A Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
There's people out there who believe this would be a good thing? Really?
If we accept this as naive, then we accept the proposer as modernly blinkered and historically blind and can likely be dismissed as such. However, if we accept the proposal as being made with full knowledge of the eventual consequences and outcomes in mind, then we can only label those making such proposals as a danger.
This absolutely terrifies me that someone thinks this is a good idea.
While FB and Google do have some problems due to their monopolies, the answer is not in state control.
Although I am not a proponent of state control of the net, I'm curious as to why not. If it's that the state can't be trusted, this doesn't seem to match our existing institutions; we regularly place our lives in control of the state every day, from food regulation rules to the social safety net, to defence of the country, etc. - why should something the net, which seems to hold much less in stakes than the things I listed, be an exception?
In general, I find public institutions to be worse than their private alternatives. I prefer UPS/FedEx to the Postal Service and I send my child to a charter school rather than the local public school. Public institutions have shown that they don't need to be good, just good enough.
The key is making sure the incentives are right. Google and Facebook are bad because they profit from violating people's privacy, and they've developed a business model based around trading personal information for services. I don't know what the answer is necessarily, but nationalising it just turns them into surveillance networks, which is arguably worse than advertising networks.
I think we need to decide what the end goal is and define the incentives needed to get us there, and ideally we'd avoid too much use of government to get there. For Google/Facebook, I doubt advertising will go away, so we need to find a way to make privacy-preserving ads a thing while still allowing advertisers to show relevant ads to customers. Perhaps the Brave model is better than Google's model, or perhaps Google's model is acceptable with transparency and oversight. But having government deeply involved in personally identifiable activity is a bit too Orwellian for me.
I accept your argument, but most people against net regulation generally have good opinions on food regulation agencies and the social safety net, so while you seem consistent, I have a feeling a lot of people aren't in this matter. I suspect the case is even greater for European countries, which do food regulation and social safety better than the US in many ways.
Either way, it would follow that a government which does those things right could, in principle, regulate the net. I think the case is stronger when one considers that everyone except anarchists accepts the rule of law, and the democratic decision process to arrive to the law. I think it's very reasonable to say that there are government institutions that are run well, and those institutions have greater consequences than the regulation of the net.
The real target of my criticism was the fact that people tend to engage in special pleading when it comes to regulating the net, or regulating speech, without much reason for it. Brison has argued that there is no meaningful metaphysical difference between what we class as "speech" and "action".
It is my view that the purpose of writing, talking, or producing content in any form is a way of furthering ones thoughts (or rather: to think). Thinking is more than just having something come to the surface and accepting it as is. Thinking is actually a system of steps to produce structure through:
Allowing anything to come to the surface of realization To notice that it exists, or to take notice of a thought/realization Generate one-to-many sort of multi-dimensional avatars that represent something that can generate alternative countering arguments, agreeing statements, appeals, or even basic realization of whether content is germane Engage in a discussion that allows the conceptualization/realization to be advanced so that more structure is ultimately produced Thinking can be done in many ways. This system, when done only in your head, is actually quite difficult to do, and it's not obvious that you actually have all the information you need to construct some form of reality around what you're trying to do, although sometimes you do. Instead, one other way to think is to talk with other people. Talking to other people provides a space for exploration and thinking to be dynamic and interactive as a result of being able to rely on "other people's brains" to generate more realizations and avatars for countering arguments/agreements/appeals.
This is also why it's important to allow people to speak freely when given the chance because if you aren't allowed to talk stupidly, then you won't be able to think, and if you can't think then you won't have any new additional structure to reality. If you don't have additional structure to reality (or the way things might be) then there is less potential that you will be able to manifest yourself appropriately in the space that is conducive for everyone to work productivly together.
Speech can be thought of as simulating action without having to actually do anything.
Your thoughts die so you don’t have to.
Action has consequence, this is certain. Thought has consequence only artificially. People have to be allowed to do this. If you don’t allow this, then they can’t think at all
That's certainly true, but it's worth asking what the justification is for the 1st amendment, i.e. what makes speech so special (after all, we have lively debate on most other amendments, such as the 2nd and in the past the 18th), and to say that freedom of speech exists a priori is just as true of speech as it is any other action, including actions we would count as murder, or theft, etc.
That isn’t to say that there are no regulations on content. Plenty of media has standards and regulations about how it produces content, rating systems for media, and a system of classifying content that is acceptable for different degrees. For instance, I could see better regulation around a rating system for YouTube content to prevent children from stumbling upon poor content. This is still different than banning speech.
Thoughtful discussions aside, the people most suited to both care about and solve the problem set are the ones I would most likely lean on. This isn’t necessarily an anarchist position, it’s one of cautious skepticism over blanket trust without industry specific evidence to prove that the govt is in fact better at handling time, money, and increasingly efficient gains. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence to prove that the govt is particularly good at handling the first two.
That all being said, I don’t see it as an all or nothing. Follow the evidence and the data.
Two points on this thought: there are a variety of viewpoints on the value of freedom of speech within "the left" - needless to say, opinions range from libertarian to unlibertarian. You shouldn't get your views of leftist philosophy from Internet memes. The second point is that you should consider reading the arguments on freedom of speech, those for and against it. Most people only seem to know of the arguments for it. On that point I'd recommend checking out Susan Brison's work for starters.