Buongiorno,
felice di vedere che, seppur faticosamente, pian piano "conspiracy is
the new normal", specialmente quando è di stampo POPULISTA :-D
perché inutile girarci in giro: Lowenthal è l'archetipo del complottista
(a sua insaputa?), con decisi tratti populisti... o no?!?
"J.C. DE MARTIN" <juancarlos.demar...@polito.it> writes:
*“One day they might come for you”
*/Digital rights activist Andrew Lowenthal on progressives' support for
the censorship-industrial complex
/
Thomas Fazi
Aug 05, 2024
In this guest post, Maike Gosch, a German communication strategist,
writer and former lawyer — whose article on the banning of the German
magazine Compact I published recently — interviews Andrew Lowenthal, the
founder and managing director of the digital civil liberties
organisation liber-net.
Lowenthal is an Australian digital rights activist of German-Jewish
descent. For almost 18 years he was the Executive Director of
EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom
of expression and open technology. The digital rights environment in
which Lowenthal spent most of his adult life was avowedly progressive —
as was Lowenthal himself.
continua qui: https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/one-day-they-might-come-for-you
siccome non vorrei che i lettori si perdessero il nocciolo della
questione, ovvero la metamorfosi del progressismo di sinistra,
l'articolo continua così:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Then came the pandemic, and Lowenthal, as many of us, experienced an
anthological shock that led him to reconsider much of his worldview —
especially about his activist milieu and the progressive left more in
general.
[...] Increasingly estranged from the progressive
former-digital-rights-now-turned-pro-censorship movement, Lowenthal
began to focus his work on the emerging digital censorship regime — or
censorship-industrial complex — even collaborating with journalists like
Matt Taibi and Michael Shellenberger on the Twitter Files. This
eventually led to the founding of liber-net.
To stay on top of all things online censorship-related, make sure to
follow Lowenthal’s great Substack, Network Affects [1].
Lowenthal: [...] got very interested in left-wing activism [...] and
particularly what was known was “anti-globalisation”. [...] I helped
organise, in Melbourne against the World Economic Forum [...] then I
started liber-net, which focuses on digital civil liberties and digital
authoritarianism in the West, issues including censorship, free speech,
surveillance, ways in which technologies increasingly create digital
gates and barriers around access, such as what we saw during Covid with
the vaccine passports, that are now coming more, in terms of digital ID
issues around programmable currency, so essentially systems of digital
social control.
Lowenthal: [...] (sulla Westminster Declaration [2], n.d.r.) the media
on the other hand rather dismissed it, or they just focus on the
right-wing people who signed it and ignored the left-wing people who
signed it to try and suggest that it was very bad, and you should stay
away from it.
MG: Often the reaction in Germany when people hear about the
censorship-industrial complex is that it gets called a conspiracy
theory. What would your reply be to that? What do you think of that
criticism?
Lowenthal: There’s huge amount of evidence now that there are a massive
number of organisations coordinating to censor content on the
internet. In fact, a lot of liberal and progressive groups now
acknowledge that this is happening. At the start of the Twitter Files,
the line was, “Oh, no, it’s a conspiracy theory. None of this is
happening, etc.”. Now, most people are saying: “Well, yes, the
government and NGOs are involved in content moderation. But it’s
okay. It’s legal. Governments should be paying attention and protecting
people from misinformation”. So now it’s very hard to find people saying
this is not happening. I think the battle about the recognition of its
existence is kind of being won in many respects. Now people are debating
whether or not it’s a good or a bad idea.
MG: The other criticism is that this whole fight is being driven by a
right-wing/populist agenda. What would your response be to that?
Lowenthal: Well, conservatives sense and experience the censorship
probably more than progressives. But that’s only part of the story. A
lot of people and groups on the left are also increasingly censored, for
example around the Israel-Gaza question. So, it impacts anyone who’s
outside of the power core. Right now, it effects the so-called right a
bit more, but it can easily switch in the other direction. And this is
one of the key arguments for progressives who still think this kind of
system of government-sponsored content moderation is a good idea: “One
day they might come for you”. And I think that has certainly already
happened around the Palestine question.
And as to the “populist” accusation: it is populist, it’s popular voices
that are being censored by elites. That is actually the main thing. It’s
not left or right. It is populist in the sense of “for the people”. It
is a threat to the elites.
MG: How do you see the situation around censorship and free speech
evolving in Europe and Germany right now, if you follow them from
Australia?
Lowenthal: Well, Germany from afar it looks quite bad, possibly the
worst in Europe. Germany is extremely important, because of Germany’s
power in the EU and because the cultural work that is leveraged to
justify new systems of censorship (mostly through NGOs and academia) has
a very large presence in Germany. It seems to me that it is the US, then
the UK, then Germany in importance. There have also been victories —
there is a lot more understanding of the censorship-industrial complex
and what it does, and there are more people who are speaking up and out
against it. The Stanford Internet Observatory, a key player in the
complex, is closing down. At the same time the new Labour Government in
Britain plans to repeal the Free Speech Act that was designed to protect
free speech on university campuses and the censors aren’t giving up the
fight easily at all. So, there’s a lot of work still to be done.
MG: How do you see the situation in Europe and Germany evolving? Where
do you see this going?
Lowenthal: I think there’s going to be a very big battle. It does not
seem like the elites want to back down from trying to censor the
internet. So, I think, if they’re not willing to leave the internet
open, more and more people are going to mobilise, to demand that the
internet remain free and open.
[...] The problem, of course, is that many people on the left have
decided that they want the government to get involved in curtailing
speech on the internet. And I think until a significant number of
progressives actually realise just how dangerous that is, it’s going to
be very hard to win this fight and renormalise free speech. The easiest
and practical way to support free speech is to speak freely. The power
is right there in your very own body.
MG: [...] “Hate is not an opinion”. What’s your response to that?
Lowenthal: Well, who defines hate? What is hate? And is the government
defining it? Are political parties defining it? What’s the threshold?
What’s the barrier? Wasn’t it Ursula von der Leyen who said: “Hate is
hate”? If that’s the definition, that is a very poor definition. I also
think that repression so often fuels hate speech. If you try and repress
it, it actually grows rather than subsiding. I think there are better
tactics and strategies than censorship. [...] one is just for the
government to be less coercive. Because I think the coercion actually
encourages more hate speech and bad actors. The other one is a very
neutral form of education. The third thing is to pay less attention to
hate speech, because again, like with coercion, attention will actually
foster it. It then becomes a great way to get attention. Like with
children, when they learn that breaking their toys gets them attention,
they will do it more. I think having open conversations is much
better. I understand that a lot of times on the internet that can be
hard. But the other thing is, you can turn the internet off. You don’t
have to read and look at all of this stuff. A lot of it, you can just
ignore. And I think that not creating a moral panic about it is probably
one of the key things, and learning how to have calm and open
conversations across differences.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
estremamente interessante il parallelo che usa: i bambini che rompono i
giocattoli per ottenere attenzione...
quindi siamo tutti MINORATI gestiti da innumerevoli tutori
istituzionali, giusto?
saluti, 380°
[1] https://networkaffects.substack.com/
[2] https://westminsterdeclaration.org/
