Editorial: The Wall and the Wedge

At Pam's House Blend, Pam Spaulding published a post today on Sen. John McCain's proposal called "Stop the Online Exploitation of Children Act," which purports to "modernize and expand reporting requirements" for certain types of Websites including what are commonly known as "blogs." I published a comment on the thread from that article, and below I republish it in edited and expanded form.

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Unfortunately, whenever a free society creates an exception to freedom of expression, what seems like a small and acceptable crack in the wall of liberty will be exploited. It is not a matter of "might"; it is, instead, a matter of inevitability.

John McCain is that inevitability become a politically powerful legislator. We—in what we legitimately believe are tolerable and even rightful areas of censorship—become his unwitting, unwilling supporters. To stand against censorship of any kind is to be accused not merely of tolerating the vile, but possibly even of promoting and liking it. That is the price we pay as free citizens for standing firmly and consistently against even the smallest cracks in that wall of liberty. To imagine, much less to enshrine in statutes and aggressive law enforcement activities, that possession or expression of one kind could be contained was a delusion of Faustian dimensions. As utterly disgusting as exploiting children is, those who would use that vileness to the purpose of a far greater agenda of controlling other speech some deem unacceptable is an exponential increase in the exploitation of children. No person is a defender of children who needs their predators as a bloody shirt to wave in a campaign against the dangers of "too much" free speech.

Now, I shall take this occasion to note an even larger, if rather parochial, point. The idea among many in the Blogosphere that the Internet is just too big, too complex, too overwhelming for anything to ever effectively control it is just plain wrong. Although an underground of it can and will always exist, the Internet as a whole really is vulnerable to being "tamed" by statutory laws, court precedents, regulatory intervention, technology, and social norms.

How many readers and contributors here would actually refuse to comply with an enacted law arising from McCain's legislative proposal? It's one thing to say, "I shall defy this outrage!"; it's quite another to face fines, imprisonment, and societal condemnation with virtually assured, if wholly unjust, accusations of supporting a universally condemned form of pornography. I will tell you right here and now that's a battle almost sure to be lost: even our presumably independent judiciary has been eaten alive when a few of its jurists have tried to insert objectivity into the body of case law on this matter.

Terror is nothing compared to fear. Terror lasts for a moment and far too often sires retributive rage. Fear, on the other hand, is penetrating and far too often breeds surrender justified as willing and desirable compliance.

Technologically, the content of the Internet can be controlled. It is being done in many countries, and it is being done fairly effectively. The control will become more effective with time because the technology of monitoring, tracking, filtering, and blocking is moving forward apace at the same time the content creators most likely to resist control are, as a whole, becoming less and less able to understand the consequences of the coding architecture they use. A prime example of this is the evolving W3C set of standards, which the overwhelming majority of bloggers believe are something desirable, when they are in fact just another brick in the wall of the technological regimentation that is a critical underpinning of thorough, effective, and rapid Internet speech control and suppression.

That same backdrop of misunderstanding is being used by both sides in the "'Net Neutrality" debate: the corporate interests that want to prevent statutory language enshrining neutrality use the sheer ignorance of federal legislators to advance their agenda; but at the same time, the corporate interests that come to the table posing as heroic defenders of neutrality also have entirely self-serving motives, none of which involve free speech of the kind we in the Blogosphere value so highly. Yet virtually all bloggers believe that the 'Net Neutrality supporters like Google are somehow heroic defenders of free expression. They are not; in the long run, they will be its worst enemies. Just ask the Chinese about Google's dedication to free speech when a hugely profitable venture and a repressive regime arrive together at the other side of the fulcrum separating speech and repression.

The curtain is coming down on the freedom of expression the Internet has provided. John McCain is merely a small fob on the end of one of the drawstrings of that curtain. Fighting the nearly inevitable fall of that curtain to the stage floor is in all likelihood futile, and that is why I shall engage that fight for the rest of my days. Should others wish to be effective fighters, I offer this modest advice:

It is not enough to be outraged, and it is not enough even to become "educated about the issues." Neither outrage nor education are particularly useful on a battlefield. The day is won by those most masterful in the use of the weapons of war; the day is lost by those who believe something else matters.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.