Free Speech and Community in the Digital Age

Most companies bear the imprint of their founders, but few more than Alibaba. Jack Ma’s outsize influence stems from his passion for teaching. Although he left the profession two decades ago, Jack has never really stopped being an educator. He used to joke that in his case CEO stood for “Chief Education Officer.”

The influence of a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg on their respective empires has been more like that of an idiosyncratic absolute ruler in some medieval principate than that of the head of government in a modern liberal democracy. Apple’s tethered perfectionism has everything to do with Jobs’s personality. If the other Apple-founding Steve- Wozniak-had become Apple’s dominant figure, it might have remained the open, generative platform it was at the time of the 1982 Apple II desktop computer. For years, Google did not allow advertisements for cigarettes and hard liquor because Ser-gey Brin and Larry Page disapproved of them. Facebook’s insistence on people using their real names is, to a significant degree, a result of Zuckerberg’s personal attitude.

We can insert ourselves into the struggle by creating our own virtual and physical communities for the exchange of information and ideas. The earliest recorded Western debates around free speech, in ancient Greece, connected it directly to the idea of a self-governing and well-governed community, pooling collective wisdom to establish the facts and arrive at good decisions.

The internet offers us opportunities to create our own self-governing online communities and draw on the wisdom of crowds’ across frontiers. Within the technical, legal and political outer limits set by the big cats and dogs, we can establish communities where we say: ‘we wish to conduct this debate by certain rules. If you don’t want to live by those rules, go somewhere else’. In the best case, what in the online world are usually called ‘community standards’ are exactly that- the self-determined standards of a self-governing community.

We Need freedom of expression to realise our full individual humanity. The power of speech is what distinguishes us from other animals and, thus far, from computers. If we are prevented from exercising it freely, we cannot fully be ourselves. That includes revealing ourselves to others, insofar as we wish to.

If our effective freedom of expression in a connected world is decided at the intersection of four different kinds of force – international bodies, nation states, private powers and electronically enabled networks of individuals – then it makes less sense to concentrate so heavily on the single question what should be the laws of this state?’ Rather, we need to think about the underlying principles or norms that we hope to see realised at all those levels, and can try to realise ourselves by collective, aggregated and individual action.

Under the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice; and this should include mutual criticism of the appropriateness of the languages in terms of which situations and needs are interpreted. In the course of successively undertaken abstractions, the core of generalizable interests can then emerge step by step.

The power of speech is what distinguishes us from other animals and from any machines yet invented. If we cannot express our thoughts and feelings, we can never realise our full humanity. If we cannot hear and see those other human beings, we will never understand what it means to be them.

Free speech helps us to live with the new intimacy of diversity. Only by peacefully expressing our human differences can we understand what matters to the ever more diverse women and men next to whom we are now likely to find ourselves living, as physical and virtual neighbours. If we can learn how to openly articulate all kinds of human differences – real or imagined – without coming to blows, we will be on the way to living as good neighbours in this world-as-city.

Wherever we draw the lines, the principle of being free to use your o language- your own tongue- is an important one. So is the ability to communicate across those stubborn frontiers between wikinations that, as we has seen, persist online even where political borders have become more permeable. There may be no universal right to a decent translation, but that is what communication ‘regardless of frontiers’ ideally requires. It is no accident the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is reportedly the most translated document in the world, with versions in at least 440 languages or (according to taste) dialects.

‘Seek, receive and impart’ covers three distinct though related activities. If your search engine systematically hides from you information and ideas that are out there, you may be theoretically free but will not practically be able to seek. Or you may know they are out there but be unable to receive them, because of censorship, public or private, or obstacles such as illiteracy, limited education, language barriers and poor internet access. Or you may be able to seek and receive, but not to impart back -at least, not in any effective way.

Source : Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220690-free-speech

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