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traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post.
it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/
but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/
to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/
i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/
plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/
i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin
@interfluidity I was vigorously agreeing... I'd still like your definition of 'wokeness' though, since you used it
@noodlemaz i don't have an overarching definition of wokeness. in this context i was using it to refer to the tendency of some activists and fellow travelers to put policing of language and commentary at the center of their practice, shunning and shaming people whose language or opinion are deemed regressive or bad.
i don't by any means think this fully characterizes the broad basket of tendencies (some i very much approve of) that are taken to constitute wokeness.
@interfluidity 'are taken'? By whom? Why is their definition more important than the original (being cgnisant of societal injustice, particularly but not limited to racism)?
And do you feel that in the past you might have used 'social justice warriors' or 'PC police' or similar in its place?
Do any of those have functional definitions? I don't expect answers but if your consideration leads you to 'not really', perhaps it's... Worth more consideration.
@noodlemaz words have many meanings, many connotations and denotations in actual usage. “woke[ness]” is an aggressively politicized term. yes it has its historical initial meaning, and other meanings, and proponents of various meanings are politically opposed to one another, rendering use in any sense inherently controversial, inherently offensive to one community or another. 1/
@noodlemaz but also, perhaps paradoxically, in some contexts the very controversy contributes to the clarity of what one is communicating. to refer, as i did, to “excess” wokeness as censorious invites the kind of controversy reflected in this exchange. i think that’s a feature, not a bug, because it communicates precisely what i am commenting on, a censoriousness both claimed and contested. 2/
@noodlemaz i myself am sympathetic to both the claim and the contestation. i identify more closely, politically and otherwise, with the community that would contest, but i view the claim has having a degree (an often exaggerated degree to be sure) of useful descriptiveness. i do think i’ve considered, no doubt imperfectly, the issues around my word choices. of course one can still take issue with them! /fin
@noodlemaz ( some meditation on this stuff — that one might definitely take issue with of course — here. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/10/systemic-means-its-not-your-fault/index.html )