de07d7 No.327
Let's recall Aldous Huxley's dystopia Brave New World. Many people think of it as the "soft 1984"; replacing Orwell's rule by violence and control over the truth with Huxley's rule by pleasure and apathy towards the truth.
What often gets forgotten, though, is how dissidents are treated in this book. Rather than being tortured and reeducated, they are deported to an island of their choice where they can live with other freethinkers and live independently. However, there is no possibility for these "sovereign penal colonies" to ever threaten the system due to how remote they are and how (presumably) little infrastructure they have. It is a terrible win-win: the dissidents get their freedom and the system gets a way to rid its opponents in a way that they'll never resist against. The system doesn't destroy its opposition so much as make it irrelevant.
I believe that in this regard, contemporary society has gone totalitarian in a way far beyond what Huxley could have predicted when thinking of his islands. Though governments and businesses are planning and to some degree have engaged in censorship and surveillance online, a free Internet manages to make their opponents irrelevant anyway. Think of sites like Reddit, or 4chan, or even this site and the endless forums out there, not to mention the ability to create your own website or freely hosted blog. A dizzying myriad of radical positions exist out there, some even talking over and over again about how disruptive and even violent action needs to be taken against the system.
However, like the dissidents in Brave New World, this ability to express yourself among like-minded others hardly ever translates into a sustained threat against the system. People rehash the same truths and principles repeatedly in a ceaseless series of threads or blog posts, develop a subculture (memes and /meta/ discussions) that satisfies their need for "being involved", and even break into perpetual infighting over finer points of their ideologies and tactics. This works out to the system's benefit even better than Huxley's islands, as dissidents continue to serve the system as dutiful laborers and consumers who exhaust their rebelliousness by devoting precious leisure time to said online communities.
You may protest with the examples of the Arab Spring or the shenanigans of hacktivists. Surely these are examples of the Internet allowing radicals to organize and wage real life campaigns. But in the case of the former, can we really compare the rebellion of a materially undermuh privileged populace living under a corrupt tinpot autocracy with the sophisticated liberal democracies we live under? That system clearly comes nowhere close to ours in achieving Huxley's "totalitarianism by pleasure and apathy". In the case of the latter, how often does hacktivism or IRL activities organized online translate into sustained campaigns that make reliable tactical gains, and can strategically exploit victories for further success? Typically, they just manifest as hit and runs which the system effortlessly and instantaneously cleans up after to restore normal daily life.
9b532f No.328
In order for free speech to be an enemy of liberty, the ability to express yourself (to however many or however few care to listen) would have to somehow make us less free. The only time that is true is when people use their speech to argue for totalitarian ideals and have some success in implementing their policies because they were able to freely argue for them.
As for the segregation of dissidents online, you have a point. Many of us found 8chan through the Exodus after being kicked out by other site's administrators. It's a little island of freedom, though a little more influential than the island inhabitants of Brave New World.
Then there's voluntary segregation…
de07d7 No.329
>>328For me, the comparison of online expression to Huxley's islands rests on:
1) Has establishing an online community, large or small, sharing the same radical beliefs, assisted those people with viably implementing their visions in real life? Or does online expression and organization demonstrably have a sort of narcotic effect which retards radical movements IRL?
2) Does the escapist quality of online interaction and the widespread connectivity offered by it seduce people into sinking time into it at the expense of IRL methods of expression and organization?
de07d7 No.330
>>328One more thing
>then there's voluntary segregationWell that's the point, we are talking about incentivized segregation for dissidents that said dissident will reliably choose in any given situation rather than contest their oppressor. No force is used, rather the person's natural inclinations are exploited.
Huxley was a friendly critique of minarchist libertarian/free market anarchist thought because in his view industrialization, mass communication and the sciences had equipped the forces of tyranny with the ability to induce people to enthusiastically give up on resistance rather than having to repress such people.
615849 No.335
If the idea is that having the opportunity to speak freely online gives people something to do other than actualize their freedom, and therefore interferes with the pursuit of freedom, then the same could be said of any possible activity. All opportunities are trivially antagonistic to other activities if we take this line of reasoning.
Switch gears for a moment and consider the music industry. The fact that people can download music for free would traditionally be seen as cutting into the profit in music. Yet, those musicians whose art is freely available online tend to turn –seemingly paradoxically–more profits. Why?
Because a small percentage of the people who download their music proceed to purchase other merchandise related to the music. The music is in a sense advertisement for the merchandise and concerts. Because the barrier to entry for enjoying their music is lowered, they cast a wider net and thus pull in more consumers.
In a similar fashion, the more people we get talking about freedom, the lower the barrier to entry is to do something about it. Sure; a fairly small percentage will ever go from words to action, but by casting a wider net, we get more of those people.