
The origin of Silicon Valley's dysfunctional attitude toward hate speech - karmel
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/origin-silicon-valley-dysfunctional-attitude-toward-hate-speech
======
blackbagboys
There is little or nothing in this agitprop essay that actually undermines or
even directly confronts McCarthy's original points. There's two irreconcilable
philosophical positions at play here: either you believe that there are things
- like preventing people from seeing "hurtful" humor - that are more important
than freedom of expression, or you believe that freedom of expression is
foundational for all other human freedoms. Neither side is ever going to
convince the other because they want to live in fundamentally different
worlds. If you're on the former side, your only option is to silence your
opponents; if you're on the latter, your only option is to resist being
silenced.

~~~
camgunz
Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into
a communist authoritarian nightmare? It works in basically all aspects of
public life and things seem (more or less) alright.

~~~
rtpg
There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please
in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".

~~~
apcragg
It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has
decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a
subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around
society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for
using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or
exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with
government authoritarianism.

~~~
ekianjo
> It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm.

Society is not a uniform group with a single way of thinking.

~~~
h0l0cube
apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact.
Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our
social interactions.

~~~
ekianjo
> Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our
> social interactions.

I agree, but as far as I know in the US the spirit behind such interactions is
pretty much described in the constitution, and the first amendment makes it
very clear that freedom of opinion/expression is paramount, no matter what.

------
gdwatson
The attitude this piece bemoans is something that used to be widespread in
Internet culture, and I am sad to see it dying out.

I suppose the goal to make a freer world out of the Internet was always
destined be lost. The battle against the Clipper chip was a huge victory for
that culture and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA were a huge
loss. But it was a loss the culture was conscious of, a bid by outside forces
to keep it from getting "too big for its britches."

Now it feels like that culture has been entirely swallowed up.
Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are beholden to advertising dollars and their
internal speech mores look, from outside Silicon Valley, to be
indistinguishable from other circles of their location and social class.

------
Top19
As others have noted, this article is terrible.

That is unfortunate though, because the book it is based on looks really
really interesting. I am thinking that The New Yorker (although is seems with
Mr. Cohen's help) just chose the most "out-of-touch-liberal-that-only-has-
rich-people-for-friends-way" to spin the book. That is sad because again, the
book looks good.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/)

------
mindslight
Ah, the walking corpse of yellow journalism!

The ultimate problem is that so much power has been centralized by the
surveillance industry, that the politicking gadflys can't not come buzzing.
Google, Twitter, Reddit et al are already turning over every rock hunting for
our time's communists, but according to this article they still aren't
prostrating themselves hard enough! The choosing of the losing strategy of
appeasement never cease to amaze me - this is what _real power_ looks like in
a democracy!

The obvious answer is to let these centralized surveillance cesspools wither
and die, assisted by the blight such as this article. The Free world will move
past the sinkhole of "web 2.0" and on to uncensorable decentralized
communications. As the identity politickers (aka racists) turn grey, their
kids will be discovering the actual Internet.

------
creep
I get a sense from this article of being slightly satirical (while also being
blatantly critical).

The following quotes illustrate my intuition a little more clearly.

From the article:

"newsgroups...that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet,
an early precursor to today’s Internet forums."

"I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such
stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note
that appeared on terminals campus-wide."

Along with the retro-looking GIF, the specific mention of Usenet's age, as
well as the use of the word "terminal" seem to make a connection.
Specifically, it seems to be drawing a parallel between this type of thinking
(censoring free speech to protect certain groups) and old technology.

One may find this analysis off-base, but it caught my eye immediately so I
thought I'd share.

------
js8
I am a fan of Cyberspace Manifesto. I think one reason where normal people
don't appreciate freedom of speech and computer experts do is the analogy
between our own thought processes and communicating with other people.

We certainly don't want society to censor our own thoughts (with technology).
But why should the government then censor willing communication between two
people? From a computing perspective, those are the same.

Sadly, as was already noted, the article is nowhere close to arguing this
point.

------
scythe
I disagree with absolutely everything in this article, and while the whining
that "nobody responded directly" to various complaints is likely an
exaggeration, I will nonetheless offer my piece:

>Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such
humor IS hurtful

Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually
the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful
speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative
reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from
doing that, they start to distrust the authorities.

>Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone
insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but
NOT in ALL media.

It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's
house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access
intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio
spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications;
it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more
possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on
the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are
being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you.

That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are
_private spaces_. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy:
Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as
_public_ communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement
the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her _private_
communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did
not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades
fighting against one of Brown's key premises.

>One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would
go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions
of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an
undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the _Stanford Review_ , a
sort of collegiate _Breitbart News_ for the late eighties, dedicated to
bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with
Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in
“The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another
Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism
caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World
country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.”

>Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus
nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two
white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the
backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel.

Peter Thiel and the _Stanford Review_ do not play an integral role in the
events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article.
The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an
attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel
and, apparently, _Breitbart_ , even though the author presents no evidence of
such an association.

>That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a
refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted.

If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan,
you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might
want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your
government doesn't find out about it, that is. Being from a refined background
has _nothing_ to do with being able to say what you want on the Internet,
unless a government or corporation intervenes in precisely the way the New
Yorker wants -- then it really will be only the right kind of people who can
say what they want on the Internet. If you have money, you'll always be able
to buy your way around censorship; it's the people from un-refined backgrounds
who are actually censored.

