so strange to me how the first thing people go towards is government conspiracy. The government is slow and clunky and bureaucratic as fuck, and you think they're driving some agenda, censoring things for what reason? Mostly they're just flailing to respond to dangers.

J: That’s definitely arguable but also why the censorship argument is so weird to me because it's like yes, don’t trust the information that’s given to you by whatever entrenched power and instead find the power of your own research.

E: But people don’t do research! They just look at a tweet or a headline and it forms their entire personality! No one actually looks to see if whatever dude on Joe Rogan is actually a complete moron or neo-nazi with his own fucked up agenda and lust for money and power and supremacy. Plus when the rhetoric of the so-called collective is full of lies or makes people afraid for their safety, then you're not even dealing with intelligence anymore. You're dealing with mob mentality. People getting trampled.

J: So it’s really just a classic wolves versus sheep thing.

E: What?

J: You're relating the fact that people are sheep and need to be protected from the wolves.

E: And?

J: That makes sense. We have to build a fence, for sure, to keep the wolves away from the sheep. But there’s also a danger in building the fence too high or too strong or in the wrong place.

E: How?

J: If the fence isn’t strong enough then the wolves get in and eat all the sheep. Obviously. But on the other hand if the fence is too strong, then sheep become their own problem, right? There’s gonna be one bull-headed male sheep in there that’s stronger than the other ones and he’s gonna box out all the other genetic lines and then all the sheep are inbred because the fence is so high other sheep can’t get back in, or the wolves can’t come stir things up again and eat the big male sheep and his great meat. It’s the same thing with forest fires. The reason there are so many fires now is because we kept fires from happening for so long. And now they’re ravaging everything. That’s exactly the danger of over-regulation. Of a too-strong fence. Censorship.

E: Stop switching metaphors.

J: My metaphors are amazing.

E: So you’re saying the way to let free speech flourish is to create a pen to keep out the wolves from the sheep, but then also let the wolves in sometimes to kill the sheep and then everything is solved. But that’s still regulation. Who builds the fence? Who counts the sheep? Who pays the wolves off? Who calculates how much suffering is the right amount of suffering?

J: Nature!

E: No!

J: Nature is constantly calibrating. It's not just like you put the fence there for arbitrary reasons and then leave it forever. You have to understand there's risk on both sides if the fence is put in the wrong place or is too high. Yes you have to fence out the dangerous lies and ideas. Great. But if you do that too stridently, then the fence has sucked the actual diversity of thought out of everything, in the name of protecting diversity!

E: But again there are other incentives at play. The person who's holding the most power in this analogy is the one who’s building the fence. All they have to do is say shut up sheep, this situation is helping my investors. Deal with it.

J: Honestly I'm sorry to say this and you're gonna hate it, but that's exactly why the first and second amendment are so important. When the person building the fence is a tyrant, if there's free speech and the right to bear arms then at least you have something. And in the span of human history that something has proven to be very critical.

E: But the trust you're placing in that assumes some kind of utopia, and that’s not the world we live in. The weak and oppressed simply can’t stand up for themselves. So your argument is just building a city on a hill that we’ve seen does not stand the test of time because the poor and weak keep dying.

J: I take your point but just writing it off as utopia, that’s sad, and also forgetting impermanence and constant shifts in balance. It doesn’t mean we can’t reach for the ideal thing, balancing on the edge, while also being okay with failure and suffering and starting over and trying to get it better, which involves openly stated bad ideas bouncing off of each other until they refine into something worthwhile.

E: I know but you keep coming back to being okay with human suffering.

J: Give me an answer where there’s no human suffering! It has to be okay to aim for ideological perfection while at the same time understanding that it won’t work in perpetuity or for everyone, but try anyway. That’s why we need to be able to come together and say what’s not working. Honestly and controversially. While yes protecting the weak but also protecting the freedoms that so many people in this world don’t have.

E: You're such an American. It’s so annoying. You're like a fucking founding father right now.

J: I’m sorry but it's also yoga. You try to stand on two feet and your whole ideological perfection is just I'm gonna balance my weight between my feet perfectly, between the right and the left side, perfectly, and you're like okay and then you do it but it doesn’t last and you go in one direction and then you swerve to the other side to recover. That’s your first move, to swerve from extreme to extreme, right to left. But with practice you can make more subtle adjustments, find the middle, and even so no matter how good you get at that, you still always lose balance and that's the whole thing. It doesn't mean stop shooting for the balance because you know you can't keep it forever.

E: I see you’re pretty happy with that.

J: Totally.

E: It’s a convenient binary because there’s room in the middle but in the two-party system there’s no ability to have complex exchange of ideas because you’re given a false sense of choice.

J: I agree but really it’s problematic because it's just corporate monetary influence on both sides so there's actually only one side as two sides and all are intolerable hypocrites doing the thing they’re yelling at the other side for doing. Which, again, drum roll, means we need to be able to argue against how bad that is without fear of being thrown in jail or silenced.

E: Yeah but my point is that Twitter is not a town square. It’s not a democratically open forum like everyone makes it sound. It’s an echo chamber of confirmation bias where no one knows what’s true but everyone thinks they do.

J: But who makes the decision on what’s true? Who gets to decide? I have to keep coming back to that. There’s no way to police the people who police the police. Which is exactly why we need to believe that the collective intelligence can still guess how many marbles are in the jar, if only everyone is allowed to make their own flawed guesses out in the open. Which means yes repeal Section 230, make these idiots responsible for their algorithms for one, get their hands off the scale.

E: Yeah agreed but also the truth is we live in a world that’s producing more and more people who are lost in their curated narratives because of the internet and that means we’re raising more and more sick inbred sheep. They’re not healthy robust sheep that can thrive in an open pasture.

J: That’s exactly my point! We can’t just give up on the open pasture though! They’re sick because the fence is not in the right place! And that’s where education comes in, which is a whole other thing but also requires hard fought conversation and people getting their feathers ruffled. And I'm not saying the internet is unbiased or that it doesn't have extreme power and danger. But there still has to be a place we go to get information. The printing press was also a huge problem because then the two churches in town could print stuff about how they’re different and better than each other, which is why people literally started killing each other after the printing press.

E: But the difference between the internet and the printing press is that the wars between the two sides were in person. You see the person spilling their blood on the cobblestones and you witness a whole family get wiped out, and you see that inside of your community in a way that has deep consequences. The internet is so depersonalized. You never have to admit you're wrong. You never have to feel the pain you spew or see what happens to the people who are killing themselves because of the narratives being perpetuated by motives of greed and intolerance.

J: Yeah good point. But I still think I’d rather have 7 billion idiots on Twitter than two fucking churches deciding what’s true.

E: Yeah but it’s not 7 billion people, it’s two insecure boy monsters molding 7 billion people. But I guess it’s good to know that whatever happens Zuck and Elon will go down in history as the worst human beings ever.

J: For sure we agree on that.

E: Like how do the people with the least social skills of anyone on the planet become the people with the most power to sculpt the social world. It’s literally sickening. They’re building the world like a fucked up adolescent circle jerk, just ogling at each other’s inexperienced attempts to look cool as they get off on each other. What do we do about that? How do we set the wolves loose on them? That’s the question.

J: I don’t know but maybe those of us who can have open discussions and consider the other side of an argument and admit to our own hypocrisy and say sorry I was wrong when necessary… like that can still happen, without just being like oh but there's stupid sheep over there we better not let them see the internet. Because I’m also a sheep and so are you and I’m just looking around and I’d like to trust my fellow sheep to have a good time and share cool information and ways of seeing and being in a way that opens my mind and life. And also yes for sure it would be really great to have some long range poisoned blow-darts or something that we can shoot at people when they come for our society of educated and fun and genetically diverse sheep who read books and fornicate with partners whose baby sheep then spread out in all directions of the Earth with as few fences as possible so there’s a great spectrum of viewpoints and favorite foods and colors and music and also genders and political beliefs and sexual orientations.

E: That’s beautiful. You’re such a progressive. I love rainbow sheep.

J: Totally.

E. Democracy saved.