The Elite War on Free Thought
An important piece by Matt Taibbi on free speech, “a horror story that concerns people from all countries.” Taibbi goes beyond typical discussions of censorship to the causes and agents behind our Orwellian times. It is ”the institutionalization of orthodoxy, a vast, organized effort to narrow our intellectual horizons…This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis.”
Taibbi argues that what is happening is “something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself… it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with…rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.”
“…After enough time online, users will lose both the knowledge and the vocabulary they would need to even have politically dangerous thoughts.”
Use of black/white binaries, with ideas and people, erasing nuance or complexity of thought, e.g. “good” or “ungood” and prevalence of a new level of “doublethink”— “many news stories authorities were absolutely sure about yesterday later proved totally incorrect… we’re not expected to say anything. We’re expected to forget…”
“We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory…”
The system and the elites behind it are “taking aim at people in a way that will make censorship unnecessary, by building communities of human beings with no memory and monochrome perception. This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis.”
