Dicono che occorre un’élite, che chi parla di ingiustizie nelle comunità online è andato avanti per fin troppo tempo, che i sistemi decentrati sono troppo complessi e incomprensibili, che Chelsea Manning e quegli attivisti a cui sta a cuore la libertà su internet sono il paravento dei fratelli Koch, eccetera. Argomenti tanto assurdi quanto arroganti. Ma le recenti dichiarazioni di Jaron Lanier sulle pagine di Quartz meritano sicuramente la coppa.

Lanier, un temuto ex programmatore arricchitosi con la “proprietà intellettuale”, ora rastrella denaro dicendo agli yuppie elitisti che internet è stato una brutta idea. Nel suo ultimo pezzo sostiene che se il capitalismo si rifiuta di ridistribuire la ricchezza accumulata grazie all’automazione, e se con serragli come Facebook abbiamo subito la perdita del diritto alla riservatezza, la soluzione (come poteva essere altrimenti?) sta nel rafforzamento della “proprietà intellettuale”.

Secondo Lanier, se abbiamo perso la privacy è perché non abbiamo protetto la proprietà intellettuale. Al contrario, la causa di questa perdita sono proprio le leggi e gli strumenti a difesa della proprietà intellettuale. Pensate all’incredibile concentrazione di ricchezza, garantita dalla proprietà intellettuale, che ha avuto come conseguenza la nascita di serragli come Facebook e Google. Secondo Lanier, inoltre, la progressiva scomparsa degli intermediari nel flusso delle informazioni ha portato alla perdita per sempre di quei posti di lavoro che costituivano il grosso della classe media, e questo condanna al fallimento la classica democrazia americana.

Buon fallimento, allora. Essendo nato in una famiglia senza casa, non ho mai capito i richiami scandalizzati alla santità della classe media. Gli orrori di chi vive in povertà vengono prima. In un certo senso, però, anche se in maniera contorta, tutto questo ha un senso se quello che cerchi è la conservazione dell’attuale orribile società. Ovvero se la tua priorità massima è la conservazione di quel grosso blocco elettorale imbambolato che ha reso possibili i distopici anni cinquanta. Ovvero ancora se preferisci mantenere stabili le relazioni di potere invece di alleviare le sofferenze di coloro che sono impoveriti e tenuti in condizioni di arretratezza da restrizioni sistematiche e barriere all’informazione.

Eppure il richiamo di Lanier ad un sistema di classe di sessant’anni fa, che come obiettivo principale aveva la garanzia di un lavoro a tempo pieno piuttosto che una distribuzione razionale della ricchezza generata dal sistema, è così datato e marcio che stupisce che ci sia qualcuno disposto ad ascolarlo.

Il problema è che i drammatici avanzamenti in termini di efficienza non si traducono in lavoro part-time o in progetti che rendano più del lavoro a tempo pieno, e questo è dovuto alla ridicola concentrazione dei capitali che distorce il mercato e intrappola il profitto negli strati più alti della società. La proprietà intellettuale, assieme alle barriere sistematicamente imposte alla conoscenza, ha avuto un ruolo importante, se non determinante, nella creazione del nostro sistema oligarchico. La proposta di Lanier potrebbe, in un mondo privo di corruzione, assicurare un certo grado di stabilità aggiuntiva per pochi eletti, ma in genere significa gettare benzina sul fuoco dell’oligarchia che sta razziando la nostra economia.

Ognuno di noi è dotato di creatività intellettuale e, se gli diamo tempo e spazio per esprimersi, la sua creatività va a beneficio di tutti. Gli uomini sogneranno e scopriranno sempre nuovi concetti, forme artistiche e descrizioni matematiche. Invece di avere un’élite che persegue queste passioni a tempo pieno con mezzi scandalosi, dovremmo assicurarci un mondo di relazioni orizzontali in cui ognuno è pagato abbastanza per lavorare meno e avere più tempo e modo di sviluppare la propria creatività. E poi chi mai preferirebbe vivere come uno degli “intermediari” di Lanier? Chi vorrebbe svolgere un compito non necessario, diventare parassita di quel sistema basato sulla violenza, la censura e il controllo, e che fa da sfondo alla “proprietà intellettuale”?

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

We’re told that we need elites, that people talking about injustice in their own online communities has gone on long enough, that decentralized systems are surely too complicated to figure out, that Chelsea Manning and activists who care about a free Internet are a false front for the Koch brothers, et cetera. The arguments are inevitably as preposterous as they are haughtily presented. But Jaron Lanier’s recent declaration in the pages of Quartz really takes the cake.

Lanier, a dreaded former software engineer who made a pretty penny from “intellectual property,” now rakes in cash telling elitist yuppies the Internet was a bad idea. In this latest piece he argues that the solution to capitalism’s refusal to spread the wealth from automation, as well as to the loss of privacy we’ve suffered under closed-garden platforms like Facebook, is — wait for it — for us to more strongly embrace “intellectual property.”

In addition to blaming the loss of privacy engendered by tools and laws built to defend IP — as well as the gargantuan centralized wealth from IP that underpins closed-gardens like Facebook and Google — on us not protecting IP, Lanier also claims that as we’ve bypassed middlemen in the flow of information we’ve permanently lost the jobs that comprised the bulk of the middle class and thus have ordained the failure of classical American democracy.

But frankly, good riddance. As someone whose family was homeless while I was child I’ve never understood pearl-clutching appeals to the sanctity of the middle class. The horrors of those in poverty are surely more pressing. But it makes sense in a twisted sort of way if your primary goal is the stability of our society’s existing atrocities. If your highest priority is the sort of large sedate voting bloc that made America’s dystopian 50s possible. If you prefer the stability of power relations over alleviating the suffering of those impoverished and held back by systematic constraints on and barriers to information.

Still, Lanier’s appeal to the mid-twentieth-century class system’s foremost goal of making sure everyone has full-time jobs rather than a proportional share of the increasing wealth being generated by the system is so dated and putrid it’s shocking he can find an audience wistful for it.

The problem responsible for our dramatic advances in efficiency not being reflected in part-time gigs or projects paying better than full-time jobs used to is the ridiculously huge concentrations of capital distorting the market and trapping profit among the upper echelons. Intellectual property and systematic barriers in knowledge have played a major if not defining role in the creation of our oligarchical system. Lanier’s proposal might — in a non-corrupt world — secure some additional stability for a select few, but in every world it would throw gasoline on the fires of oligarchy ravaging our economy.

Every last human being is intellectually creative in ways beneficial to us all if we’d let them have the time and space for it. We will always dream and discover wonderful arrangements of concept, art and mathematical description. Rather than empower a select elite to pursue these passions full-time by scurrilous means we should secure a world of flat market relations where everyone is paid enough for less labor that they might pursue their creative passions. And anyway who on earth would prefer to live as one of Lanier’s “middlemen?” Doing explicitly unnecessary work, a parasite on the system of violence, censorship, and surveillance that underpins “intellectual property?”

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Jaron Lanier: “Proprietà Intellettuale” e Parassitismo di un Sistema Violento.

Tivemos 137 republicações, com uma média de 6,85 republicações por texto. Nós mais que dobramos a quantidade de textos republicados por sites e jornais, comparando nosso desempenho em abril, com 57 republicações em 25 textos (média de 2,28 republicações por texto).

Digna de nota é a republicação de um dos textos escritos por mim em um grande jornal brasileiro, o Jornal do Brasil. Contando com sua republicação no Jornal do Brasil, Cercamentos modernos teve 14 citações em diversos meios.

Nossa página no Facebook cresceu bastante, saindo de suas 536 curtidas para as 875 atuais. Certamente vamos passar as 1000 curtidas em junho e já teremos uma comemoração engatilhada.

Até 25 de maio, porém, o número de textos publicados no site em português ficou aquém dos 25 planejados. Espero remediar essa situação em junho. O crescimento do Twitter também foi baixo, estacionando em 56 seguidores (ganhando apenas 8 desde abril). Será outro veículo que eu enfatizarei em junho.

Os outros projetos que assumi estão em andamento, porém um pouco mais lento: a tradução para o português de The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand, de Kevin Carson, e a resenha do livro Hierarquia, de Augusto de Franco.

Todo esse trabalho só é possível com a sua doação. Então coopere conosco para darmos um passo rumo a uma sociedade sem estado!

Erick Vasconcelos
Coordenador de Mídias
Centro por uma Sociedade Sem Estado

Portuguese Media Coordinator Update: May 2014

In May, we ran 20 articles in Portuguese on the C4SS website. Nine of them were written either by myself or by Valdenor Júnior, striking a dialogue specifically with the Portuguese-speaking public, in particular Brazilians.

We had 137 pickups — an average of 6.85 per article. The total pickups by newspapers and websites more than doubled compared to April, that had 57 pickups and 25 articles (an average of 2.28 per article).

It’s worth noting that we were able to plaster one of our articles on the website of a very large newspaper in Brazil, Jornal do Brasil. Counting the JB pickup, the Portuguese version of my own Modern Enclosures was cited 14 times in several outlets, having the most citations in the month.

Our Facebook page had significant growth, from the 536 likes it had in April to our current 875. We’ll definitely hit the 1,000 mark in June, and we should have a little celebration ready by then.

Until May 25, however, the number of articles we published ran a little short of the 25 mark we planned. I hope to remedy that situation in June. Our growth on Twitter was lukewarm as well, going from 48 in April to 56 now (only 8 more). It’s another area I hope to boost in the coming month.

Other projects I took upon myself are still underway, but at a slower pace: the translation to Portuguese of The Iron Fist Behind the Insibile Hand, by Kevin Carson, and the review of Hierarchy, by Augusto de Franco.

All this work is made possible with your donation. Cooperate with us to make anarchy a reality!

Erick Vasconcelos
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

But this campaign is illustrative for another reason. Facebook is under fire not just for permitting misogynistic speech that condones violence, but for banning speech far more innocuous. As Soraya Chemaly, Jaclyn Friedman and Lauren Bates explain in their open letter to the company:

These [misogynistic] pages and images are approved by your moderators, while you regularly remove content such as pictures of women breastfeeding, women post-mastectomy and artistic representations of women’s bodies. In addition, women’s political speech, involving the use of their bodies in non-sexualized ways for protest, is regularly banned as pornographic, while pornographic content — prohibited by your own guidelines — remains. It appears that Facebook considers violence against women to be less offensive than non-violent images of women’s bodies, and that the only acceptable representation of women’s nudity are those in which women appear as sex objects or the victims of abuse. Your common practice of allowing this content by appending a [humor] disclaimer to said content literally treats violence targeting women as a joke.

This is truly a vile double standard. It treats women’s bodies as more offensive than violence against women. It treats rape and domestic violence as less objectionable than women breastfeeding.

What we should keep in mind, however, is that this double standard did not start with Facebook. The same double standard has been promoted for more than a century as part of US law. One of the few exceptions to the First Amendment that the US government recognizes is an exception for “obscenity.” The US government claims the power to prosecute and incarcerate people for speech and expression it deems legally “obscene.”  Historically this has meant targeting sexual expression.

In 1873, Anthony Comstock convinced Congress to pass the Comstock Law, banning “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” content from the mails. Moses Harman, publisher of anarchist feminist journal Lucifer the Lightbearer, was jailed multiple times under Comstock’s reign, because his periodical featured “obscene” advocacy of birth control and free love. Margaret Sanger was similarly charged with obscenity for distributing information about contraception. The Comstock Law was used to punish practically anyone who sent information about contraception or criticism of marital rape through the post.

Obscenity law has changed a lot since the days of the Comstock. In 1973, in Miller v. California, the Supreme Court affirmed that “Obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment” but narrowed the definition of obscenity, defining speech as obscene based on the following criteria:

(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

“Prurient interest” refers to sexual arousal. So the US government claims the power to use force and violence to censor speech based on it being sexually arousing, “offensive,” and lacking “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”  This provides justification for the US government to censor completely non-violent pictures of naked bodies. As John Stoltenberg writes, “obscenity laws are constructed on the presumption that it is women’s bodies that are dirty, that women’s bodies are the filth.”

Based on the Miller test, US courts have also ruled that government censorship of sexist material is unconstitutional. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon’s Civil Rights Antipornography Ordinance was ruled unconstitutional in part because “The Indianapolis ordinance does not refer to the prurient interest, to offensiveness, or to the standards of the community.” Instead, the statute referenced objectification of women, degradation of women, and portrayal of violence against women.

The American legal system believes that the state has more legitimate interest in stopping people from being sexually aroused than in countering sexism or violence. Don’t you think those are bizarre priorities?

As a matter of principle, the state should have no power to censor. Furthermore, the state’s backwards priorities present a good argument for its abolition. In addition to abolishing the state, we should seek to stop its toxic and bigoted standards from defining the privately run social media spaces we use.

(* Do poema de Tennyson A Investida da Brigada Ligeira, inspirado em um dos episódios mais desastrosos de toda a história militar britânica. Ver por exemplo http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carga_da_Brigada_Ligeira)

Não é fácil calar-me. Tendo a ser o primeiro a dar opinião, certa ou errada, e não há muita coisa que me faça não agir assim nessa área.

Tenho de confessar, contudo, ter ficado, por um momento, sem fala e de queixo caído com a rematada ousadia de uma pesquisa da Notícias da CBS na Internet acompanhando a história de dois homens sentenciados, na terça-feira, no Reino Unido (“Britânicos pegam 4 anos de prisão por postagens de protesto no Facebook,” em 17 de agosto): “São quatro anos de prisão pena muito severa para uma postagem no Facebook?”

Realmente nem tenho de tratar da questão das respostas dos leitores (embora, enquanto escrevo, 50% dos respondentes nauseabundamente declaram-se por “Que nada, o castigo é justo”). A única coisa possivelmente mais apavorante do que a pergunta ela própria formulada de cara limpa é a ausência, entre as respostas de escolha múltipla, da opção “você por acaso está doido? Prisão? Por umapostagem no Facebook?”

Amigos, isto não é uma situação limite — “fogo num teatro repleto” ou “palavras de  ódio” faladas enquanto brandidos coquetéis molotov. É claro caso de pessoas sentadas em frente de computadores, digitando coisas para serem lidas por outras pessoas sentadas em frente de outros computadores.

Nem, aparentemente, o Serviço de Promotoria da Coroa recorreu matreiramente a acusações de “conspiração” ou lançou mão de outras formas de esperteza para fazer parecer que se tratava de coisa diferente de expressão verbal. As acusações foram formuladas de maneira simples, sendo o alegado crime “incitação à desordem.”

Como escrevi alhures, a guerra pelo futuro da humanidade — uma guerra que se desencadeia há séculos, uma guerra na qual os lados são, um, o estado contra todo mundo mais, o vencedor toma tudo, e o que está em jogo é nada menos do que um futuro dominado pelo totalitarismo e, o outro, a mais ínfima das probabilidades de criação de uma sociedade livre — ao longo do ano passado ou em torno disso foi eviscerada até reduzir-se a sua essência de guerra de informação. As armas do estado são muito reais e suas vítimas ainda estão rubras de sangue, mas a batalha será ganha ou perdida em nível de controle de informação e de comunicação.

Embora eu acredite firmemente que apenas um resultado — o fim o estado-nação westfaliano — seja possível, fico surpreso com a velocidade com que os estados estão confirmando minha estimativa da situação mediante descerem à tática do desespero: O ataque frontal.

No decurso de apenas um ano, ou em torno disso, as revelações do Wikileaks e o affaire Bradley Manning levaram o governo dos Estados Unidos a afastar-se da abordagem tradicional de “controle dos danos” diante de revelação de segredos de estado embaraçosos e a adotar uma política de impedir a todo custo a investigação do estado pelo público.

No decurso de meros meses, fomos da condição de “democracias ocidentais” admoestadoras do regime de Mubarak no Egito por ele vedar acesso à Internet para conter uma revolução, à condição da burocracia do Transporte Rápido da Área da Baía de San Francisco que bloqueou o acesso a telefones celulares para que sua autoridade não seja “questionada.”

Em questão de poucas semanas a condição da “mídia social” foi duplamente transformada — primeiro, de “um livre mercado de ideias” para local potencialmente perigoso no qual prisioneiros podem cometer abusos, e agora disso para um lugar onde comunicar-se pode tornar alguém num prisioneiro.

Tudo o que precede, naturalmente, auxiliado pela mídia cãozinho de colo, com súbito consternado interesse em “grupos de aglomeração súbita-ação-dispersão” e com temeridade para formular perguntas tais como “são quatro anos de prisão pena muito severa para uma postagem no Facebook?” como se a resposta correta pudesse concebivelmente ser qualquer coisa outra que “você por acaso está doido?”

As coisas certamente ficarão piores antes de melhorar, mas a catinga do medo circunda o estado e seus defensores. E por bom motivo. Eles estão vivendo na protelação de um tempo que já se esgotou.

Artigo original afixado por Thomas L. Knapp em 17 de agosto de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

I must confess, however to falling speechless and slack-jawed for a moment at the sheer gall of a CBS News Internet poll accompanying the story of two men sentenced Tuesday in the United Kingdom (“Brits get 4 years prison for Facebook riot posts,” August 17): “Is four years prison too harsh for a Facebook post?”

I don’t really even have to reach the issue of reader response (although, as I write, 50% of respondents sickeningly declare for “No, fair punishment”). The only thing possibly more appalling than the question itself asked with a straight face is the absence among multiple choice answers of “are you out of your freaking mind? Prison? For a Facebook post?”

Folks, this is not an edge case — “fire in a crowded theater” or “fighting words” spoken while brandishing molotov cocktails. It’s a clear matter of people sitting in front of computers, typing things intended to be read by other people sitting in front of other computers.

Nor, seemingly, did the Crown Prosecution Service pull a fast one with “conspiracy” charges or other trickery to make it look like this was about anything other than speech. The cases were plainly charged, the alleged crime being “inciting disorder.”

As I’ve written elsewhere, the war for humanity’s future — a war that has raged for centuries, a war in which the sides are the state versus everyone else, winner take all, and the stakes amount to nothing less than a future dominated by totalitarianism versus the slimmest shot at creating a free society — has over the last year or so been stripped to its essence as an information war. The state’s guns are very real and its victims still bleed red, but the battle will be won or lost at the level of information and communications control.

While I firmly believe that only one outcome — the end of the Westphalian nation-state — is possible, I’m surprised with the speed at which states are confirming my estimate of the situation by descending to the tactic of desperation: The frontal assault.

Over the course of only a year or so, the Wikileaks disclosures and Bradley Manning affair have pushed the US government away from the typical “damage control” approach to disclosure of embarrassing state secrets and into a policy of sparing the state public scrutiny at all costs.

Over the course of mere months, we’ve gone from “western democracies” chiding Egypt’s Mubarak regime for shutting down Internet access to stall a revolution, to San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit bureaucracy shutting down cell phone access lest its authority be “challenged.”

In a matter of a few weeks the status of “social media” has been doubly transformed — first from “a free marketplace of ideas” into a potentially dangerous venue that prisoners might abuse, and now from that into a place where communicating might make one a prisoner.

All of the foregoing, of course, assisted by lapdog media with a sudden handwringing interest in “flash mobs” and the temerity to ask questions like “is four years prison too harsh for a Facebook post?” as if the correct answer could conceivably be anything other than “are you out of your freaking mind?”

Things will certainly get worse before they get better, but the stink of fear surrounds the state and its defenders. And for good reason. They’re living on borrowed time.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Meia Légua, Meia Légua, Meia Légua Avante.

Libertarians are nonaggressive and essentially want to be left alone. They don’t (or shouldn’t) seek to hurt or exploit anyone. I personally would like to live in peace with all people and trade. I respect the labor of others in the hopes that they might too respect mine. We libertarians have lives we enjoy leading; friends and family to do things more fun than politicking with, music to create, wilderness to explore, a whole world of delights waiting, and some of us even enjoy moving our bodies rhymically to well-ordered sounds. We would surely all choose such activities, full of spunk and life, over participation in the jaundiced political nightmare we are currently faced with, but alas, we are not permitted to escape the fatigue of supporting our philosophy.

Market anarchists envision a world without poverty or war, where individuals are not forced to subsidize the domination of one another, nor have our own lives paternalistically guided by bureaucrats, politicians, or generals, irrelevant of how they were placed in a position of political power.

This world is possible, and it isn’t really all that complex of an idea: there should be no arbitrary political boundaries and thus no forced collectivization. Political relationships should be based upon consent and problems resolved through decentralized common law negotiation amongst the affected parties, not non-refusable legislative representation based upon geographical lines.

Libertarians form intentional communities in places like New Hampshire through the Free State project, but also inhabit substantial online communities on sites like Facebook and Reddit, where people spend huge amounts of time sharing media related to recent government hijinx, political and/or economic theory, and historical mischief. Unless one just desperately needs this sort of town crier attention, I believe most of us would prefer to leave political libertarianism behind us for good and live our values in real life without unjust interference.

I imagine living some place like Moab, Utah, where I would buy a used four-wheel drive truck and romp into the wilderness for days at a time. When I’d meander back to civilization, I’d strum a guitar, and maybe find a hardword floor to lindy hop over. I don’t imagine having to work all that much either, as I wouldn’t be funding corporate privilege or the deaths of children overseas against my will. My economic competition wouldn’t be artificially advantaged over me through the state as they currently are, and I wouldn’t face onerous regulations, zoning, and licensing laws which entrench the well-connected and severely disrupt low overhead producers such as myself. It’s not that I desire a large amount of wealth, but the American breed of political and economic strangulation is denying me the fullest expression of my humanity, and yours too.

When anarchists come up against a system of voting inside of meaningless boundaries where everyone votes on how much forced labor we should make our neighbors perform and for which ends, not with their explicit permission but through some vague invocation of social contract, we find ourselves especially embittered.

If you see a libertarian or anarchist in the next week, show them some love. Their choices unsavory, the system illegitimate; it makes for a frustrating experience to hope for any semblance of a sane political future. While our ideas might sound utopian, we think it is far more utopian to believe that a political system based upon arbitrariness and forced collectivization can lead to anything worthwhile.

We would never seek to hurt you, another peaceful person, but please, we need to get on with our lives. Help us in ending the cruel irony of political libertarianism, so that all of us Americans might now maintain the countless wasted hours and wealth the political system saps from us, and replace our fatigue once more with the joy of living.

YouTube was banned in Turkey a few years ago for allowing posting of videos “defaming” the all but deified founder of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It isn’t impossible that the New Media bastion of pleasure which is Facebook might meet the same fate.

In the original complaint, Kılıçdaroğlu’s lawyers stipulated that they wanted Facebook banned, but they’ve since retreated from this position. Maybe they backed off out of concern that Turkey’s 22.5 million users would put down their çays and riot, but it is more likely that their new strategy of establishing “a nongovernmental ethics commission of journalists established to deal with insulting or immoral content” will do the same job in a more Orwellian (but less upsetting to the citizens) manner than an outright ban.

Now now now, hold your horses; they aren’t looking to restrict speech, they just want the offensive material taken down. Freedom of speech has its limits, and a respectful tone and meter of lawful discussion must be encouraged by an independent panel of journalists, who will ostensibly in no way parrot the wishes of the state which created it. They’re here to make sure the Turkish people are privy to a certain standard of quality in their political discourse, that’s all.

The consistent application of this principle of oversight is, of course, political gagging; a chilling effect, which is exactly what the Turkish establishment (and all rulers) would truly cherish.

Serdar Kuzuloğlu, a Turkish columnist, wrote in response to the state’s continuing efforts to curtail internet free speech a few months ago:

“Let me write what I have written a thousand times once more. YouTube is just a cover. The actual goal is silencing the opposition and founding a media that practices self-censorship out of fear … [They] have succeeded at both.”

Restricting speech of any kind only further solidifies the power of those who currently hold it, as they will be the ones determining which speech is offensive and which is not. It should come as no surprise when speech critical of the state becomes “offensive”‘ and is punished, or at the very least silenced, and that speech which celebrates the holders of power is left unmolested.

The Turks I know are hopeful; skeptical that the state will attempt to ban Facebook. Taking candy from ravenous New Media users doesn’t sound like an especially wise political move, but alas, if the Turkish state was able to take down YouTube, Facebook doesn’t appear an invincible redoubt.

The proposed limiting of speech by the Turkish government is just one more nail in the coffin of the belief that the state is here to help or protect people, or at the very least listen to the needs of its subjects. The state serves the interests of the elite who seek to maintain and enlarge their power over others, and like any hierarchy, the shit rolls downhill. Complaining about those above is a dangerous maneuver to risk.

Better to not say anything controversial, follow one’s culturally-sanctioned leaders, and choose from amongst the authorized political doctrines. If people don’t comply with such restrictions, on Facebook and in “real life” (whatever that means), some dastardly individual might just point out those damn nude emperors all over the place and some actually substantive politickin’ might occur. Oh no!