Dom Alhambra

When a phrase becomes doctrine, its spirit has often expired and parasites have moved in. Free Speech, a phrase that transformed from the right to advocate for suppressed groups to the mandatory equalization of voice for all people (and corporations, bots, hate groups, government agencies, so on), became a heartless doctrine with the advent of the internet, a technology well-known for removing all accountability for its users, thus making truth and speech unaccountable to any portion of reality.

Jacob Mchangama moralizes the doctrine of Free Speech by dividing people into two groups (“egalitarian” and “elitist”). One is preferred, one is not:

An egalitarian conception of free speech stresses the importance of providing everyone with a voice in public affairs regardless of status or education. An elitist conception, on the other hand, prefers a public sphere mediated by institutional gatekeepers who can ensure the “responsible” diffusion of information and opinion.

The egalitarian, Mchangama’s hero of this doctrine, has turned Free Speech into an entitlement for all people. Mchangama’s villain “mediates” information—which for the author has no difference compared with censorship, for he has developed a slippery slope that earned authority can at any time turn into violent authoritarianism.

But after reading “The War on Free Speech”—no, it’s not a Fox News piece by Hannity—I don’t see the author speaking much about free speech but rather about the blunt object of Free Speech a phrase that ignores every nuanced facet of why we live in an era that is so wary of unmediated communication. Even when Mchangama recognizes the pitfalls of technology and speech—the disinformation campaigns and the co-opting of digital networks by authoritarian regimes—his response can only be “we must fight fire with fire”. Misinformation with even more information.

How does that even play out in the field? I’ve seen how conspiracy theorists search Google for their information: They search for exactly what they want to search for, and skip past any dissenting news. I’ve seen how opinions become fact, because there is no time in verbal speech to “fact check”. The viruses of misinformation spread because we are kind human beings that are not used to mass manipulations by algorithms and bots. And when we start finding the cracks in good information, we start to build up defenses against both fact and fiction. Soon enough, our truth is a mix of both, with the satisfaction that we put in the work to siphon through it all with our own personal values and principles. In other words, the censorship and “elitism” Mchangama reacts against is in fact internalized in the individual. What else is there to do when we are overwhelmed by Free Speech, which has effectively counteracted the best of what real free speech has to offer?

Mchangama is not worried at all about the effects of Free Speech, so long as the technology of communication is not fettered by any entity. The manipulators sneak in through the doctrine, and we disengage and seek our own truths. But these mixes of fact and fiction are our personal truths, and why shouldn’t others know our truth? Thus we are missionaries, spreading the Good News online and in the real world, without understanding where our truths came from and what impacts they may have on other individuals or civil society as a whole.

Mchangama believes that he is pushing a humanistic ideal by being an advocate of Free Speech, but his criticisms of those he believes as “elitists”—a new generation of progressives who want to purge an ever-broadening collection of ideas and views they deem racist, sexist, or anti-LGBTQ from universities, media outlets, and cultural institutions”—ignores the humanity of what they are attempting to do. These “new progressives” recognize the marketplace of ideas that Mchangama appears to be extolling by fighting speech with more speech, but they realize that private and public institutions are the basis of the marketplace, and so they believe that racial, sexual, and LGBT equality may not only derive from free speech, but by informationally competing with opposing perspectives. These “new progressives” are in fact championing Mchangama’s Free Speech by pointing out the issues of competing speech, undermining it, and using the same marketplace institutions to install their own ideals of speech. Again, Mchangama is approaching Free Speech as a neutral technology, so the gaming of the system by using speech to fight speech can be built in.

And for the conservatives, Mchangama provides a sketch of “free speech cynicism” that appears to only be more Free Speech: 

Despite professing concern for free speech, conservatives have also responded to the rise of so-called identity politics and what they decry as “cancel culture” with illiberal laws prohibiting the discussion of certain conceptions of and theories about race, gender, and even history in educational settings.

Isn’t the point of Free Speech the ability for anyone to propose ideas that can be inconvenient to the status quo? Lawmakers, liberal or illiberal, can propose laws of any kind, because it is up to the social technology of democracy to decide whether it goes into effect, no? Should it somehow be illegal to consider and propose “illiberal laws” in the name of Free Speech? What does Mchangama want? It appears that he wishes for a time when the majority wasn’t fractured, and that truth was centralized by authorities—if not, then we already have Free Speech in spades.

The technology of Free Speech naturally divides and disintegrates societies until all truth is held only by the individual. Free Speech is the method in which any and all opinions, facts, and fictions are equal in value and must be sorted through and adopted by the individual. By completely rejecting the “elitist” notion of free speech, Mchangama believes that the human right of Free Speech supersedes any type of shared knowledge, for the marketplace ideas—like the stock market—is determined by complex irrationalities and value systems that transcend truth and fact.

I don’t think we’re in a “Free Speech recession” but at a height of paranoia about the overwhelming noise our communication networks—from verbal speech to internet media—are making, and thus we are trying to do everything we can to lessen the noise, even if we start retreating to fantasy and censorship. Free Speech won’t solve the existential crisis of information abundance. Normal free speech will always help to maintain accountability for authorities and governing bodies. The internet actively rejects accountability with fake accounts, fake people, false information, false identities. The internet only provides the doctrine of Free Speech, which is that all information is equal and it is up to the individual to parse through the falsities and make up their own reality.