What's "Free" About "Free Speech"?

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Without being aware of it, we’ve privatized “free” speech in the form of digital monopolies.

Free speech is getting a lot of attention these days, so let’s consider what’s actually “free” about it and what’s not “free.” The general view seems to be that censorship is the threat to free speech, and that’s certainly an issue. But that’s not all that’s going on in the realm of free speech.

Let’s return to the pre-social-media days and consider what “free speech” meant. It did not mean we could demand a newspaper publish our opinion. The newspaper was a private enterprise and its offices were private property. As such, it had the right to choose what it would publish. Free speech meant that we could pass out leaflets on the public sidewalk outside the newspaper offices, or we could launch a competing publication.

On a smaller scale, consider my blog / site. Over the years, some readers have complained that I didn’t host a “comments” forum where they could post their views. I tried one such option many years ago and gave it up as too much work. This is a private enterprise. I pay for the server. The content is copyrighted. I am not obligated to offer a forum for others to post their views. They are free to launch their own blog / site. That’s free speech in the digital age.

In other words, free speech doesn’t mean everyone has a right to address an audience hosted by a private enterprise; it means everyone can stand on the public sidewalk and pass out leaflets or pay for a server to post their views online. I complain about being shadow-banned by various institutions, but they have no obligation to post whatever content I create; they’re private enterprises pursuing their private interests by maximizing profits.

The way they maximize profits is encourage users to post content / perform searches for “free” and then monetize that “free” content / search by collecting data on users and selling it at a premium. This model has generated enormous profits and trillion-dollar enterprises.

There’s nothing “free” about these enterprises’ platforms accepting our “free” content. We choose to give these enterprises content for free, and they’re free to monetize this content and the data they collect on us. We can opt out by not posting content on their platforms and not using their search engine.

But this isn’t the entire story, either, is it? These enterprises are monopolies, dominating the search / social media realms, realms which are now dominant cultural, social and political influences in the digital / online era. The appeal of reaching a vast audience so easily is simply too irresistible, and so we not only give these enterprises our content for free, we’ve granted them extraordinary powers few of us truly understand.

Bruce Schneier served up a nuanced, wide-ranging critique of this revolution in his essay The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt. Here are some key excerpts:

“Blending Stewart Brand and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, McKenzie Wark writes in A Hacker Manifesto (2004) that ‘information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.’

Permitting internet companies to hack the systems in which culture is produced and circulates is a short-term trade-off that has proven to have devastating long-term consequences.”

Without being aware of it, we’ve privatized “free” speech in the form of digital monopolies. “Free” speech is now subject to “community standards” that are both Orwellian in the finality of their control (no recourse, no appeal process) and Kafkaesque in their arbitrariness and vagueness. As in Kafka’s The Castle, we can peer through a peephole at the power of “community standards” but cannot engage it. We are powerless observers.

There are only two ways to retrieve the power we have unknowingly transferred to digital monopolies: 1) regulate these monopolies as public utilities, or 2) nationalize them and strip out all the surveillance / monetization features, leaving only the basic search / social media functions.

This runs into the buzzsaws of The Market and private enterprise, which are core to the ideology of “free enterprise.” The government regulates privately owned utilities, as these provide essential public services. If we consider this common sense, then why is it anathema to regulate digital monopolies for the same reason?

We can have either “free” enterprise, or “free” speech. We can’t have both when “free” enterprise has a lock on “free” speech.

This photo is from the 1976 film All the President’s Men which elevated journalists to heroes / heroines in a world of power hiding its abuses. Now that digital monopolies are the power hiding their abuses, who will be the heroes / heroines that rescue the citizenry from digital exploitation and servitude?

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