Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police.
I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.
The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).
For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).
While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).
One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).
Other siren voices on the PC “crisis” simply make up stories in a manner that would please the director of any Russian troll factory. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the Faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting the addition of non-white authors to the curriculum. Four months later, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”; this despite the sum total of zero complaints from faculty members of fellow students. Not only had Cambridge Faculty of English not removed any white authors from its curriculum, the open letter had made no such demand in the first place nor was the featured student the sole signatory. The next day, the Telegraph printed a retraction on page two (Malik).
The reality is probably very difficult on campus from the policing of behaviour, behaviour and knowledge dissemination by the PC enforcers who demand that white authors be replaced on reading lists by those of colour; that trigger warnings be issued ahead of classes on classic literature; that safe spaces be set up for disadvantaged minorities and that jazz hands replace hand clapping at student events which so exercises the imagination of Brendan O’Neill and other high priests of “free speech”. Such localised and incidental phenomena undoubtedly have occurred but does this really mean the extinction of free speech on campuses; the creation of a generation of snowflakes by the forces of woke totalitarianism? For hard data on the real crisis of racism on campus over the last two years or so gives the lie to their confected narrative of suppression of free speech.
Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).
This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)
But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.
Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).
Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).
At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)
With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)
With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.
4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).
4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)
The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.
The political attitudes of chan collective members and their progeny ranged from far-right neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists and paleo-conservatives to techno-libertarians and national anarchists complemented by elements of the ‘Manosphere’ including men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, anti-feminists and ‘incels’ (for involuntary celibates). But so far their potential political capital had yet to be leveraged. Into this breach stepped the Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon of the Breitbart news website. In 2014 Breitbart started to woo these communities towards participation in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. Both shared a commitment to destroying the political and media establishment. The ability of 4-chan and their successors to produce powerful social media viral output and to coordinate attacks on their enemies looked prize assets for an election campaign. Yet the prejudice and aggression (especially the far-right neo-Nazi extremists among them) intrinsic to these groups and their lack of interest in the democratic process made the idea of recruiting them and their methods to a democratic campaign preposterous. But it was only their two shared beliefs – freedom of information and online sovereignty- that Bannon’s Breitbart would utilise in the forthcoming Presidential election. (Moore: pp.20-21).
Bannon had originally been captivated by the power and political potential of these communities in 2007 when he had been brought in to help run an online business that sold virtual items to multi-player gamers – like those on World of Warcraft – for real money. The gamers hated companies like this and did all they could to force them out. Although the business bombed, the journalist and author Joshua Green commented that “Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered by trying to build the business … an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men” whose collective power could destroy business. (Moore: p.21).
It was the #Gamergate affair in 2014 that provided Breitbart its opportunity to capitalise on this massive human resource potential. Simply put, disparate online users from 4chan and the gaming community became convinced that videogame journalism was unethical, and then used this belief to justify savage and persistent online attacks – including multiple rape and death threats – against female journalists and game developers. Breitbart – and later Bannon and the Trump campaign- politicised this nasty, sordid episode by presenting the battle as a front in a much broader cultural war pitting channers as freedom fighters defending their territory against alien outsiders and the deadening PC hand of the establishment. In this way, it leveraged the only two coherent political credos uniting these subcultures – information freedom and sovereignty. In this culture war, Breitbart framed the left as anti-freedom (expressed as ‘political correctness’) and anti-sovereignty (by being pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender equality) (Moore: p.22)
After the launch of Breitbart Tech on 27 October 2015 and an exclusive interview with Donald Trump as the lead story on the main site, the alliance between Breitbart, the chans and the gamers was sealed in the defence of free speech fundamentalism and anonymity against any attempts by left and liberal progressives to take them away. This eclectic mix of lulzy malcontents were then to be mobilised in a culture war which was to climax in the Presidential election of November 2016. In this existential struggle, Breitbart warned apocalyptically that if they did not take up arms, they would be overrun by normies, noobs, social justice warriors and politically correct feminazis who would destroy their world and wipe out their freedoms. (Moore: pp.24-25).
The story of how Bannon, Breitbart and Trump triumphed in this culture has been and will continue to be told ad infinitum. But it is worth emphasising that it was in the name of free speech fundamentalism that the channers, Redditors and gamers hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, gamed social media, baited mainstream media, doxxed journalists, created false narratives and promoted outright lies and slander as in #Pizzagate. In debasing democracy through their unexpected victory, they created a model for others to copy – the Freextremist Model.
Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.
Bibliography
(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11
(2) Nesrine Malik. There is a crisis on campuses – but it’s racism not free speech Guardian 14th October 2019
(3) Martin Moore. Democracy Hacked. How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics London: Oneworld 2019
Barry Gilheany with an essay on the problems posed by an absolutist adherence to fee speech.
Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police.
I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.
The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).
For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).
While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).
One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).
In 2018, it was reported that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK had surged by more than 60% in the previous two years. A similar spike in the number of religiously motivated hate crimes at universities was revealed in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Independent newspaper with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents reported at 26 UK universities. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an official inquiry into what seems to be a virulent outbreak of racism on campus. A Warwick University student discovered racial slurs written on bananas he had stored in a shared kitchen. In 2018, two 18-year-old men were arrested after a Nottingham Trent University student posted video footage of racist chants, including “we hate the blacks” outside her bedroom door in her student hall of residence. Such incidents only come to public notice when they are distributed on social media; in the words of the Black, Minority Ethnic ( BME) student officer for University College London in the Guardian in 2018: “We would hear about a case [every day] in the media if everything that happened went online” (Malik).
Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).
This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)
But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.
Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).
Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).
At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)
With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)
With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.
4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).
4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)
The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.
Into this turbulence stepped Breitbart’s newly recruited provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, in September 2014 who sought to be the gamers’ champion by turning the narrative on its head. Instead of acknowledging the harassment, doxing and mobbing by the activist gamers, he depicted them as the victims of “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers.’ He dismissed campaigners’ concern over online death threats to women as “death threat hysteria”. (Moore: pp.22-23).
Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.
Bibliography
(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11
Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police.
I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.
The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).
For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).
While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).
One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).
In 2018, it was reported that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK had surged by more than 60% in the previous two years. A similar spike in the number of religiously motivated hate crimes at universities was revealed in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Independent newspaper with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents reported at 26 UK universities. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an official inquiry into what seems to be a virulent outbreak of racism on campus. A Warwick University student discovered racial slurs written on bananas he had stored in a shared kitchen. In 2018, two 18-year-old men were arrested after a Nottingham Trent University student posted video footage of racist chants, including “we hate the blacks” outside her bedroom door in her student hall of residence. Such incidents only come to public notice when they are distributed on social media; in the words of the Black, Minority Ethnic ( BME) student officer for University College London in the Guardian in 2018: “We would hear about a case [every day] in the media if everything that happened went online” (Malik).
Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).
This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)
But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.
Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).
Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).
At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)
With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)
With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.
4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).
4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)
The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.
Into this turbulence stepped Breitbart’s newly recruited provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, in September 2014 who sought to be the gamers’ champion by turning the narrative on its head. Instead of acknowledging the harassment, doxing and mobbing by the activist gamers, he depicted them as the victims of “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers.’ He dismissed campaigners’ concern over online death threats to women as “death threat hysteria”. (Moore: pp.22-23).
Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.
Bibliography
(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11
➽ Barry Gilheany is the author of a PhD thesis Post-Eighth Abortion Politics in the Republic of Ireland from Essex University, Department of Government. He is also the author of The Discursive Construction of Abortion in Georgina Waylen & Vicky Randall (Eds) Gender, The State and Politics Routledge, 1998.
Barry Gilheany with an essay on the problems posed by an absolutist adherence to fee speech.
Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police.
I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.
The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).
For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).
While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).
One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).
Other siren voices on the PC “crisis” simply make up stories in a manner that would please the director of any Russian troll factory. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the Faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting the addition of non-white authors to the curriculum. Four months later, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”; this despite the sum total of zero complaints from faculty members of fellow students. Not only had Cambridge Faculty of English not removed any white authors from its curriculum, the open letter had made no such demand in the first place nor was the featured student the sole signatory. The next day, the Telegraph printed a retraction on page two (Malik).
The reality is probably very difficult on campus from the policing of behaviour, behaviour and knowledge dissemination by the PC enforcers who demand that white authors be replaced on reading lists by those of colour; that trigger warnings be issued ahead of classes on classic literature; that safe spaces be set up for disadvantaged minorities and that jazz hands replace hand clapping at student events which so exercises the imagination of Brendan O’Neill and other high priests of “free speech”. Such localised and incidental phenomena undoubtedly have occurred but does this really mean the extinction of free speech on campuses; the creation of a generation of snowflakes by the forces of woke totalitarianism? For hard data on the real crisis of racism on campus over the last two years or so gives the lie to their confected narrative of suppression of free speech.
Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).
This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)
But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.
Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).
Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).
At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)
With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)
With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.
4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).
4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)
The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.
The political attitudes of chan collective members and their progeny ranged from far-right neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists and paleo-conservatives to techno-libertarians and national anarchists complemented by elements of the ‘Manosphere’ including men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, anti-feminists and ‘incels’ (for involuntary celibates). But so far their potential political capital had yet to be leveraged. Into this breach stepped the Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon of the Breitbart news website. In 2014 Breitbart started to woo these communities towards participation in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. Both shared a commitment to destroying the political and media establishment. The ability of 4-chan and their successors to produce powerful social media viral output and to coordinate attacks on their enemies looked prize assets for an election campaign. Yet the prejudice and aggression (especially the far-right neo-Nazi extremists among them) intrinsic to these groups and their lack of interest in the democratic process made the idea of recruiting them and their methods to a democratic campaign preposterous. But it was only their two shared beliefs – freedom of information and online sovereignty- that Bannon’s Breitbart would utilise in the forthcoming Presidential election. (Moore: pp.20-21).
Bannon had originally been captivated by the power and political potential of these communities in 2007 when he had been brought in to help run an online business that sold virtual items to multi-player gamers – like those on World of Warcraft – for real money. The gamers hated companies like this and did all they could to force them out. Although the business bombed, the journalist and author Joshua Green commented that “Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered by trying to build the business … an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men” whose collective power could destroy business. (Moore: p.21).
It was the #Gamergate affair in 2014 that provided Breitbart its opportunity to capitalise on this massive human resource potential. Simply put, disparate online users from 4chan and the gaming community became convinced that videogame journalism was unethical, and then used this belief to justify savage and persistent online attacks – including multiple rape and death threats – against female journalists and game developers. Breitbart – and later Bannon and the Trump campaign- politicised this nasty, sordid episode by presenting the battle as a front in a much broader cultural war pitting channers as freedom fighters defending their territory against alien outsiders and the deadening PC hand of the establishment. In this way, it leveraged the only two coherent political credos uniting these subcultures – information freedom and sovereignty. In this culture war, Breitbart framed the left as anti-freedom (expressed as ‘political correctness’) and anti-sovereignty (by being pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender equality) (Moore: p.22)
After the launch of Breitbart Tech on 27 October 2015 and an exclusive interview with Donald Trump as the lead story on the main site, the alliance between Breitbart, the chans and the gamers was sealed in the defence of free speech fundamentalism and anonymity against any attempts by left and liberal progressives to take them away. This eclectic mix of lulzy malcontents were then to be mobilised in a culture war which was to climax in the Presidential election of November 2016. In this existential struggle, Breitbart warned apocalyptically that if they did not take up arms, they would be overrun by normies, noobs, social justice warriors and politically correct feminazis who would destroy their world and wipe out their freedoms. (Moore: pp.24-25).
The story of how Bannon, Breitbart and Trump triumphed in this culture has been and will continue to be told ad infinitum. But it is worth emphasising that it was in the name of free speech fundamentalism that the channers, Redditors and gamers hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, gamed social media, baited mainstream media, doxxed journalists, created false narratives and promoted outright lies and slander as in #Pizzagate. In debasing democracy through their unexpected victory, they created a model for others to copy – the Freextremist Model.
Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.
Bibliography
(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11
(2) Nesrine Malik. There is a crisis on campuses – but it’s racism not free speech Guardian 14th October 2019
(3) Martin Moore. Democracy Hacked. How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics London: Oneworld 2019
Barry Gilheany with an essay on the problems posed by an absolutist adherence to fee speech. Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police.
I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.
The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).
For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.
A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).
While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).
One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).
Other siren voices on the PC “crisis” simply make up stories in a manner that would please the director of any Russian troll factory. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the Faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting the addition of non-white authors to the curriculum. Four months later, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”; this despite the sum total of zero complaints from faculty members of fellow students. Not only had Cambridge Faculty of English not removed any white authors from its curriculum, the open letter had made no such demand in the first place nor was the featured student the sole signatory. The next day, the Telegraph printed a retraction on page two (Malik).
The reality is probably very difficult on campus from the policing of behaviour, behaviour and knowledge dissemination by the PC enforcers who demand that white authors be replaced on reading lists by those of colour; that trigger warnings be issued ahead of classes on classic literature; that safe spaces be set up for disadvantaged minorities and that jazz hands replace hand clapping at student events which so exercises the imagination of Brendan O’Neill and other high priests of “free speech”. Such localised and incidental phenomena undoubtedly have occurred but does this really mean the extinction of free speech on campuses; the creation of a generation of snowflakes by the forces of woke totalitarianism? For hard data on the real crisis of racism on campus over the last two years or so gives the lie to their confected narrative of suppression of free speech.
Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).
This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)
But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.
Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).
Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).
At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)
With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)
With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.
4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).
4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)
The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.
The political attitudes of chan collective members and their progeny ranged from far-right neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists and paleo-conservatives to techno-libertarians and national anarchists complemented by elements of the ‘Manosphere’ including men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, anti-feminists and ‘incels’ (for involuntary celibates). But so far their potential political capital had yet to be leveraged. Into this breach stepped the Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon of the Breitbart news website. In 2014 Breitbart started to woo these communities towards participation in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. Both shared a commitment to destroying the political and media establishment. The ability of 4-chan and their successors to produce powerful social media viral output and to coordinate attacks on their enemies looked prize assets for an election campaign. Yet the prejudice and aggression (especially the far-right neo-Nazi extremists among them) intrinsic to these groups and their lack of interest in the democratic process made the idea of recruiting them and their methods to a democratic campaign preposterous. But it was only their two shared beliefs – freedom of information and online sovereignty- that Bannon’s Breitbart would utilise in the forthcoming Presidential election. (Moore: pp.20-21).
Bannon had originally been captivated by the power and political potential of these communities in 2007 when he had been brought in to help run an online business that sold virtual items to multi-player gamers – like those on World of Warcraft – for real money. The gamers hated companies like this and did all they could to force them out. Although the business bombed, the journalist and author Joshua Green commented that “Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered by trying to build the business … an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men” whose collective power could destroy business. (Moore: p.21).
It was the #Gamergate affair in 2014 that provided Breitbart its opportunity to capitalise on this massive human resource potential. Simply put, disparate online users from 4chan and the gaming community became convinced that videogame journalism was unethical, and then used this belief to justify savage and persistent online attacks – including multiple rape and death threats – against female journalists and game developers. Breitbart – and later Bannon and the Trump campaign- politicised this nasty, sordid episode by presenting the battle as a front in a much broader cultural war pitting channers as freedom fighters defending their territory against alien outsiders and the deadening PC hand of the establishment. In this way, it leveraged the only two coherent political credos uniting these subcultures – information freedom and sovereignty. In this culture war, Breitbart framed the left as anti-freedom (expressed as ‘political correctness’) and anti-sovereignty (by being pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender equality) (Moore: p.22)
After the launch of Breitbart Tech on 27 October 2015 and an exclusive interview with Donald Trump as the lead story on the main site, the alliance between Breitbart, the chans and the gamers was sealed in the defence of free speech fundamentalism and anonymity against any attempts by left and liberal progressives to take them away. This eclectic mix of lulzy malcontents were then to be mobilised in a culture war which was to climax in the Presidential election of November 2016. In this existential struggle, Breitbart warned apocalyptically that if they did not take up arms, they would be overrun by normies, noobs, social justice warriors and politically correct feminazis who would destroy their world and wipe out their freedoms. (Moore: pp.24-25).
The story of how Bannon, Breitbart and Trump triumphed in this culture has been and will continue to be told ad infinitum. But it is worth emphasising that it was in the name of free speech fundamentalism that the channers, Redditors and gamers hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, gamed social media, baited mainstream media, doxxed journalists, created false narratives and promoted outright lies and slander as in #Pizzagate. In debasing democracy through their unexpected victory, they created a model for others to copy – the Freextremist Model.
Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.
Bibliography
(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11
(2) Nesrine Malik. There is a crisis on campuses – but it’s racism not free speech Guardian 14th October 2019
(3) Martin Moore. Democracy Hacked. How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics London: Oneworld 2019
➽ Barry Gilheany is the author of a PhD thesis Post-Eighth Abortion Politics in the Republic of Ireland from Essex University, Department of Government. He is also the author of The Discursive Construction of Abortion in Georgina Waylen & Vicky Randall (Eds) Gender, The State and Politics Routledge, 1998.
Barry - thanks for publishing this piece here. A very thorough piece. Having read through it while formatting it - and it is worth another more focused read - I don't think it comes up with any means to tackle the very real censorship by woke and PC. It fails to address how universities are producing a snowflake culture by promoting the right not to be offended. While there is a huge problem with the politics of Spiked Online, its one saving grace has been its robust defence of free speech against the political correct warriors of woke.
ReplyDelete“Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression.” –Barry Gilheany
ReplyDeleteErr, yes, it is.
Otherwise all we’d get to hear is expressions you prefer. No thanks.
I’d much rather let racists upchuck their verbal and written bile.
Better to have a genuine market place of free ideas.
Rather than just your ideas.
It’s for adults to sort things out for themselves.
Not so-called intellectuals filtering out what is or isn’t acceptable.
Like these two BBC trolls that you more or less echo here.
Watch them shudder while questioning Bill Hicks about free speech.
Start it at 1:39 if you want to skip the preamble and watch to end.
Great line there by Bill Hicks about there being no lines.
Bill Hicks BBC Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoCezQAF5AA
Anthony, Eoghan
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments and feedback.
I do not deny that there is a problem with "woke" culture on campus but my motivation in writing this piece was to point out how "freedom of speech" has been perverted by the chan and gamer trollers in their culture war against an imagined left-liberal establishment with the appalling consequences that we are all living with the the Trump Presidency and Brexit. As I point out also Trump and Brexit were the consequences of information freedom rather than the exercise of genuine freedom of speech.
But there is nothing new in this fake news phenomenon other than the term. The whole purpose of free speech is to facilitate the flow of information. What value would free speech have other than letting off steam if it is not used for the transmission of information.
DeleteIf there is no freedom of information then there can be no exercise of genuine free speech.
ReplyDeleteAnd the way to combat bad ideas is with better ideas.
That said, Brexit is largely the consequence of English nationalism versus European federalism.
And Donald Trump is the consequence of many things starting with his KKK father Frederick Christ Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump
If information is dumped on the public and cyber realms in the form of fake news and outright lies as happened in both the Brexit and Trump campaign then genuine democratic deliberation suffers.
ReplyDeletethat's true but limiting free speech is not the answer.
DeleteLimiting disinformation, conspiracy theories and targetted hate speech is the answer.
ReplyDelete