Okay that's probably too melodramatic, but you have to admit that the digital revolution that promised a bright and closely connected future for all of humanity has fallen far short of said promise.
I'm not going to go over the whole bots, cyberwarfare and swatting stuff, many people speak about it better than I ever could. No, what I'm going to talk about is free speech and the new circumstances the digital age has wrought upon it.
Before I continue, I want to bring to your attention to an article written by Zeynep Tufekci at Wired. It's an interesting article detailing how censorship is no longer the sole purview of governments or large corporations and what that implies for the digital age.
If you are unable to read the whole story then at least take this quote to heart:
"The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all."
Thus the new age of censorship, but what of free speech itself?
At the risk of being U.S.-centric (I don't think I have the liberty to talk about other nations), let's go back to the late 18th century U.S. As the Constitution was formed one of the major ideas codified by it was the idea of the freedom of peaceful expression. You could argue against or in favor of an idea or event and -provided you did so peacefully- you wouldn't be arrested or silenced by the U.S. government.
We all know the world was different back then. But let's think for a moment about how different it really was and what those differences meant for the very concept of freedom of expression (including the freedom of speech).
This was an age in which news only traveled as fast as a horse could gallop, a world where electricity -much less communications based on it- was yet to be harnessed, an age where the scope of globalization was limited by sail, carriage and foot.
What did all of this imply for the idea of free expression? It meant nobody, not even the greatest thinkers of the time, could imagine near-instantaneous communication to audiences of millions across a continent, much less the entire world. Nobody could have imagined that wealthy reactionaries could buy up large portions of the fourth-estate known as the press and control it from halfway around the planet. And certainly nobody could have conceived of sockpuppet accounts, weaponized personality profiling or web-bots that a small group of people in Macedonia could use to warp the zeitgeist of an entire country across the Atlantic.
But all of that is possible today thanks to the power of the World Wide Web, and as a result it's changed the context of free expression. Before, it was believed that one person could contribute one voice to the chorus of human rhetoric and only one voice. But with sockpuppets and web-bots it's now possible for a single person to amplify their voice to shout over all objections and concerns.
In other words: free expression today means all expression is free, but some freedom is freer than others -especially if dishonest means are used. And all of this is having a deleterious effect on civilization.
Of course pointing out a problem is easy but it's much harder to come up with solutions for it. It would require action via massive cross-disciplinary research and implementation.
Unfortunately I am just one person in a sea of 7 billion and counting.
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