in 2021, American society is not excited about the part of anyone’s history where they didn’t know who they were or what they believed in.
Our past is examined as part of sentencing for any current social crimes. This has long been part of how the legal world works: if you have prior convictions you get more serious sentences for current convictions. it’s new in the world of social power.
Well, no it’s not. what’s new is the consequential levels that social power has attained over races and classes that were formerly only subject to state power.
Now all races and classes are increasingly subject to the power held by a wide net of social peers.
this is why confusing arguments are being had about freedom of speech. e.g. do you have freedom of speech if in speaking freely you will risk being “cancelled”?
I would say: freedom of speech is a construct guaranteed by the state, protected by the state, and modified by the state. It’s a freedom from persecution by the state, which was seen as the most powerful force an individual might face, and really the only organized antagonist force a white male would face in life, outside of wartime. during war time, another threat is larger still, so freedom of speech has been curtailed during war.
freedom from persecution by the organized state due to spoken and printed speech is what Americans basically have because those in power have felt it was an important protection against tyrants and bad governments.
—-
so what has happened is that another force has risen with enough power and organization to inflict its will on white men: the flexing and flowing and ever-slightly-changing online social world.
—-
what is a government? It’s a structure of rulership that has enough power to stay in place. It gets that power from its ability to dominate individuals and groups who would overthrow it. It doesn’t need to exercise that power all the time to hold it. It has the power to tax because it has the power to kill or imprison. It has the power to make new rules and enforce them with life changing consequences.
—
the online social world is developing all these powers. It’s like a new governing force, for better or worse. And it’s far less controlled by the old nobility than the current American government is.
For better or worse: a tax on our jokes: we are hereby ordered to remove certain offensive language from attempts at humor, or face significant penalty.
for better or worse: pressure on editorial pages of newspapers: all editors are hereby ordered to not print certain contemporary opinions or face significant penalty from social peers
For better or worse: obligations toward the least among us: all homeowners in Portland are to express their support for new houseless facilities on their street and to avoid concerns about the negative impact such facilities may have on their property’s value or face social penalty; similarly, concerns about drug use among homeless populations and concerns about finding needles on the sidewalk should be suppressed in favor of the aggregate benefit to humans in critical need of some help.
for better or worse: in some towns, in addition to health inspection scores, restaurant owners must display a list of all the oppressed groups they actively support, or risk social penalty
—
the power held in the online social world—there we meet our girlfriends, grow our influence, build our businesses— means that social power is increasingly very very real.
American notions of free speech have nothing to do with it. It’s a different government. It’s totally by the people, of the people, and of all the people, not just some of the men, not just those over 18, not just the landowners.
—
Separate from any opinion about what’s better and worse: the unwritten, impermanent, and unorganized nature of social power gives it a flavor of power that tends to be eventually seen as dangerous by those who live under it. That flavor can be described in many ways:
without clear precedents
lacking due process
arbitrarily applied
—
in the case of a monarchy, power lacking due process can lead to good outcomes when the monarch strives for good, and bad outcomes when the monarch strives for bad.
it has been the tendency of all societies over time to establish due process and checks on power—whether in the form of senates, kings courts, mothers influencing young kings, committees, or simple traditions and historical precedents—because unchecked power creates such an opportunity for tyranny that it is destroys itself/is unsustainable and is replaced by more sustainable structures which have better checks on power and thus more buy in = more Muscle to protect themselves from competing governments
how will this social power evolve to have such checks on the power of the online social world?
i am Not sure. It might be difficult to do so. It might be that the online social world is inherently uncheckable in this way. Its rulings and penalties and benefits cannot be organized into a precedent based structure. That also means it won’t be able to marshal the power resources to protect itself from competitive governments.
I suspect it will become increasingly outlawed by more organized governments with more power and more established jurisprudence structures.