The 104th Block: Redacted
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This week…
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Anyway, as usual, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
I like free speech so much, I’ve decided to buy it
Eli Grober for McSweeney’s:
Hi there, I’m Elon Musk. I’m mostly known for rockets and cars, but what I really care about is free speech. I can’t get enough of it. In fact, I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it.
That’s right, it turns out free speech isn’t free—it costs exactly $44 billion. That might sound like too much money for one person to be allowed to spend, but that’s only because it is. And I’ve decided free speech is worth the cost. I’m going to make sure some board full of rich guys doesn’t get to define what counts as free speech. Instead, just one rich guy will get to decide what counts as free speech: me.
So what does free speech mean to me? Free speech means… well, anything you want it to mean. Free speech is magical. It’s amorphous. It’s undefinable. That’s the power of free speech: nobody in history has ever defined it—not our founders, or politicians, or judges, or even average citizens. There’s simply no definition of free speech.
“That’s not true,” you might say, “It’s pretty clearly defined.” And to that, I’d say, “That’s the beauty of free speech—it can be a lie. I was lying to you. And that’s allowed.”
Read, if only for these opening paragraphs.
Outside the US, Elon Musk’s vision of a rules-free Twitter is expected to unlock violence and civil strife
Ellery Biddle for Coda:
“Everyone thinks they know how to do content moderation until it becomes their job,” said Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a tech policy group in New Delhi.
“I am not sure how [Musk] plans to address censorship by proxy that countries like India demand,” she wrote in a message.
The Modi government is known for pressuring the company to remove certain posts and reinstate others. In 2021, officials updated India’s IT Rules and began requiring large foreign tech platforms to create locally-staffed grievance programs for content removal and related disputes. It took several months, and a police visit to Twitter’s local offices, before the company complied.
Twitter has faced similar kinds of pressure in sub-Saharan Africa, where it plays a significant role in national politics in the region’s largest markets, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
In the dark. Seven years, 60 countries, 935 internet shutdowns: How authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent
Peter Guest for Rest of World:
Over the last six months, Rest of World spoke to more than 70 technologists, telecomms experts, activists, and journalists from around the world to track how governments’ control over the internet has grown and evolved during the past decade. Their testimony shows that the free, open, global internet is under severe threat. Telecomms blackouts and mass censorship risk fragmenting the internet and even undermining its physical integrity. These threats come in many forms, but most of the experts we spoke to trace them back to a watershed moment, 11 years ago in Cairo, when, facing a mass protest movement that was evolving and growing online, the Egyptian government turned off the internet.
Those who live through these blackouts know, it’s not just about connection to the Internet, to the world. Every Malaysian election comes with blackouts.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading the extract of The Power of Platforms: Shaping Media and Society, a book by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter that explores the impact of big technology companies on journalism.
I’m watching a refresher: The Social Dilemma.
I’m listening to The Good Russians on NPR’s Rough Translation.
More stray links:
Selling voyeurism: How companies create value from the taboo by Trish Ruebottom, Madeline Toubiana, Maxim Voronov, and Sean Buchanan for The Conversation.
All that is solid melts into information, an interview with Byung-Chul Han with Noema’s Nathan Gardels.
Chart of the week
From Sophie Mellor’s Fortune piece showing big Twitter accounts on the left losing followers and those on the right gaining, since the Musk buyout:
