Every now and then, I run into somebody who believes in the “harmful” effects of information, writing, words, etc.—all that stuff we just call “content” these days. Frank Fisher at the Guardian has found one of them:
“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That’s my view. Absolutely categorical,” [Andy] Burnham, the [Member of Parliament] for Leigh in Greater Manchester, told the Daily Telegraph. “If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.”
Can this nutjob really be serious? “Content that should just not be available to be viewed”? Fisher points out that, while Burnham’s perspective might be an interesting philosophical idea, to be discussed informally, we should be troubled that someone in government, with at least a modicum of real power, is trying to take this idea and turn it into law:
This isn’t a guy in the pub talking, this is a government minister who says he knows what people should and shouldn’t be allowed to read and see. Well sorry, Andy, while we might discuss the possibility of you deciding that for children, you certainly don’t get to decide that for me. The temptation is simply to brush the arrogance away with an angry wave, and figure nothing will come of it. That would be dangerous.
As we see in Australia, just because a policy is insane, futile, counter-productive and hugely unpopular doesn’t mean it won’t end up being implemented.
The idea of the internet as a safe haven for free speech, where “governments couldn’t reach” has been a great tool to break down barriers all over the world and allow people to see that, while the rule of law is necessary, building the walls of national borders and pretending that we need to keep ourselves secure against each other is probably something more like a well-adapted virus that keeps its victims mobile enough to keep propagating in others. But government officials don’t want us on the internet here, like this, whispering about how they’re just parasites that ruin life for the rest of us. That would threaten their job security.
Ordinary people need to be thinking a bit more about the rule of law, how it works, and what it ought to do. When people like Burnham suggest, almost literally, that we just shut down free speech like it was a dead ideal gone horribly wrong, ordinary people need to stop and ask themselves why he would suggest that kind of policy. Why would we want governments tinkering on the internet, restricting free speech? Whose interests would that really serve? And especially in nations like ours where many of our policymakers are elected by the votes of ordinary people, what does it mean to talk about “authority” and the “will of the people”?
But let me just get down to it: people like Burnham are idiots and jack-booted thugs. They want a world completely sanitized at the expense of ignoring human nature. They want to control the international channels of communication. They like the world partitioned into a bunch of nation-states because that keeps crimes and crises coming across their desks, so they will have something to do with their power.
There is no such thing as “content that should just not be available to be viewed.” What people like Burnham really mean is that only government officials should get to view all the content, and then decide what the rest of us are allowed to see. So what, then, does it mean to get elected? What are we saying when we tell a person, “I want you to be a government official?” And what kinds of incentives does one have to seek government office? It means we create a world where the people in government are the people who think something like, “I’d sure enjoy getting a look-see at all the stuff nobody else is allowed to see, like all the extra-dirty porn!” Or they are the people who think, “I am so vastly superior than everyone else, I need to decide what everyone else should get to see and think about.”
In other words, allowing governments to regulate free speech is just a recipe for increasing how many scoundrels and jack-booted thugs are elected or appointed to office. If our society destroys itself, I would rather we do it by exercising our freedom to excess, so we know it was our fault, that we simply could not handle living together, that there was some fundamental weakness in human nature that prevented us from achieving more than being a bunch of petty little communities wracked by war and infighting. But if we let the government drive us into the ground, we will always wonder, “Could we have stopped it? Could we have risen above?”