John Naughton, in an Observer article called “Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy”, writes
“To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.”
Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote?
Naughton continues,
At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative.
The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review.
Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in.
To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense.
They’re talking about the printing press? Or about ink and paper? Oh wait, I know, they’re talking about modulating breathing in order to cause air vibrations.
I’d have at least some concern for the SIO had they been addressing the “fine people” lies since Charlottesville.
But, to them, “disinfo” and “misinfo” is simply whatever they disagree with. Not “2+2=5”, but “red is better than blue.”
That’s not correction, or an overriding concern with accuracy. That’s pure viewpoint censorship.
But if they can redefine “vaccine”, they can certainly redefine “fact.”
@jgh
They’re talking about the printing press? Or about ink and paper? Oh wait, I know, they’re talking about modulating breathing in order to cause air vibrations.
There was huge fear among governments of printing presses. They were registered and controlled by the government. In England people were burned at the stake for the crime of publishing the Bible in English.
So I guess at least they aren’t burning people at the stake. So that is progress of a sort.
And then along came Elon . . . .
It is certainly an irony that those who want views and even facts that they do not like to be suppressed should see themselves, or at least say they see themselves, as defending democracy, Mr Naughton being a particularly pompous and snobbish example.
“The wildest nonsense” is what is written in the Observer newspaper – by people such as John Naughton.
The idea that organisations like the “Stanford Internet Observatory” are God like arbiters of truth would be funny if it was not so dangerous – in reality Corporate State organisations (including universities) lie and distort constantly, about everything from historic temperature records to treatments for Covid and the infamous Covid “vaccines”.
As for democracy – what someone like Mr Naughton means by “democracy” is rule by a small (supposedly intellectual) group, with the people held in total contempt (and treated as serfs) – after all the people, to Mr Naughton and his Observer associates, are just “every Tom, Dick and Harry” not really human beings at all – and certainly without any rights AGAINST the state. At least Plato did not pretend to support democracy – he was open in his his hatred of it. Our modern Collectivist “Guardians” pretend to love democracy – whilst doing everything they can to destroy what is left of it.
No prizes for guessing that the Observer supported the Covid Lockdowns, which were nothing to do with reducing deaths from Covid (nations that did not lockdown did NOT have a higher death rate), and will support Climate Lockdowns (which will be nothing to do with reducing world C02 levels) – by whatever name they are pushed.
As for Freedom of Speech – well that would be “racist-sexist-homophobic-transphobic-Islamophobic-Climate-Denying” one must not allow “Reactionary” opinions – as that would be “Repressive Tolerance” (Herbert Marcuse).
Again Plato was open in his support for censorship and in his hatred for democracy – it is a unfortunate that the modern elite are not open about their position.
Lies are not “noble” – and the Collectivist cause is not “noble” either. A society ruled by “experts” on the lines that Plato, Sir Francis “The New Atlantis” Bacon and Henri Saint-Simon wanted, would NOT be “scientific” – indeed such a tyranny would destroy real science – which is based on open debate and NOT lying about data in order to push political and cultural agendas.
I found it a bit of a revelation when I acquired a television that would show YouTube videos so I didn’t have to watch them on my phone. It seemed as though suddenly we had citizens television. There is no doubt a lot of rubbish on there but there is also loads of really excellent content put their by people who love a particular subject and know an awful lot about it. Presumably Mr. Naughton would regard YouTube as being bad because any Tom, Dick and Harry can make television shows too?
Ask yourself what the Progressives want to progress to. They want to progress to Utopia – an ideally perfect state, especially in its social and political and moral aspects. Of course the Progressives, believing themselves to be perfect, expect to rule in Utopia and dissenting opinions must by definition be less than perfect and therefore anti-Utopian. And as a consequence dissenting opinions must be suppressed on the way to Utopia and when we get there.
In the Middle Ages there was enormous resistance by (most of) the Church to vernacular translations of the Bible. Ordinary people being able to understand the sacred words without the gatekeepers of the priesthood? Heresy. Today’s Progressives lay claim to be the gatekeepers of the way to a better world, Utopia. As such they wish to control the language used and the ideas expressed, but on a day to day basis it is about defending their privileges.
My first thought while reading this piece was “To see oursels as ithers see us!”. Then I wondered who it was that described the stages of democracy. Google told me it was Alexander Fraser Tytler. Google also noted that he was a friend of Robbie Burns. Ironic that this technology shows us, how little has changed. Also the tittle of Burns poem “To a Louse”, seemed about right.
Of course the Progressives, believing themselves to be perfect, expect to rule in Utopia
But wouldn’t Utopia have no rulers?
@jgh
If we managed to create an Utopia without rulers then within months leaders and followers would emerge. The leaders would work to ensure their ideas were adopted and the followers would be happy to go along with someone else doing the ‘thinking’.
If you want a practical example of this consider that almost all of the original kibbutzim of the previous century (and most other ‘intentional communities’) eventually failed. Their ‘collective’ ethos did not survive people having individual expectations.
Telling a progressive that Utopia will have no rulers would be like telling me that Utopia will have no chocolate chip cookies.
Both of us would recoil in horror and ask what the point of Utopia was, anyway.
@bobby b
Telling a progressive that Utopia will have no rulers would be like telling me that Utopia will have no chocolate chip cookies.
If you read Thomas More’s Utopia you’ll have to agree that it is a very useful idea, because what More describes as Utopia, what he considers an ideal society, would be my idea of hell and the worst possible society. More’s Utopia had no private property or money. Everyone lived in a state provided house with 10-16 people and the house they lived in was rotated regularly. Everyone had a state mandated job, all manual labor. Every household had a couple of slaves. Everyone ate together in communal feeding halls where they ate what they were given with no choices. Premarital sex was punished with a lifetime of enforced celibacy, and my favorite one? As a religious duty wives had to confess their sins to their husbands once a month.
To me it sounds a lot like Jim Jones’ compound in Guyana. It sounds like utter hell to me. Though hardly surprising since Thomas More was a horrible man, despite Robert Bolt’s hagiography.
Which is to say one man’s Utopia is another man’s dystopia, which is why there is not such thing as Utopia.
There’s a quote from the old Usenet days of the Internet: “Usenet is essentially Letters to the Editor without the editor. Editors don’t appreciate this, for some reason.”
Telling a progressive that Utopia will have no rulers would be like telling me that Utopia will have no chocolate chip cookies.
There are two views of the “ideal” or “utopian” government. One is that almost everyone will obey the law almost all the time, because the law is “both ancient and just.” Exceptions can be dealt with by private, ad-hoc action, so no actual government is needed.
The other is of a God-Emperor who decrees justice and virtue and thus causes justice and virtue to happen. Exceptions can be dealt with by special appeals to the God-Emperor who, with a wave of his hand, will cast down the evil-doers and cause justice and virtue to be restored.
Progressives take the second view, sometimes with a “Council of Scientists” or some similar group acting as a sort of synthetic or composite God-Emperor.
Classical-liberal and libertarian types try to approximate the first ideal via smaller government, minimal government, or even anarcho-capitalist non-government, the last with agencies that are not ad-hoc but that are also non-governmental. (And we recognize that “Utopia is not an option.”)
Frasor Orr – Sir Thomas Moore was part of the revival of popularity of the ideas of Plato. But I suspect you already know that.
According to the opinion polls the ideas of Plato, economic Collectivism and the crushing of Civil Liberties (including Freedom of Speech) are about to win the British General Election – I think Plato would be amused by this as he hated democracy, indeed hated ordinary people. “See – the people are voting for their enslavement, which is what they deserve!” Plato would laugh.
I bet if I could present Naughton with a list of thing he’s proposed that *I* get to “fact check” and label he might suddenly imagine it to be censorious and meddling.
That he can’t imagine this already, himself says much about him and nothing about the idea.
What you’re observing here is the disintermediation of that which we term “news”. It’s really a return to the olden dayes, when you got the unfiltered perceptions of eyewitness reporters, and you had to do your own interpretation of the proffered information.
The various numpties inserted themselves into the equation, and offered their own interpretations to you. This started during the early days of “journalism”, and once it became a potential “power center”, the usual suspects glommed onto the whole thing and subverted it.
The current state of things is that the heirs of those numpties are losing control of the narrative; they don’t like this fact, and are acting to try and retain their control over it all. They’re going to fail, but the fight over it is going to be epic.
All of this is going to be increasingly apparent as the technology improves; at some point, you’re not going to tune into CNN to find out what’s going on, you’re going to be looking at trusted aggregators for a collection of eyewitness reports that will spread the viewpoint across all participants in an event. This is going to break the whole paradigm, which will result in some very interesting outcomes.
See Michael Yon or various other “citizen journalists” for examples. The monolithic companies of yore are going to die, and that’s basically because you no longer need their vast infrastructure to reach an audience.
I missed the bit at the end about Charlie Richardson.
My father, Harry Marks, banned the Richardson gang (including “Mad Frankie Fraser”) from his club – he also banned the Kray gang.
It is possible to successfully make a stand against such criminals.
My father was indeed shot – but not seriously (and I am not sure that one of the gangs was even involved). He died in his bed (upstairs here in Kettering) only a couple of decades ago.
“To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever…”
Do the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop Approve?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/63087.html
See also Ruxandra Teslo: The Road to (Mental) Serfdom:
https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-road-to-mental-serfdom-and-misinformation
David Foster – two interesting articles, thank you for sharing them.
Yes the period of liberty in public speech in England does not go back as far as people think and did not last as long as most people suppose – before 1692 one needed permission to publish a book (although prosecutions of people who broke this regulation were rare – the danger of prosecution was there), and a few decades later Sir Robert Walpole tricked Parliament into censoring the theatre (I say “tricked” because the terrible play he showed the House of Commons, which glorified rape-murder-and-so-on had, secretly, been financed by Sir Robert himself – for the express purpose of shocking Parliament into approving censorship on moral grounds (censorship he really wanted to try and crush political dissent).
Making political speeches was allowed – at least till 1965 when “incitement to racial hatred” (now just being anti “equality and diversity”) started to be used as a justification for ever stricter political censorship via a series of Acts.
These days the favouritism is open – put a sticker on a lamp post which says “Stop Voting Tory” and you will not be punished, but put a sticker (same size), on the same lamp post, that a court regards as “racist” and you may get two years in prison – even if the sticker in no way advocates violence or any other action.