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Episode Summary:
In episode eight of Revolution Now, Peter Joseph discusses the complex issues surrounding free speech, focusing on the influence of social media and the rise of conspiracy culture. He explores how free speech is critical for intellectual progress and protection against oppressive power structures, but also highlights the challenges posed by harmful speech, particularly in the modern context where social media algorithms amplify misinformation.

Joseph critiques absolutism in free speech, arguing for a more nuanced approach. He explains that while free speech is fundamental for societal growth and reform, it must be regulated in cases of harm. He draws from historical examples like the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, where speech was only restricted if it posed an imminent threat of harm, to emphasize the difficulty of defining limits to free speech in today’s landscape.

The conversation also dives into the evolutionary and psychological tendencies of human beings to conform to groupthink, which, combined with the sensationalism and rapid spread of information on social media, can create echo chambers of irrational beliefs, as seen with the rise of movements like QAnon. Joseph warns that this trend is a threat to self-regulation in speech and calls for greater transparency and public accountability for social media platforms.

He concludes by advocating for a more informed and structured dialogue around free speech regulation, emphasizing that it should include democratic participation to address the broader societal impacts of harmful and misleading content.

Transcript:
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now, episode number 8, November 3rd, 2020. On the docket today, we have the issue of free speech. And by extension, related subjects of ethics, morality, and philosophy itself. I’m also going to touch upon in this context, the rise of conspiracy culture a bit, and the effect of social media on such information flow, which has, no doubt, altered the landscape in the free speech debate due to the power of algorithms, of course.

Also know that there will be a Medium article out in a few days more specific to the subject of non-evidence based belief, particularly extending to conspiracy culture and what’s generally happened over the past 10 years when it comes to baseless ideas, as we see with QAnon and beyond.

But before we jump into that, I want to remind folks that I’m working on a new lecture for early January, which will take place in Los Angeles in a small theater, internal and with a well spaced audience. It will be a free event and it will be webcast and professionally recorded in the hope to spark a new conversation about the future of activism itself.

I’ve given quite a few public talks of the years, and I keep trying to approach it in different ways, trying to find different angles and the novel formulation I have come up for this one, I think will be effective. Probably two hours in length. The program would present a general theory of human behavioral causality, hence the bio-psycho-social science that I’ve always talked about, that we put together to figure out what people do and why coupled with a consequential analysis of progressive activism and its social determinants. I say social determinants because, as I’ve argued before, traditional forms of activism as we know it are having an increasingly marginal effect.

Anyway, my basic goal with this lecture in January is to get across some important reasoning relating, of course, to what we know as a structuralist worldview. Overall, it’s about killing as many birds with one stone, if you will, which is why I focus on economic change as without a change in how the economy is structured, without a new social precondition to foster improved social relations and better environmental stability, there’s really no change to be expected.

What separates this upcoming event from my other works is it’s going to finally approach a more formal activist method. So this kind of multi-leveled approach, which is very different from the majority of proposals seen by notable folks out there, writing books within system ideas. Ultimately you have to be in system to a degree, but the real power is going to be from out of the system. So I’ll be making an announcement about that event soon, and it is being made possible by the kind of people supporting me at my Patreon, peterjoseph.info.

Now back to the podcast subject matter. One of my goals today on the subject of free speech is to hopefully instill a less polarized and more nuanced view of the idea. With the power of social media, the banning of popular figures, cancel culture, and a great deal of outrage over content deemed offensive, dubious, harmful, I think it’s important people step back and understand a bit about the history of free speech and it’s philosophical and hence legal basis, with ultimately the most critical question being how do we go about modeling a prudent approach to speech regulation in the rare cases required without inhibiting the critically important necessity of free speech in modern civil liberty theory, hence our ability to express our thoughts without inhibition, condemnation, or censorship.

Generally, I find free speech to be critical to civilization for two reasons. One science demands it for intellectual development and knowledge assessment. If we did not challenge prior assumptions with our speech, such as the earth being the center of the universe, or the earth being flat, we would be in a very dire place today, no doubt. Free speech is absolutely essential to intellectual progress, overturning prior ideas with better ones.

Second, and more particular to the legal distinction historically, free speech is an offensive measure to protect against power, which is particularly important in our unfortunately hierarchical society that’s based on group antagonism and competition, where a very strong fascistic propensity exists for one group to harm and exploit or oppress another group for their own gain as history has shown. If it wasn’t for free speech and the ability to protest, to challenge authority, to express contempt for not only government, but private enterprise through public criticism, labor movements in the pursuit of reforms, the nature of society would look much different, particularly the nature of Western society, because unfortunately there are still pockets of the world that are far deeper in this sickness, such as Saudi Arabia, which has limited free speech. And, you know, if you offend the theocratic institution, great violence will likely bestow you whether it’s stonings or beheadings and so on. Blasphemy laws, just look at the outcry right now and the violence with the Canadian decision to show the prophet Muhammad in response to the beheading that happened, which I’m sure everyone heard about and so on and so on.

That aside, as a filmmaker, I have obviously dealt with my share of media suppression and I get it, but yet I’m not an absolutist when it comes to free speech as if anything should go and that’s that. Because nothing in life works that way, of course. In the same way moral codes common to religion or other philosophies also can’t be seen as absolute on any level. Thou shalt not kill, they say.

When the truth is everything is contingent upon circumstance. Absolutism, meaning taking a declaratory position on a given issue, is a fundamentally flawed and infantile disposition when it comes to pretty much everything, as I’ll describe. This isn’t to say moral guidelines in general, don’t have strong purpose. It’s definitely a good idea for people to generally see killing each other as bad for many functional reasons, not just arbitrary moral ones.

In the end account has to be taken of the condition or environment or circumstance one finds themselves. It’s contingent upon circumstance. And as unfortunate as it is, as much as I, of course, personally believe and would go far out of my way, not to hurt another human being, let alone take another human being’s life, there are in fact theoretical circumstances that could become reality where such conditions warrant it, unfortunately. And what does it mean? Ultimately it means there is a deep need for systemic thinking and conditional thinking as opposed to this myopic absolutism in philosophy.

Let me step back here a little bit. Let me start by saying that if there’s any underscoring trend that can be observed as knowledge has developed, it’s the fact that the more we understand the more there is to understand and nothing is what it appears at first, when it comes to any kind of intellectual or, hence, scientific discovery. We have been in a kind of transition when it comes to how we arrive at conclusions and beliefs moving from highly simplistic singularly causal conditions to explain phenomenon, such as, say, the early idea in Christianity that a deity created the world in six days, to a far more complex view, analyzed and corroborated through the lens of science, revealing another explanation for life, which is the intersecting reality of biological evolution in contrast.

Now, do we have a definitive and complete sense of biological evolution? No, but we know enough to support the general theory based on corroborated evidence from many directions and since science demands falsifiability, we can expect intellectual discovery around evolutionary theory to change, with some ideas proven wrong while others emerged to support existing ones and so on.

In fact, the reason I point this out is that the very method of science as we know it, proves the failure of absolutism inherently. It can’t exist. And yet our brains appear to be wired to want to seek out such simplicity. We have this kind of epistemological evolution, the evolution of how knowledge is obtained. And it’s easy to understand how our five sense reality, how we see and how we feel inherently resolves to simplistic conclusions about the world based on the superficial perception. For example, we know very well, the earth is not flat even though there’s a fairly robust community of goofballs out there that think that it is. But how do we know? Because there are numerous intersecting measurable phenomenon that corroborate the conclusion and continuously so as new information continues to come in year after year, from mathematical modeling to physical observation, to the physics of celestial bodies interacting, to the moon’s gravitational pull, every level of analysis repeated and tested confirms the fact that the earth is round, overriding that failed intuition that people have historically experienced when they walk across the earth, because it looks flat, it feels flat.

In the same way, early astronomers thought the earth must be the center of the solar system or the universe. Clearly from the perspective, looking outward from the earth surface, the stars and the planets appear to rotate around the earth. So, this was believed until Copernicus and then Galileo came along. And jumping back to the notion of free speech and its obvious importance, we all know that Galileo was highly condemned with his view of a heliocentric universe and was threatened as a heretic by the prevailing religious establishment.

To summarize, you have this basic move from a perceptual superficiality to scientific corroborated measurement, revealing not only the importance of not taking an absolutist to view and not being dogmatic in our beliefs, vulnerable to change, but also the importance of free speech itself in the process of knowledge development, as the example of Galileo.

And of course, it’s going to be fascinating to look back 100 years from now, I’ll be dead, but you know, and to see how much silly stuff we believe right now that we take for granted, which will be proven wrong in the future. And that’s just the nature of things.

What I’m trying to get at here is that the structure of our minds pose challenges, the structure of how we sense things pose challenges. We humans have a very difficult time perceiving systemic outcomes. We think categorically, and we tend to observe in a reductionist manner. And to clarify my terms, first, what I mean by categorical is we put things into boxes in our minds, creating associations, trying to decipher some organization. And the problem with that is that by nature of categories, you imply exclusion and separation. This, to me, is a part of reductionist thinking and by reductionism defined, I mean the process of understanding reality by breaking it down into component parts and then studying the behavior of those parts. So you have a categorical concept of a car engine and you have the reduction of the component parts of that car engine in an attempt to understand how the engine works. And obviously there’s no question, reductionist thinking has been extremely important to scientific development, but the problem is the analysis is not open-ended. It’s categorically specific, once again.

But what if you reverse the context? Instead of going in, you went outward to figure out the larger context of the engine and the car itself. What if you were challenged to figure out how the car itself fit into a larger order equation that may not be readily apparent to you?

We know a tree is a tree and the tree is composed of attributes that define its internal structure, its characteristics: leaves, branches, roots. But the tree is really part of a larger order context, such as an ecosystem. What created that tree? What supports that tree from the external?

Reductionism itself is best thought of as existing on a side of a spectrum of analysis. While it’s important to evaluate things in reductionist way, breaking things down, understanding their parts, it is just as important to reverse direction and think about how that categorical phenomenon fits inside other categories and ultimately systems, how it may be emergent, how it might be changing as a whole as a system, such as the process of natural selection, symbiosis, synergy, and all sorts of other things that I’m not going to go into.

And the point here is that this also applies to information, how we intellectually organize and contextualize information in our minds lends itself to truncated and incomplete conclusions and notoriously so, which is why slogans and moral declarations, as I’ve mentioned, have persisted so strongly in cultural rhetoric, which is why things have been so myopic.

From a categorical reductionist perspective, there is a built-in lack of connectivity in the way people see causality in reality, and that’s a serious problem. I think the best example, as I’ve used before, is the concept of structural violence or, come to think of it, as I talked about a few podcasts ago, the concept of systemic racism.

If you put a gun to someone’s head and pull the trigger, everyone recognizes that as violence. However, if a corporation routinely pollutes a water supply causing cancer years later in people who eventually die prematurely, most people don’t really see that as violence in the same visceral way, yet it is. And the same goes for systemic racism. It’s just too complicated for people to think about multiple intersecting influences that lead to bigoted outcomes, which is why so many conservative minded people don’t even believe systemic racism exists. They don’t believe it exists because they have no clue how it works.

And there are plenty of other examples, libertarian thinking such as volunteerism, the non-aggression principle and all this stuff that I’ve talked about before, they are categorically superficial frameworks that lack a systemic connection and hence they lack intellectual validity.

Similarly, we have a linguistic structure that is declaratory: propositions. In fact, the very statement I made before, “There is no such thing as absolutism,” is of course an absolutist statement and paradoxically so. David Bohm, a famous theoretical physicist who did a lot of work in quantum theory and, by extension, philosophy of mind, used to abstractly talk about how language should focus on the verb and not the noun, creating a language of process and transformation, which he called rheomode, or flowing mode, which is very interesting. I haven’t looked into it that much, but I think just the notion of the idea is very fascinating.

One could theorize a more viable form of communication, which is systemically contextual, and open-ended in its means as opposed to propositional and declaratory. Just something to think about.

All of these tangents aside, what I’m trying to say is that our brains are wired a certain way, which doesn’t necessarily work in our favor and it tends to be reductionist and anti-systemic in perception. And one outcome of this that I think we’re all familiar with is categorical polarization. You see polarization everywhere in our language, especially when it comes to anything political. The very idea that society today generalizes and judges huge swaths of people, such as being “left” or “right”, is very troubling to me. Take the categorical box of socialism and think about the associations that people have come up with when they hear ideas such as, I don’t know, universal healthcare or basic social safety nets. And because of their indoctrination and limited education and lack of critical thought, they simply have no choice but to throw the idea into the box of socialism associated with whatever they have been fed regarding socialism drawing judgment from those associations, completely evading the rationale or logic of why universal health care and such arguments are viable.

You also might notice that if you say something about someone’s speech, critical of someone’s speech, almost invariably, some intellectual freedom fighter will accuse you of simply being against their speech universally, right? You see this all the time, at least I have, because they have no nuanced view of what speech actually is. They don’t understand the complexity and systemic nature of speech and its energy. Politically, you see this weaponized all the time, of course, sweeping generalizations that superficially makes sense, feeding those limited cognitive tendencies that are so inherent to our brains, once again, especially for those that have not discovered that tendency. And if you look at the history of propaganda, you know, it’s explicitly based on this kind of narrow communication, simplified slogans, sweeping generalizations, and constant polarization, of course.

Which now brings us to moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, as we know, it also lends itself to compartmentalization in this way. In my book, The New Human Rights Movement, I write a good deal about the debate between moral relativism and the idea of moral objectivism. Moral relativism means different people can hold different moral views of the same situation, of course. For example, a person with a conviction that eating meat is immoral, hence deciding to be vegetarian, stands in contrast to a person who sees no moral issue with the harvesting of animals. And yet that same person who does willfully eat meat might find certain kinds of meat appropriate and morally so. For example, a Western meat eater accustomed to the traditional diet, along with a culture of dog domestication, which is ubiquitous, man’s best friend, might very well find it repulsive and even immoral that in areas of Asia, people still eat dog. Such is the nature of moral relativism.

As an aside, German anthropologist, Franz Boas, extended this theory to demonstrate the power of culture itself in determining core values and beliefs of people within it. He coined the term cultural relativism, which is a further distinction expressing the strong influence social tradition has when it comes to what individuals consider appropriate or not, from human sacrifice of the Aztecs, to the polygamy of Mormonism, to the endo cannibalism of the Yanomami tribe of the Amazon, social variants across time and region is common.

It’s also easy to see how one’s acceptance of a given belief, moral or not, can become reinforced simply because it is shared by many in the same culture, social reinforcement, as I’ve talked about before.

Now, moral objectivism on the other hand says moral truths must be universal. That is, they are external to the beliefs of an individual or culture, like a law of nature. And hence moral objectivism is really absolutism, once again.

Within the confines of moral objectivism, the most obvious rudimentary problem is that of what’s called conflicting moral dilemmas. A man comes to your house and asks you where your friend is, saying he is going to kill him. You do know where your friend is and you happen to have the moral conviction not to lie to others. Yet, if you tell the truth, your friend will be in danger since you also hold the conviction that murder is wrong. You have a conflict, so what do you do? Well, as most would, you sacrifice one conviction, telling the truth, to uphold the other, no murder, as a rational compromise. So your moral priorities become organized based on the severity of the circumstance. Hence, once again, that moral decision-making is always contingent to circumstance.

Now, moving on, as I think I’ve run this into the ground enough, I hope this has given at least a cursory overview of many cognitive and comprehension problems we face, affecting both our method of measuring truth and ethical and moral assumptions we hold. Our brains are certainly incredible, but the very nature of the way we are wired requires far more education to understand how to use our senses and reasoning correctly, being aware of the problems inherent, which frankly should be a college course in and of itself. Knowing how to think also means knowing the limitations of the process itself. And I haven’t even touched upon things like cognitive biases and other inhibiting factors. But enough of that.

So, let’s now shift gears and finally delve into the subject of the free speech debate and the controversial issue of regulation or even censorship.

In 1969, there was a Supreme Court case called Brandenburg v. Ohio. In short, guy named Brandenburg, who just happened to be the head of the KU Klux Klan in Ohio, held a rally in 1964. By the way, for those that don’t know what the KU Klux Klan is in the United States is a white nationalist, white supremacist hate group that’s been around for a very long time that rejects the existence of black people, Jewish people, and beyond.

So, Brandenburg held this public rally where he talked about getting revenge on the government and by extension black people and Jewish people for the apparent interest, as he saw it, of everyone oppressing the white race. The speech promoted violence, and he was promptly arrested and convicted under an Ohio criminal syndicalism statute for promoting harm. Amusingly, the clan leader contacted the ACLU and they took his case to the Supreme Court, challenging the conviction as a violation of his first amendment rights, his free speech rights. And interestingly enough, the Supreme Court agreed, ruling in Brandenburg’s favor and stated that the speech that he put forward did not promote what they termed “imminent” danger or harm, imminent, and hence was protected under the first amendment. Anyone that wants to look up this trial for more details is free to do so. It’s well-documented online.

The point here has to do with the qualification of imminent danger or harm. Historically speaking, going back to the philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill, who wrote a highly influential text called On Liberty, which is very much held up today as a legal foundation and the philosophical foundation for the first amendment and free speech in general, a very notable influential text. And the ultimate qualification Mill makes in terms of drawing this line between what can be considered protected speech or unprotected speech comes down, of course, to is it causing harm.

He wrote, and I quote, that, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.” And what the Supreme Court did is further qualify his concept of harm with the idea of it being imminent. And they define imminent as basically direct instruction.

Jump ahead to the trial of, say, Charles Manson, who was convicted of various murders on the grounds he instructed his followers to do so creating this imminent threat of harm through his speech, as opposed to some vague suggestion where people interpreted his language and then executed murders on their own behalf where Manson would have been protected in that case.

And the point I’m trying to make here is you start out with the concept of harm and then you have a qualification of imminent harm. Well, where is the objectivity in any of this? And clearly that is the difficulty of the debate. And there is no singular answer. Going back to the epistemological stuff we talked about earlier, everything is contingent upon circumstance. Our historical intuition has been a kind of sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me philosophy. And unfortunately that’s just not true. Language creates and communicates ideas, ideas lead to human behaviors, and, hence, actions. And there is no question language causes systemic harm in many, many, many, many cases.

If you think the free speech of someone like Adolph Hitler didn’t influence millions and millions of people while forming belief systems that motivated thousands and hundreds of people to engage in horrifically violent, inhumane, murderous actions, you’re not accounting for this properly. The reason you have slander and libel laws on the books is because they can harm someone’s reputation and, hence, their survival, at least in today’s market system by extension. The reason you have hate speech laws in the books is because it’s obviously well-established empirically that some forms of speech, like through the KKK, promoting human exclusion and abuse, racism, is a destructive social disposition.

We find ourselves in this unique gray area, searching for justifiable lines to draw between harmful speech and protected speech. And I find the manner by which the community grapples with this problem is to assume some kind of communicative self-regulation. There’s an old Jacque Fresco line that comes out of an interview he did with Larry King many decades ago. And he says, when pressed on the issue of government power and coercion, “An educated population needs no control.”

And while we can be subjective and debate about what an educated population could be, what’s implied here is that a properly informed and organized society is self regulating. Self-regulating meaning there’s no kind of mechanism of law or sanctioned use of force to curtail human behavior. Which, of course, goes back to system science, as I’ve talked about before, a viable system needs no control. And this is true in terms of human cultural regulations, so to speak.

And that idea of self-regulation is really what is being implied even though that term is not used in the public sphere when people talk about free speech being cross-checked by other free speech with the conclusion that this kind of dynamic interaction will amplify probable truths, bringing them to the surface, while pushing down absurdities and improbable claims. Fighting speech with speech, a lot of people will say, that are proponents of free speech, generally in an absolutist way.

But is that really the case historically? Do we have empirical or formal evidence that human society is increasing in an evidence-based rationally inferred and manner of arriving at conclusions? I would generally argue yes. Science has prevailed to challenge the philosophical orthodoxy of theistic religion in many old superstitions in most parts of the world, so there’s evidence of that. But at the same time, you have very powerful, strongholds of non-evidence based belief out there still, reinforced by cultural tradition, personal identity, and social connection. We are social beings first and intellectual being second, as I write in my new film InterReflections. And that is really where the danger resides as far as I’m concerned.

Some may remember that study where people were put into a room and shown a picture of a series of lines, one line, obviously, being longer than the other, and the person in the study is asked which line is longest after filling the room with a whole bunch of decoys that will disagree and pick the wrong line to try and see if the unsuspecting person will conform to the incorrect conclusions of the majority. And in many, many cases that unsuspecting person did.

This is where the danger of social media resides in its current form. As long as there are populations present that are large enough in their promotion of non-evidence based belief, there will be a proclivity for many people to join that group identity, regardless of any kind of evidence or rational consideration.

Unfortunately, deep in our evolutionary baggage is a wiring, probably for early forms of fitness for our survival, where we conform. We kowtow to the worldview of others, the dominant worldview for the sake of our perceived status, integrity, in that community and beyond. And I’m not saying people out there can’t be educated out of such a predisposition, willing to move against group consensus, as we see very commonly, even though it’s still kind of rare. Most people conform.

So not only are we faced with the terrible mental dilemma in regard to how we qualify harm to the extent society may need to protect itself from speech. Our very consciousness is polluted by an evolutionary tendency toward group inclusion and conformity, which would promote irrational speech. So in this, how are we to expect intelligent self-regulation? Because the danger is, as we see with the rise of belief systems, such as QAnon and other foundationless and completely uncorroborated ideas, is that once the ideas take hold, they create group and personal identity and then they perpetuate regardless of new information. In fact, I would qualify much of the Trump camp in that context, as well.

As an aside, you know how many books have been written against Donald Trump and his administration? You know how many shows? How many movies? How many celebrities have come out? How much just incredible attack against one singular person? And yet, his base is still unwavering if not grown larger, because they’ve made themselves completely immune. I mean, even members of his own family attack him as a sociopath, but it doesn’t matter. These folks are locked in with their groupistic identity.

So here you have a contemporary mode of communication that’s extremely popular, that is built on a social networking of vitality, where they want things to move quickly and gain notice and keep people’s attention. And you have a culture of people that is not only groupistic by nature of the competitive reality we are born into, but also biologically groupistic, and our revolutionary psychology for reasons spoken of prior, that works against one going against the grain again, to conform to people, to conform to groups, to conform to whatever their identity is. And then you couple in the dynamic fact that controversial ideas and negative news, and, really, much of the conspiracy quality moves much more rapidly and gains far more attention in many contexts than normal, rational evidence-based media because it sensational.

So what’s going to win in that scenario? Will engaged free speech prevail to bring the truth to the surface and suppress dangerous ideas by self-regulation? Or are we in a new reality where social bubbles, groups, are fortifying themselves, regardless of external information and the more they fortify themselves and block out new information, the stronger they become?

These are critical contextual questions that need to be talked about publicly. And the solution to regulation on social media ultimately is transparency and accountability. Talking about the framework of what I’ve just described, and opening the conversation up and making case study examples, allowing the general population to have a say what these private dictatorships do. Twitter or Facebook, Instagram, and so on are all private dictatorships. They are mini governments and they have the right to do whatever the hell they want without any influence from anyone else, which is a double-edged sword, needless to say. There needs to be a public body, that it is external to these companies that have influence on what the companies do by law.

While more broadly, the goal of society should be speech self-regulation, of course, but we have to account for each particular circumstance and predicament such as the case with social media and its amplification of nonsense, fortifying group identity and inclusion. As trite as it is to say, it’s a massive educational problem. And I really believe, when it comes to conspiracy culture, which by the way, as I said earlier, I’m going to be writing an article about this stuff. If you didn’t have such an abusive hierarchical society that really reduces intelligent education and critical thought across the board, at least in America, maybe other countries are better, I haven’t looked at the statistics of this line of thinking, metamagical, schizotypal thinking, it would be a good thing to kind of model out there to see how prevalent this kind of thinking is in this region versus this region, of course, but the oppression inherent to our society, as Frederick Douglas pointed out, makes people feel like there’s a conspiracy against them.

We live in a groupistic reality. Everybody is at war with everybody else on some level due to our social system, unfortunately. And in this dynamic of a lack of education, of class oppression, of a confusion about why causality is occurring, the easiest thing for people to come up with, the singular causality fallacy once again, is to oversimplify reality and their categorical reductionist way of thinking combined with the tendency for group inclusion and boom, you have a division of society based on belief systems that are completely incoherent.

The dystopian view of social media and the rise of non evidence-based belief, which is growing and ubiquitous is that we literally just detach from reality entirely, like, you know, something that broke off of a space shuttle and just floats infinitely if there’s space in multiple directions at once. A terrible analogy, but you get my point.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, much more could be said as usual, but the free speech debate needs to be elevated to a far more detailed discussion away from all this absolutist nonsense and there has to be some type of democratic participation in social media and the conversation of what should be banned and not banned. The causality of hurt and harm when it’s imminent? What is systemically dangerous, such as people that deny COVID or climate change. All of this has an effect and it’s all good to talk about.

That does it for me. God damn, I’m tired. Hope everyone’s doing okay out there. And I will talk to everybody next week.