This article supports Count 2 of the indictment of identity politics that I set out in the opening article J’Accuse Identity Politics. Unlike the claim made in Count 1 that identity politics is racist, I suspect few people will find the idea that identity politics is hostile to free speech implausible given the familiar reports of people being shouted down or denied a platform for the things they say or the views they hold. Therefore the main aim of this article is to underscore the gravity of the longer-term threat to free speech in nominally free Western societies arising from the digitalization of communication, the dominance of a few social media corporations, and disturbing evidence that the ideology of identity politics has engendered a growing antipathy to free and open debate of contentious issues within these vastly powerful and largely unaccountable organisations.
George Orwell wrote 1984, his final novel, shortly before his death in 1948. It portrays a dystopian future in which everyone is subjected to constant surveillance by an all-powerful party-state clearly modelled on Stalin’s Soviet Union. The incessant, intrusive surveillance is linked to a system of rewards and punishments, a minutely structured hierarchy of privileges, ultimately controlled by an inner-party elite.
The story is premised on the availability of technologies that would have seemed in the realm of science fiction at the time of writing, such as telescreens in every home that monitored all movements and conversations.
As we know, that technological gap has been well and truly crossed today with mobile devices tracking our every movement (unless deliberately disabled) and constantly uploading the data into the cloud, where it can be used to market items as we pass by specific physical locations; and there are smart televisions as well as phones capable of keeping track of our conversations. Our pattern of activity as we use apps, or browse the web, is minutely tracked to enable tightly targeted advertising.
When I first read 1984 decades ago I could buy the idea of such devices. After all, there was nothing that involved violating any fundamental law of physics, so it seemed only a matter of time before these things became available.
However there was a more fundamental problem. It was one thing to collect all this information, but how would it be processed? Who would do all the sifting and analysing of the vast torrent of data collected so it could be used effectively by the state? Would half the population need to be deployed to monitor the other half? And who would monitor the monitors?
Again, that problem is well on the way to being solved, by the use of non-human monitors, software agents that exploit Artificial Intelligence that can scan, process and analyse vast amounts of data in real time, and other related technologies like facial recognition that use pervasive networks of CCTV cameras, drones and other technologies to monitor every person’s movements.
A new, more perfect totalitarianism
If you put this all together, you have the potential for the creation of a surveillance state the likes of which even Orwell could not have envisaged. And it is being brought into being as we speak in China, through the development and rolling out of what is innocuously termed their ‘social credit’ scheme.
The regime describes the aim of the plan, announced in 2014 as part of the five-year plan, as to:
broadly shape a thick atmosphere in the entire society that keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful
Under this scheme, every Chinese citizen will be given a score for their every action in the online and physical realms, and marked up or down depending on whether their behaviour is deemed criminal or virtuous, pro or anti-social, and most importantly, whether they show signs of dissenting against the political order.
These scores will then be used to grant or deny access to all manner of privileges: access to loan finance, university places, desirable jobs, ability to travel overseas – or even to use domestic transport services. According to the chief executive of one of China’s leading finance companies, Ant Financial, which is integral to the social credit scheme, it ‘will ensure that bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction’.
This system is coming into being now, with a nation-wide rollout running ahead of the target date of 2020. The project is most advanced in Beijing, where more than 470,000 surveillance cameras have already been installed, with 200 million for the nation as a whole (and rising rapidly).
The regime is investing huge sums in artificial intelligence, establishing a global lead in AI-based facial recognition technology, a lead largely due to the firms doing the development being given unrestricted access to the enormous facial image database, free of any Western qualms about privacy.
Do you remember the heady early days of the internet and social media when it was assumed it would be a liberating technology? Here is how a recent article in the New York Times describes this system:
China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a great democratiser, bringing people more freedom and connecting them to the world. In China, it has brought control … In some cities, cameras scan train stations for China’s most wanted. Billboard-size displays show the faces of jaywalkers and list the names of people who don’t pay their debts. Facial recognition scanners guard the entrances to housing complexes. Already, China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras — four times as many as the United States.
The technology allows the monitoring of the behaviour of not just an individual, but his or her network of contacts. An article in the magazine National Interest describes how dissidents and their families can be caught in the surveillance net:
In the case of journalist Liu Hu, it could mean trying to expose government corruption. Other offenses could be things such as jaywalking, smoking on a train, criticizing the government, or having friends or family that speak ill of the government, all things that can lower one’s score.
See that? You can be punished for having family members who are critical of the government, something last seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin, where being related to a counter-revolutionary was a criminal offence.
Martin Chorzema, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics cited in the New York Times has described the goal of all this as ‘algorithmic governance’, in which the very possibility of surveillance is enough to ensure conformity:
The whole point is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored, and that uncertainty makes people more obedient
It couldn't happen here though, could it?
You might be inclined to think that while this is all very regrettable and unfortunate for people in China (at least those that want to speak freely) it can hardly have any bearing on Western societies, with our traditions of free speech safeguarded by laws, constitutions and impartial judiciaries.
There are a number of problems with this sanguine viewpoint.
Firstly, the technologies being harnessed by the Chinese regime are available, indeed were in almost all cases invented and first developed in the West and are being extensively used, albeit for more benign purposes. Furthermore some Western firms are actually collaborating with the Chinese regime to develop better censorship and surveillance technologies. It has recently been revealed that Google is working on a new search engine code-named Dragonfly for the regime. According to one report:
Dragonfly, was designed for Android devices, and would remove content deemed sensitive by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.
Previously undisclosed details about the plan, obtained by The Intercept on Friday, show that Google compiled a censorship blacklist that included terms such as ‘human rights,’ ‘student protest,’ and ‘Nobel Prize’ in Mandarin.
Leading human rights groups have criticized Dragonfly, saying that it could result in the company ‘directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.’
The arrogance of this corporate titan is remarkable. According to the same report:
Google has so far declined to publicly address concerns about the Chinese censorship plans and did not respond to a request for comment on this story. In the six weeks since the first details about Dragonfly were revealed, the company has refused to engage with human rights groups, ignored dozens of reporters’ questions, and rebuffed U.S. senators.
This underscores the reality that, when it comes to controlling information flows these days, by far the most powerful actors are not governments but the tech companies that exercise a near-monopolistic dominance in their respective sectors. The most visible are Apple, Amazon, Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, but they are supported by a raft of less visible firms that provide backbone infrastructures like payments systems (PayPal, Stripe), domain registration services (Register.com), and site protection (CloudFlare).
To see what this means, consider the United States, the home base of most of these corporations, which has the strongest and most explicit guarantee of free speech of any Western nation, encoded in the First Amendment to the US Constitution that forbids the making of any law ‘abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble’.
The Supreme Court has consistently upheld a strong interpretation of this provision so that even so-called ‘hate speech’ is protected by it. There is a federal statute that prescribes possibly severe penalties for conspiring to deny any person the free exercise of any constitutionally guaranteed right.
So what is the problem?
The problem is that the First Amendment only binds governmental entities from restricting speech and publication. Private organisations, whether they be universities, corporations or NGOs, are not covered by the First Amendment, though some such as private universities may claim to follow the principle of the Amendment.
This means that the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters have complete legal discretion to publish what they want, by whomever they want, and to ban likewise. They have almost unchallengeable power to do this, with only the most limited options for those affected to challenge such actions legally.
Bear in mind that we inhabit a world were digital media, and social media in particular, have become the new ‘public square’, where viewpoints are expressed and controversies argued out.
A recent article by Tyler Grant in the US-based international affairs magazine National Interest takes up developments at Facebook:
… this is where the West is at risk of the same collapse of liberty we’ve seen in China… the attitudes for policing speech and some instrumentalities are already in place for a full American adoption of a similar social scoring system. Until now, tech companies’ willingness to police online behaviour has been limited to small infractions: an occasional ban of a high profile figure or small, limited admissions by Twitter and Facebook that their algorithms discriminate unfairly against conservatives. That has now changed.
Grant goes on to note:
The Washington Post reports that Facebook has begun assigning individuals a ‘reputation score’ designed to measure the ‘credibility of users.’ This adds concern to an already discomforting environment where a person who has their YouTube channel demonetized and gets banned from Twitter has been all but silenced and is thus unable to meaningfully contribute to public discourse. This is clear thought policing coming from a surprising source: private enterprise.
The return of arbitrary power
So how comfortable should we be about this state of affairs? After all, we are ‘only’ talking about the power to filter and censor a very large part of the information fed to most of the world’s population; they can’t throw people in gaol, at least not now. Anyway, they are private companies so it is only right and proper that they control what goes on their platforms; and if they become too restrictive surely the free market will work its magic and corporate rivals will emerge in due course?
If my use of scare quotes seems sarcastic, it is prompted by the fact that just these sorts of comments recur in this debate.
What we are seeing here is the exercise of arbitrary power by entities that can effectively thumb their noses at governments and legislatures. From the earliest moves to open up Western societies, starting with the Magna Carta, the need to curtail arbitrary power (originally the ‘divine right of Kings’) has been a central concern of those wishing to move to a more open, accountable and ultimately democratic society.
And how are they choosing to exercise that power? There is no doubt that in recent years all the major social media platforms have become ever more willing to delete content that contravenes their ‘community guidelines’. In some cases, as with terrorism or advocacy of it, this is entirely legitimate, but we increasingly see targeting of speech that, whether you agree with it or not, should fall within the bounds of acceptable discourse in a free and open society.
An example is the treatment of PragerU (Prager University), a conservative group based in the US that produces videos that advocate for mainstream right-wing positions. Numerous other examples could be given, mainly but not exclusively from those on the right of the political spectrum (see The Death of the First Amendment in Cyberspace by Jacob Mchangama).
In September this year all the major social media companies combined, in what was clearly an orchestrated move, removed the right-wing content provider InfoWars run by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from all their sites (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter – even the email service provider MailChimp). Jones had 2.5 million followers. InfoWars was an easy target since he undoubtedly is, well, a conspiracy theorist.
People who value free and open speech need to think very carefully about the precedent set by this case, and fears on this score have been borne out as more and more content providers far less extreme than Jones are removed. Consider: ‘First they came for Alex Jones…’
It seems the social media giants especially dislike effective ‘memes’ that spread virally if they are directed against the verities of PC orthodoxy. Twitter recently cancelled over 1,500 accounts spreading something termed the ‘NPC meme’. This stands for ‘Non-playable character’, a reference from online games to characters who are not operated by humans, but rather by artificial intelligence. The meme targets those who stereotypically, even robotically, recite received opinions in the PC world. Apparently Twitter considers this dehumanizing.
As for John Stuart Mill’s famous dictum in defence of open debate that ‘he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that’, that has been declared old-hat, at least by Twitter. In evidence to a UK parliamentary committee, a senior Twitter executive issued this pronouncement:
I look back over last 5 1/2 years, and the answers I would have given to some of these questions five years ago were very different. Twitter was in a place where it believed the most effective antidote to bad speech was good speech. It was very much a John Stuart Mill-style philosophy. We've realized the world we live in has changed. We've had to go on a journey with it, and we've realized it's no longer possible to stand up for all speech in the hopes society will become a better place because racism will be challenged, or homophobia challenged, or extremism will be challenged. And we do have to take steps to limit the visibility of hateful symbols, to ban people from the platform who affiliate with violent groups - that's the journey we're on.
So, who gets to decide what is ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘Islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’, and so on? And why should speech so designated be banned?
As is now notorious, these inherently subjective terms have been weaponized for ideological warfare. In some cases, as I explained in my previous article on identity politics and racism, they have been effectively redefined beyond recognition by the identity politics ideologues in academia and elsewhere, so that a vast number of people can be targeted with them and subjected to everything from social media opprobrium to firing from their jobs.
The James Damore case and Google's ideological monoculture
What do we know about the internal culture of these corporations that wield so much power about who can and cannot be heard, whose voices are to amplified or muted, in the new public square of social media? A recent incident shines some disturbing light on the largest and most powerful of these, Google.
In August last year Google summarily fired a senior software engineer, James Damore. He was not fired for incompetence, or for stealing company secrets, or for abusing work colleagues.
No – he was fired for saying something that was deemed incorrect. Or rather ‘incorrect’ in the sense of being out of sync with Google’s corporate ideology. An ideology that, according to Damore, was turning Google into an echo chamber where dissenters learn that it is safest to keep their counsel.
Damore’s high crime was to circulate a ten-page memo that disputed the view that the underrepresentation of women in technical fields like software engineering was solely due to implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases – to sexism.
He cited research showing that, on average, women tend to prefer people-oriented occupations whereas men are often more comfortable working with things - objects, data and systems. He was not claiming women lack the relevant aptitudes, and he stressed that people should be assessed on their individual merits, not prejudged by population-level averages.
The views he expressed were backed by extensive citations of relevant research that showed that women have, on average, a greater preference for working with people, while men prefer to work with things, objects or abstract concept.
He was at pains to express his support for diversity and inclusion, and made a number of constructive suggestions, but argued that the existence of these preference differences mean that to aim for statistical gender equality is likely to be futile and counterproductive.
All very reasonable, or at least debateable, one would think – especially given that the memo was composed in response to a request for feedback following a staff meeting about diversity.
The reaction was peremptory and severe. When the memo went viral, he was fired from the company, Google’s new Vice President and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Danielle Brown issuing a statement that said of the memo:
… like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.
See that? At Google, making ‘incorrect assumptions’ about gender is a fireable offence. So serious was the offence she considered it inappropriate even to link to it, clearly discouraging people from reading it for themselves and forming their own conclusions since ‘it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses’.
The tone and content of this statement strikingly confirms Damore’s claim about Google being an ideological closed shop. He states in the memo:
Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies.
So, Google holds an internal meeting at which it solicits the views of its employees. Damore responds in good faith, with a carefully reasoned, thoroughly researched submission that, however, departs from the corporate ideology. The result? He is summarily fired.
A similar internal culture apparently exists at Facebook, leading to over one hundred forming an internal message group called FB’ers for Political Diversity that accuses the company of having an internal monoculture. According to a post by a senior Facebook engineer, Brian Amerige:
We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views… We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack – often in mobs – anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.
In Facebook’s defence, there have been no reports, as far as I know, of Brian Amerige or any of his colleagues being fired for saying this, though how these actions will affect their future careers and promotion prospects remains to be seen. One of the most malignant aspects of the treatment of Damore was the attempt by his enemies to ensure that, not only would he not work for Google, but that he be excluded from employment anywhere else in this industry sector.
It is profoundly disturbing that corporations with enormous power to filter, prioritize and censor information presented to most of the world’s population have this kind of culture. How much credence can be placed on search results and news feeds, whether they be generated purely algorithmically (algorithms can be tweaked), and especially with some level of human intervention. While this is hard to prove definitively, there is at least some grounds for concern.
How did things get to this point?
We have long become accustomed to seeing the inmates of academic institutions required to pay at least lip service to platitudinous drivel about ‘diversity and inclusion’. In the US applicants for tenured academic posts are required to submit ‘diversity statements’ full of stuff like the following:
Across all my course, I emphasize the intellectual contributions provided by scholars from underrepresented groups and feature studies of a range of diverse research subjects.
Or
In my recent years, being instructor at a particularly culturally diverse campus has helped me achieve one of my personal goals as an academic, which is to create a safe space in classrooms where ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and gender differences are respected.
Woe betide any aspiring academic who does not play along. This stuff amounts to a kind of intellectual loyalty oath, one that effectively demands fealty to an ideology, something that should have no place in a university.
One academic writing about this culture asks how the aforementioned former Googler James Damore would be treated given his ten-page memo:
Imagine, if you can, what would happen if James Damore, the former senior software engineer fired from Google for writing a memo questioning efforts at gender diversity, were to apply for a position at SDSU. Observing a search committee considering his application would probably call to mind Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, about witchcraft in Salem.
But that is precisely how he was treated, not in a university, but in the world’s most powerful private company! That is a clear sign of just how pervasive the identarian ideology has become over the past few decades.
If this continues we risk ending up with a seamless system of ideological indoctrination extending from all levels in the education system and on into working life. A world in which young people, especially, inhabit one big ideological echo chamber, unaware that alternative views on some key issues even exist, let alone that they might be worth considering.
In light of these developments it is fascinating to see the extent to which this was prefigured more than half a century ago by the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of the major theorists of the Frankfurt School of philosophy that gave us Cultural Marxism (probably an oxymoron, but that’s a quibble) and spawned the ‘critical theory’, the intellectual underpinning of identity politics.
Marcuse migrated to the United States in 1934 and taught for many years at Brandeis University. He was a revered figure in the 1960s New Left, the movement that shaped a generation of radicals who after the activism of that era died down entered the universities and other spheres and began the ‘long march through the institutions’.
In 1965 Marcuse wrote an essay titled Repressive Tolerance that many regard as the founding manifesto of the movement and mindset we nowadays know as political correctness in which he argued for a blatantly selective attitude to free speech.
Arguing from the extreme repressiveness of modern capitalist societies, he insisted that political viewpoints should be tolerated if, and only if, they promote what he deemed to be progressive social change. He stated bluntly: ‘liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.’
Who gets to distinguish ‘liberating’ tolerance from the repressive variety? Why, appropriately trained, or rather indoctrinated, academics of course. This would naturally require some changes to what goes on in the educational sphere:
… the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour.
So there you have it. Tolerance is intolerant. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell eat your heart out.
Marcuse wrote this awful screed in the very early stages of the 1960s student rebellion. He acknowledged that his desired totalitarian dystopia would strike his then readers as, well, utopian: ‘at present no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice’.
It is intriguing to speculate how Marcuse would react were he to return from the dead and see the extent to which his project has succeeded. But I wonder if he would see a terrible irony in the fact his ideology – minus the stuff about redistributing wealth and economic power and ending capitalism – has lodged in the belly of the corporate megaliths he aspired to dismantle.
Conclusion: The end of the long march
When I first got involved in Labor politics in the early 1970s the Left, with which I was affiliated throughout my political career, championed free speech, taking a major role in some major campaigns against censorship at the time. Admittedly, an important exception to this was the old-line communists, who remained quite influential through the trade unions and their surrogates in the Labor Party. But the position of the mainstream social-democratic Left was pretty clear.
We were enthused by the emergence during the late 1960s of a New Left, apparently committed to democracy and free speech. The Free Speech Movement at the University of California Berkeley that peaked in 1964 was a defining moment marking, we thought, a clear parting of the ways with the old authoritarian communist Left.
How ironic then that Berkeley has been the scene of some of the most egregious recent instances of speech suppression as violent mobs have attacked speakers and their audiences at events that challenge identarian orthodoxies. This sort of behaviour has become endemic at universities around the world, including here in Australia most recently with the disruption of psychologist Bettina Arndt, a well-known critic of the idea that gender identity is fluid, when she tried to speak at several universities.
With the benefit of hindsight, the optimism over the emergence of an apparently anti-authoritarian Left was misplaced. In the midst of 1960s the intellectual foundations for a new kind of authoritarian Left were being laid by people like Herbert Marcuse and his contemporaries and successors.
In correspondence with the German radical Rudi Dutschke, Marcuse enthused over his concept of a long march through the institutions of power that would, in due course, create the conditions for the selective suppression of free speech, replacing ‘repressive tolerance’ with ‘liberating tolerance’.
Marcuse’s heirs have continued this project to the present day, adding new rationalizations grounded in identity politics such as the claim that speech suppression is justified by the need to create space for the voices of the ‘marginalized’ so that, for example, the feminist Germaine Greer must be no-platformed on the ground that, compared to the ‘transgendered’, the ‘cisgendered’ are powerful.
As is so often the case with identarian claims, the arguments backing this view are flimsy and frequently circular. An article in the online magazine Quillette nicely captures the Kafkaesque logic:
Any questioning of a presupposed victim group is itself considered suppression of the victim group, and summarily de-platformed. This obviously circular argument—that one cannot question theory of the marginalised group without suppressing speech from the marginalised group—justifies the censorship of honest critics, who are silenced before they can even challenge the assumptions on which their censorship is based. Destruction of reputation and de-platforming is frequently used to this effect.
In recent years we see one institution after another become infected with the identarian ideology. Originating in the universities, it has spread to all education sectors, the media, politics, sport and finally the big corporate sector.
As these institutions have been captured, it has been possible to give legal form to speech restrictions through instruments like our Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act and equivalents elsewhere, with only the United States protected by the First Amendment – at least for now.
Invariably, these instruments place tremendous emphasis on the need to protect groups deemed marginalized groups from ‘offense’ or ‘hate speech’, highly subjective assessments. The scope of such legislation expands constantly (the repeal in Canada of their equivalent of 18c being a rare exception).
There is constant pressure to bring criticism of religion – of Islam in particular – within the scope of such legislation. It is now conventional wisdom in sections of academia that Islamophobia (a propaganda term coined and promulgated by the Muslim Brotherhood) is a form of racism. The European Court of Human Rights just issued a ruling supporting an Austrian court’s conviction of a woman for disparaging Islam – a de facto blasphemy conviction.
Huge resources are put into enforcing online and offline speech codes. In Britain, the Crown Prosecution Service proudly boasts of securing over 15,000 convictions for ‘hate crimes’ in a single year, which they define as:
Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.
Amazing. Prosecutions based on the subjective perceptions of the ‘victim’ or ‘any other person’. As the Americans like to say, you could indict a ham sandwich on this basis.
The grim reality is that we face an extraordinarily powerful and multi-faceted challenge to what, until recently, was seen as a fundamental and secure aspect of our civilization, with the social media giants being the latest and by far most dangerous addition to the adversaries of free speech.