The Blog

2021-

2021-01-14 g
THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH
"These policies are born of a paternalistic distrust of ordinary people, who are deemed to be incapable of discriminating between lies and truth for themselves, and apparently need companies and governments to protect them from exposure to misinformation."

A lockdown of the mind

Big Tech wants us to outsource all our thinking to the authorities.

When the pandemic hit, as many of us were frantically searching empty supermarket shelves for the last remaining cans of beans, it finally dawned on us that our globalised dependency on international supply chains had left us vulnerable. As lockdowns forced us online, technology was praised as the source of our resilience. While our bodies were in lockdown, at least our minds could remain free. But the events of the past week should provide us with a similar wake-up call to our dangerous dependency on a few gargantuan, unaccountable companies which have assumed control our intellectual supply chains.

After the events on Capitol Hill, Twitter permanently suspended the account of the president of the United States. Donald Trump was also booted off all other major social-media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. ‘If you can silence a king’, tweeted one of Twitter’s investors, ‘you are the king’.

Many try to argue that the tech firms are private companies, and the state has no right to prevent them from discriminating on ideological grounds. It’s a free market – users can always turn to an alternative provider. This might be true if the Big Tech firms weren’t already so powerful that they can simply cut off competitors who refuse to comply with their censorious demands. But Parler – an alternative to Twitter – has now been removed from the Google Play Store so that it could no longer be accessed by Android users. Apple followed suit and threatened to do the same unless Parler met its terms for moderating and removing ‘objectionable content’. Parler’s website has now been taken down completely as Amazon refuses to host it.

... These policies are born of a paternalistic distrust of ordinary people, who are deemed to be incapable of discriminating between lies and truth for themselves, and apparently need companies and governments to protect them from exposure to misinformation. But far from making us more resilient to bad ideas, censorship actually diminishes our capacity to discern the truth. ‘It forgets’, Tylecote writes, ‘what inoculation is: an element of exposure to the infectious agent. So what people are proposing is not mental inoculation, but mental quarantine.’ Given the obvious fact that misinformation does exist online, it may seem necessary to lean on some authority to distinguish fact from falsity. But giving these authorities the final word leaves us vulnerable in the most fundamental sense.

In his 1945 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell commented on the increasingly degraded state of our use of English. Describing a ‘tired hack’, who would be at home in any Covid press conference, he observed that the ‘appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself’.

The consequences of ‘gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else’, Orwell argued, created a reduced state of consciousness that was ‘favourable to political conformity’. Words like democracy, freedom and justice are ‘often used in a consciously dishonest way’, as we have seen with those celebrating Big Tech silencing an elected US president in the name of defending democracy or protecting liberty. (read more)

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