Bari Weiss has an interesting post concerning the events of the week, but I’m a little troubled by her quote of David Sacks:
I think David’s advice is wise: “The good news is that the most important events of my life, and your life, will always take place more or less within a 25-foot radius of wherever we are standing. Like the Beatles said, all you need is love. So, try to be kind, and avoid making sweeping statements about large classes of people. Give food to the hungry. Tell your children that you love them. And please, whatever you do, don’t embrace anyone’s sweeping program for remedying historical injustice, because history’s victims are already dead—and soon, there will be plenty more of them. I can hear the sound of the engines revving up, even from here.”
This is quite the transactional view of history, a view that is implicitly rebuffed by economic studies which conclude that family wealth is often deeply enhanced by inheritance – the opposite of this transactional view. That is, if you view the Black community as being notably economically disadvantaged, that’s easily enough traced back to the systemic racism practiced against them, going all the way back to the retraction of the promise of Forty acres and a mule.
In other words, history’s victims still live and are among us.
That said, I have no intention of this rebuttal being used to endorse any particular sweeping historical program; I do not believe any have been properly debated. I prefer to follow the progress of such models as that of Asheville, NC, which I expect will feel its way along, make mistakes as well as strides, and produce a model from which we can build. I have little trust in the work of theoreticians who hardly get their hands dirty with the politics necessary, particularly if they include the likes of Professor Singh.
I enjoyed reading Weiss’ post, but if she can make the mistake of thinking Sack’s post is wise, I wonder what else she may have wrong. For example, she laments the control of the public square by technology companies and worries about Twitter shutting her down if it can shut Trump down.
It’s not that Trump was permanently banned from Twitter. I’d be happy to never hear that voice or see those CAPS again. It’s that Twitter can ban whoever it wants whenever it wants for whatever reason. It’s that all the real town squares have been shuttered and that the only one left is pixelated and controlled by a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley.
We were promised the Internet would be better than democracy. But then it got privatized. Corporations own it. There is no online bill of rights. There is only the frenzy of the mob and fickle choices of a few billionaires.
But the Golden Age Weiss implicitly yearns for never existed. There are always constraints on speech beyond the basics. Speakers are ignored because they say something unpopular, or because they’re incomprehensible; speakers are shouted down; speakers are despised. The implicit yearning for inflicting one’s thoughts on another being has never been guaranteed.
The Age over which Weiss is agonizing is interesting for those who want to speak because, to a more effective extent than ever before, speakers can self-publish. That’s what she’s doing, and I’m doing, right now. Weiss might argue that our hosts (Bluehost in my case) could shut us down, just as Parler was shutdown by Apple, Google, and Amazon, but this ignores an important capability – you can always write your own publishing platform. If you can’t find a technology provider with a notion of freedom that suits you – and there are some really relaxed standards out there – you can even build your own company to do it.
So, to some extent, I have to wonder how much of this is navel staring, rather than trying to understand how to safely limit speech that is destructive to society. Several years ago I argued with a conservative friend about the limits of political speech for non-citizens such as other countries, especially those who did not reveal that they weren’t Americans, and he seemed to feel that the natural wisdom of the citizenry would win out.
I remain deeply unconvinced.
But I also remain deeply disturbed at the problem of governmental & corporate interference in communications. I don’t deny the problem. But I don’t really feel Weiss has contributed to that discussion beyond wailing about the very technology that enables this new age of Mass Communications. I wish she’d gone further in her analysis in understanding the antecedents.
