A Second Hand Conjecture

Hmm. It seems that media reports filed on November 5th explicitly stating that Obama met with Governor Blagojevich to discuss his Senate replacement, are suddenly disappearing from the web.

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MySpace, apparently in the mood for universal condemnation, has deleted the photographs of burn victim BJ McCombs for being “offensive” on sight. I don’t know about you, but when I think of the limitless number of offensive things I’ve seen on MySpace, young BJ McCombs isn’t among them.

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One of the subtextual themes coming out of the conference so far is what can almost be called a double-standard: the participants demand the right to unrestricted speech, but recoil in horror at the consequences such speech brings. It is difficult to discuss this without denying, or, at the very least, denigrating the very real atrocities many have suffered for their writing—whether it is being tortured and sodomized in Egypt, threatened with gang rape in Kenya, or sentenced to death in Afghanistan. However, many of the participants seem to have what can only be called a utopian view of how free speech in both free and unfree societies operate.

Indeed, missing in much of this discussion about what, exactly, free speech and censorship are is a realization of what they are not. Several have complained that blogging can put their jobs at risk, or that if they agitate too loudly they face harassment. So what? In years past, I have been fired for blogging; as a result, for many years now, over many jobs, I have categorically refused to blog about them or on topics that would create a conflict of interest. According to several of the speakers here, that means I exist in a repressive speech environment and “suffer” under a despotic, freedom-hating regime.

If that is the case, then no one is free. And maybe that is true. But to a large degree, there is a tendency to confuse “freedom to speak” with “freedom to speak without consequence.”

The idea of consequences for speech is a tricky one to unravel. Many despotic governments, like Egypt, simply say crippling court cases and unwinnable libel suits are a “consequence” of speaking about political and commercial events within the country. One speaker, from Kenya, detailed how she began to receive not just death threats but rape threats over her activism during that country’s election crisis several months ago. Is that just a “consequence?”

Obviously, yes, but is it a fair one? The point I am getting at is, while it sounds really pretty to talk about how we all have the right to speak freely without threat or intimidation, the reality is that such a thing is so unrealistic as to be nearly childish. I cannot walk up to an overweight person on the street and yell, “you are FAT!” and realistically expect to face zero consequences for it. Similarly, in a work environment, which is by nature hierarchical and requires no small amount of subservience to superiors, I cannot freely speak my opinion to certain people and expect to remain employed. And what’s more, it is not reasonable to demand such a thing.

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Hey everybody. First off, Budapest is a great city! We’re about to start the GVO meting, which is focusing mostly on net censorship. Considering my other blog, Registan.net, is definitely blocked in Uzbekistan, and quite possibly elsewhere, this matters tremendously, to say nothing of real people in really dangerous places doing their best get their voices heard. It’s quite a gathering of people: in the last 48 hours, I have had lively conversations with writers from Bahrain, Uganda, Malawi, Tajikistan, Hungary, and Netherlands. This is a truly global group of people trying to make the world a more open, transparent place—exactly the kind of work I’m sure ASHC readers appreciate.

The meetings will be liveblogged and webcast at the Summit website: summit08.globalvoicesonline.org. I don’t know how busy I will be, but I’ll try to post whatever updates I can.

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After their success getting the Muhammad cartoons banned, some Muslims have now set their sights on wikipedia. Recently a large group of Muslims have started an email campaign asking wikipedia to remove their images of their holy prophet Muhammad, even going so far as to start an online petition that has received over 80,000 signatures.

“It’s totally unacceptable to print the prophet’s picture,” Saadia Bukhari from Pakistan wrote in a message. “It shows insensitivity towards Muslim feelings and should be removed immediately.”

Thankfully wikipedia says they are staying true to the idealism the site was founded on, and doesn’t find it “unacceptable” to “[show] insensitivity towards Muslim feelings”.

“Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.”

I can only hope that this stays a peaceful online protest and doesn’t descend into an online version of the violence that the cartoon controversy did.

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I also want to add what I think is a much larger point about these types of protests. From the Paul Cobb, who teaches Islamic history at Notre Dame, “The idea of imposing a ban on all depictions of people, particularly Muhammad, dates to the 20th century”. This is a very recent phenomenon and does not represent any consensus of world wide Muslims. It isn’t some ancient commandmet being violated, it’s a politicization of a cultural taboo, if you can even call it that.

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(photo: Sébastien Boymond-Pfahrer)

Howard W. French notices that attempts to evade and promote evasion of China’s Great Firewall –which blocks vast regions of the web from the Chinese public– are taking off inside the PRC. Li Xieheng, who coded the Firefox proxy plug-in Gladder, has recognized the fundamental weakness of censorship: it relies on the public’s specific ignorance that it is being actively controlled and manipulated.

“If you don’t know what’s on top of you, than you won’t fight back against it…It’s just like many people not feeling that China isn’t free. They’re not aware of it and feel things are natural here, but that’s just the power of media control.”

“Why don’t they just take Google down? It’s because they don’t want to have a scene and have everybody know. A lot of people came to know about the system because of Flickr, and that is something the system needs to weigh.”
(The New York Times via Boing Boing)

Censorship efforts in the United States have always failed, because while courts and government bodies can attempt to censor or restrict access to information on grounds of obscenity or criminal advocacy, they generally cannot conceal their efforts to do so. Once the public is aware that information is being withheld from it, it becomes very difficult to maintain an embargo. It’s an old story, but when it comes to knowledge, demand always favors the forbidden.

Thus the 1933 test case seizure of imported copies of Joyce’s Ulysses on grounds of obscenity, dramatically publicized the novel to an otherwise largely indifferent audience (which was Random House’s intention of course). While the government had the power to confiscate, it did not have the power to conceal confiscation.

The nature of the material banned becomes consequential in how broadly and quickly any new popular awareness of censorship can spread. By banning access to ASHC for criticism of communism, the PRC is unlikely to intrude into the realm of popular Chinese consciousness. But as Li suggests, striking at Flickr is another matter altogether. Perhaps the wall is starting to stretch too far, to sustain widespread popular ignorance that the Chinese public is living in coercive information seclusion from the rest of the world. One can hope.

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GamePolitics has an interesting story about a plan in the Indian parliament to ban violent video games. A pity, as I was just reading in Businessweek about the fantastic growth of the Indian gaming market. But that’s a bit of an old story: If you see consumer demand, regulate or prohibit supply. The result of course being that legitimate retailers comply…and the black market grows.

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