Uniformity makes a system fragile. Biological diversity is protected for a lot of… reasonable reasons. Aversion to inbreeding, besides being embodied in human customs, is part of the instinctive behaviour of most animals.

Diversity allows a species to increase its odds of survival under varying conditions. Historically, real pandemics have decimated large parts of humanity. Those with the appropriate genes have survived.

I believe that what holds true in biology is also applicable to the world of ideas: every belief/system is vulnerable to new ideas/information that challenge it. Each belief/system develops mechanisms of self defense in order to protect itself from “pathogenic” ideas that threaten it. One of these is, of course, censorship.

Doubt has kept me from moving forward, and if I start writing again, this is because the doubt has faded sufficiently. Not completely, however, and I am always ready to reconsider when faced with new information.

Since March 2020, censorship has swept over pretty much the whole world. It was both painful to bear and, for those who took a step back, very instructive:

1. Censorship doesn’t just happen to others, even our democracies have shown their limits in terms of freedom of expression.

In the previous post, the rationale that seemed to justify censorship was to protect social cohesion. Is this the only way? Is it the best? The answer is no to both.

There is a key reason why hate speech was so successful in Myanmar: the population there was not used to/educated about the Internet. And without this education to distance oneself from the information received, the mind is extremely vulnerable.

Censorship is about externalising and centralising our discernment (cf Michel Serres on externalisation). It entrusts it to an intermediary: a social media, a publication, a government. Exempting oneself from the task of discernment is a form of acedia, the famous intellectual laziness referred to in the 7 deadly sins.

Freedom of speech is a political choice, and while I held it as a higher value, some facts brought me to falter. Do you remember the recent issue with the Rohingyas in Myanmar](https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/asie/ashin-wirathu-moine-bouddhiste-on-l-appelle-le-hitler-birman_1915393.html)?

A bit of background: the country, which had been tightly locked up for decades under military rule, had just opened up to the internet. One of the first players to enter this new territory was Facebook, which offered zero-rating. Thus sponsored, its service was a lightning success in the country.

I believe that the various organisations that regularly offer to sign online petitions are a typical exploitation of the participatory dynamics enabled by digital technology: they regularly bring issues to the attention of the greatest audience, often acting as an early-warning system and helping place citizen pressure on politicians or companies that “act badly”.

This morning, I received an email from one of these organisations, whose purpose is to denounce the YouTube dissemination of climate-sceptic videos, and “worse”, profit-making from the fact that these videos are viewed millions of times. The purpose of the petition I was asked to sign was to put pressure on YouTube to ban these videos.

Fake news is to thought what fog is to sight: you get lost and you crash.

Article published on the site “Rude Baguette” at the beginning of January:

The spread of false information (especially on the Internet) has become one of the major issues for contemporary politics and economics. Beyond the decline of trust in political institutions and personalities (contributing to the rise of populism), these fake news have an impact on world economy. A recent study estimates their direct cost at $78 billion. Adding indirect cost, the bill rises to $100 billion.

The worship of personality

In France (and in many other countries), the presidential elections mobilize the most voters: when one votes for a person, the programme takes second place. The point is then to seduce the voters more than to convince them. The tragedy of the struggle between reason and sentiment often sees (unfortunately or not) the latter prevail.

The elected are humans

Like Sauron’s ring, which gradually weakened its wearer (cf. The Lord of the Rings), power eventually corrupts the individual. Whatever the initial intentions of the elected official, staying in power soon becomes a priority, sometimes at the expense of the public interest he’ s supposed to defend.

A representative democracy is no longer a democracy but an aristocracy: representatives have power over a people who entrusted it to them. The ultimate justification for delegating power is that exercising power is a full-time job. But delegation has major shortcomings.

Political marketing

Getting elected requires a majority of voters to gather around a programme. Visionaries convincing crowds seem to have given way to marketers: building the winning program involves opinion polls and voter segmentation. A candidate must sell himself, with all the failings inherent in a sales process.

When economy takes over politics, traditional voting acts lose their relevance. Elected governments no longer seem in a position to represent their citizens before investors or debt holders. The former Greek Finance Minister testifies about this.

In this context, acts of purchase or investment have become the new form of voting. This is no longer, however, a citizen’s vote, where every voter has a voice. Purchasing power becomes political power, the distribution of which is certainly not very egalitarian.

After listening to some statements (which I think are misleading), I questioned the reason for my attachment to total freedom of expression, and wondered what could justify censorship. The protection of the general interest? Of private interests? Who is legitimate to set the rules? And to arbitrate? Is it reasonable to entrust any authority with the responsibility of sorting information?

Is informational chaos, or just chaos, desirable? Is it even bearable? Where does the need for order originate from? Isn’t it inherent in any society? Isn’t the human being fundamentally social? Is chaos sustainable over time? Would it not inevitably lead to a new order? So why prefer a new uncertain order to the one in place? Have we not rooted in us a need for stability and security that would then be the ultimate rationale for any rule and censorship?

Of course, all governments impose limits on freedom of expression.

These limits are sometimes acceptable and generally accepted by the population: this is the case in France, for example, with hate speech, terrorist propaganda, child pornography, etc. The US has even included freedom of expression in the first amendment of its Constitution: there the limits are wider (but note that if the Nazi party is allowed, disclosing means to read DVDs is prohibited by the DMCA).

If freedom of expression were only an individual right, a majority of people saying “I don’t care about all this stuff, I have nothing to say or hide” would be enough to legitimize censorship and mass surveillance.

• By the way, it is important to note the individualistic vision of this type of comment “I don’t care if my neighbour has things to say or hide” which has as corollaries “I don’t want to hear what he has to say” and “if he has things to hide, it’s illegal”. Of course, individualism is part of the evils that plague our societies, but it is another subject.

But freedom of expression is also a collective good, and it is as such that it must be protected. The question of course guides the answer, and the question to ask to reflect the collective aspect would rather be “do you blindly trust the authorities in place to defend the collective interest?”

No comment!

That was the subject of a previous post.

Yuval Noah Harari explains very well why data is an issue of power, and therefore why avoid their concentration is essential to safeguarding democracy. This is obviously very well aligned with the idea of PeerStorage in its political dimension.

The rest is taken from the TED website (I only translated for the French version).

Video on TED website

Introduction

In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism – and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy.

PSometimes I wonder if mankind has created, through economics and finance, its own golem.

For centuries, companies have become legal bodies. As such, they have interests and rights, which often conflict to those of natural persons, i.e. citizens. Moreover, they have unrestricted lifespan, which is an immeasurable advantage over any natural person.

The larger a company is, the more independent it becomes from the people who are supposed to run it, and the more it acts in its own interest. However, the interests of a company can be summed up in a single word: profit. Everything else is just a means. And for lack of morality, since morality is a human value, all means are fine.

Truth suffers from two major disadvantages:

• it is often complex and requires effort to be understood, yet few have the intellectual willingness to take an interest in it,
• it is often not overly spectacular in the end, and accessing it does not offer any particular “pleasure”.

Attention is more easily captured by spectacular information that does not need to be significant, not even true. In fact, in an audience-based ecosystem, everything tends to become show, staging, story telling. The average user becomes a lazy observer waiting to be entertained, and less and less a citizen who seeks to be informed.

As long as anyone can write anything, there are obviously a lot of overflows. We often talk about “fake news” and “hate speech”. While these phenomena are not new, the Internet has brought a new dimension to them: a much broader scope, and an illusion of anonymity that disinhibits speech.

In response, the public authorities generally prefer the legislative response: prohibit certain statements, punish the guilty parties. This type of response poses two democratic problems:

Algorithms sort the information presented to each user. But because there are “type 3” services, it is possible to personalize the advertising and non-advertising information that is presented to everyone.

As a result, each user is exposed to different information. And it is a vicious circle: the more we look at information, the more the same type of information will be put forward by algorithms, and the more we will look at this same type of information, thus locking ourselves in very comfortable “bubbles”, far from information that could call into question our own ideas. In some cases, recommendation algorithms lead to radicalization.

Have you ever wondered why one result comes ahead of another in a search? Or why your social network information feed was arranged in that order?

At work are algorithms. To make the service work, they evaluate, according to more or less clear criteria, what needs to be highlighted. And this power to sort information is crucial: what happens on or after the second page is often ignored due to time constraints. Of course it’s not deleted, of course whoever wants to find it will find it. But at the societal level, it is statistics that matter. And statistics show that it is the first information that counts.