Thread by @doctorow

My @EFF colleague @jilliancyork's latest project is #SpeakingFreely, a series of interviews with people about free expression and the internet, including what @neilhimself memorably called "icky speech."

journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-de…

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The latest interview subject is the incomparable @Ada_Palmer: historian, sf writer, musician, and co-host of last year's U Chicago seminar series on "systems of information control during information revolutions," which I co-taught with her.

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Ada's interview synthesizes her historian's distance from the subject ("yes, this is my subject, and these people are terrible, and it’s kind of fun in that way") with her perspective as a writer and advocate for free speech.

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"One of the victims of censorship is the future capacity to tell histories of the period when censorship happened..... It renders that historical record unreliable... makes it easier for people to make claims you can’t refute using historical sources."

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"It’s similar to how we see people invalidating things now—like 'that climate study wasn’t really valid because it got funding from a leftist political group”—they’re invalidating the material by claiming that there has to be insincerity its development."

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"Pretty much every censoring operation post-printing press recognizes that it isn’t possible to track down and destroy every copy of a thing...An Inquisition book burning was the ceremonial burning of one copy. The Inquisition kept examples of all of the books they banned."

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Fascinating perspecting on whether nongovernmental action can really be called "censorship."

"The Inquisition wasn’t the state - it was a private org like to Doctors Without Borders or Unicef, run by private orgs like the Dominicans and it often competed with the state."

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As she points out, everything the Inquisition did would be fine alongside the First Amendment, because it was entirely private action.

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Next, Palmer talks about market concentration and how it abets this kind of private censorship. This is something I've written a lot about, see for example:

locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-d…

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"If you have a plural set of voices, then you’re always going to have some spaces where things can be said, just like you have a plurality of printers printing books, and some will only print orthodox things and some will only print radical ones."

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And while the internet COULD afford many venues for speech, in practice a concentrated internet makes is plausible to accomplish the censor's never-realized dream: "You can make a program that can hunt down every instance of a particular phrase and erase it."

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Tiny architectural choices make big differences here ("Architecture is politics" -@mkapor). Amazon can update your Kindle books without your permission, Kobo can't. Amazon could delete every instance of a book on Kindles, but Kobo would need cooperation from its customers.

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Palmer is just the latest subject of Jillian's series. You can read many other amazing interviews here:

eff.org/speaking-freely

/eof