In the ever-fascinating realm of information, where anything from timeless wisdom to the analysis of current events is flowing or contained, those who have the most important things to say are seldom audible. Analytical and artistic voices are no longer speaking, or they are silenced, or both. Their silences and absences leave a contour of what once was. The inflated buzzword ‘censorship’ makes up only a tiny part of the root cause: oppression.
Oppression is anti-freedom on individual, social and societal levels. Oppression and censorship seem like two sides of the same coin but they can be at odds with each other. At the Dutch television broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland some employees mistook editorial judgement for censorship and it lead them to publicly oust their editor-in-chief. Editorial judgement, the executive decision-making on what to publish and what not to publish, is in itself a form of freedom and a prerequisite for journalism. And so it happened that the employees, lacking the power of executive editorial decision-making and claiming to fight censorship, morphed into oppressors.
While some are taking one step forward and two steps back, the public remains stuck with the less important information: the daily observations, the reactions, the summaries, the commercials, the propagandists, the opinions, the obvious, the banal. This is not necessarily a critique but more something to be aware of, something to keep in mind. We are living in historically severe information poverty and it is costing lives, happiness and prosperity.
The role of the analyst has changed in recent years because the playing field changed. The main flow of information about current events, “the news”, is designed with the predictable chain reactions and opinions already calculated into the message. The better analysts know this and consequently take a loftier perspective, resulting in more abstract or complex analyses, more shadow bans and a smaller audience. Simultaneously, the bigger voices on the Internet are suffering the same fate as the common faces on television: they may seem popular but their value is diminishing.
If there was a free marketplace of ideas this would organically solve itself, but the reality is that social network timelines are heavily controlled. The best analysts –from poets to experts– have gone offline. Some announced their departure, some just left. Many a 50K+ follower account remains inactive, leaving a grey photo and a gap of years since the last tweet. Some have mentioned reasons, some have not. A few have stated that it is no longer wise or possible to share views openly online. The public, meanwhile, can only resort to improving their own judgements.
“Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth, any cause to wonder that he does not hear it.”
Tacitus, 55-120 AD (Cited in: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1899)
Oppression is multidimensional and it isn’t going anywhere soon. The Masters of the Internet won’t allow the relative freedom of the 2000s blogosphere anytime soon. An unmanipulated flow of user-generated content has never been sustained, not just because of censorship but because of oppression. Powerful publishers aren’t going to stop calling themselves platforms while they can get away with it. Causes of problems can not be part of the solution – this includes billionaires, and this includes the self-proclaimed liberator and ultimate solution to all of the above, the owner of X.
