Government doesn’t so much prevent bad things or promote good things as work hard to make sure it controls all the things, good or bad, or at least gets a substantial cut. It’s not worried that you’ll get “misinformed” or that your artistic output will get stolen, but it wants to be the entity controlling the information you get and taxing any art you buy or sell.
So it is that we see copyright-flouting, file-sharing pirate Kim Dotcom is finally slated to be extradited to the U.S. for trial and see Telegram CEO Pavel Durov being arrested, at the hands of the French but behest of the U.S., for helping Russians and others social-network without police snooping.
Worse, Brazil, having recently made the mistake of reelecting socialist Lula, is fining people $9000 per day for using insufficiently-censored social media platform X (even though Lula’s own party is still posting, hypocrisy never being an obstacle for the left). Brazil is cheered on in this Elon Musk-bashing, speech-suppressing behavior not just by the fascistic E.U. but, closer to home, by chronically sadistic, psychopathic economist/supervillain Robert Reich, who just wrote a whole Guardian piece suggesting ways regulators could make life more difficult for Musk, and, perhaps most disturbingly, by former DNC deputy chair and Minnesota attorney general (and Muslim convert) Keith Ellison, who tweeted his thanks (“obligado”) to Brazil.
Don’t commit any speech-related offenses around Minnesotans or Reich’s authoritarian-liberal Ivy League pals. (I’m pleased to see data-driven, truth-admiring Nate Silver calling out Reich as an authoritarian these days, not likely a view that many of Silver’s socialistic, paternalistic New York Times friends share.)
I wish I could say that back in the late-20th century, when I felt at home in a seemingly free world, people would’ve considered it preposterous to crack down on the phone company and arrest or fine its CEOs just because some telephone users might be criminals or political subversives.
But the truth, as my X pal MaxPaxCat notes, is that the government loved an unfettered old-fashioned phone company long ago not because the government loved freedom but because the centralized, immobile wires were so much easier to tap and listen in on, all the time. They didn’t want us silenced. They wanted us to keep on talking. And for decades, anyone who suggested they were listening in was called paranoid. Now, some of the tech bros will still say that about you if you think the algorithms are logging more than just your silent clicks, so in some ways, nothing has changed.
Bridging eras, my Boomer mom has become one of those people who just hedges her bets by periodically saying things into the old land line like “and that was a joke, if anyone from the government is listening,” bless her. Sad that we as a civilization have come to this. Sadder still that so many want to go farther in this direction.
And we don’t move in the surveillance state direction at a smooth, even pace, either but in big lurches that happen at times of heightened interest such as the current campaign season. (Actually, I owe my leftist friends this much after they’ve put up with decades of me defending right against left or private sector against public sector: I should take care to say we’ve become a surveillance society, not merely a surveillance state, since so much corporate activity now revolves around the same kind of data-harvesting, privacy-shredding, stalking/monitoring behavior, and not just because of pressure from politics, either, much as we libertarians might be tempted to think so. The controllers want you siloed for both regulatory and sales purposes.)
It was nice to see Mark Zuckerberg, always skirting the public/private divide, admit that in the last presidential election season, he succumbed to pressure from the intelligence sector of the government and censored Facebook posts (including one of mine, I must note) that described the salacious contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop accurately. That was a move that might well have steered the 2020 election away from Trump (if indeed he lost, but then, we can’t even admit the remote conceptual possibility of doubt on that question without expecting private or legal reprisals, can we?).
Corrupt institutions are scarier than any one corrupt mogul and should be abolished. But conservatives furiously defend existing institutions, and liberals increasingly enjoy using them for their own ends, so the political will to end them is nearly non-existent. Right-wingers of all people should be skeptical of idle talk about fixing, reforming, and restaffing the institutions that monitor and control us. Instead, the right is ever more prone to talk of merely “cleaning house” and ousting “the traitors,” as if the next batch of creeps will behave themselves, as long as someone tough and mean like Trump is in charge of them—because when have tough and mean people ever abused their power?
So, after centuries of naivete, Americans must now ask themselves the depressing question, like the death rattle of a once-free creature living under a dying sun, that first began resonating for many of us a decade ago with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the omnipresence of government snooping: What happens to me if I speak out? Even Zuckerberg admits he now feels compelled to wonder. And in this environment, amidst a resurgent chorus of calls for tamping down on “misinformation,” we will now ostensibly hold a free election.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey