Granny's Business Model -- She'll say what you're afraid to say, for a dollar a word

                                                                                           -- Just Jests                        

           

                                   Media Visit to Granny's Free Speech Kiosk

Interviewer:  So Granny, this is a nice little business enterprise you've made for yourself.

Granny:  Yes, censorship opens up a surprising number of commercial opportunities.

Interviewer:  So, in taking this opportunity would you call yourself a free-speech heroine, or a trouble-maker?

Granny:  I don't aim to be either, although heroism often does cause trouble -- for someone.

Interviewer:  Will it make trouble for you if someone decides your speech is too incorrect? Aren't you afraid of being shot?

Granny:  Yes -- so this is bullet-proof glass I'm sitting behind.

Interviewer:  Ah. Opinions can be dangerous. Maybe you should add a Danger-Pay Surcharge to your fee. 

Granny:  Really, speech should be free. If someone is wise and broke, I'll express their forbidden thoughts gratis. (But don't tell the rich folks ...) Everything is monetized now. Your own magazine charges buyers or advertisers to read your words.

Interviewer:  True. I see you have quite an audience around your booth. Do some get upset if they don't approve when you contradict fashionably-correct attitudes?

Granny:  I do get an audience, but no one has to stay and listen if something offends them. The other side of free speech is the freedom to not listen.

Interviewer:  You're performing a public service, eh? 

Granny:  Indeed. I'm retired, I've got my little pension, I can afford to do this because I don't have to please an employer who could fire me for expressing what their pollsters have determined are not the popular public attitudes of the moment.

Interviewer:  Well good luck, Granny! Stay safe.

Granny:  I'll be fine. The up-side of being an old granny is that by being dismissed by influencers and virtue-signallers, we oldsters are also often overlooked by cancel-culture.

*  *  * 

"Democracy is not about how many people vote but about how many people feel free to say what they think in public".

                                              -- V. Ramaswamy, 2022

"... in the sunset of life ... I feel it my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear." 

                                          -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton,1898

                                                      

On a Scroll

Walking, sitting at a bus stop, in a cafe or waiting room, lining up in a shop, walking the dog, visiting a playground with the kids -- whatever else they're doing, everyone seems to be scrolling through a smartphone at the same time. When do you ever see anyone reading a book, watching a sunset, or just sitting? Just thinking? Thoughts are buried under the spillage which content-providers lay out online. Advertisers and meme-merchants are on a roll.

The device-addicted are like pollinators primed by evolution to flit from bloom to bloom until they die. No thought is required because their brains are pre-wired. 

Once they learned that people's brains were pre-wired to crave gratification, and once digital innovation provided the perfect tool for harnessing cravings, advertisers and influencers found it easy to herd us. 

We are told the Internet offers free choice, but the algorithmic influencers and persuaders have pre-arranged the choices ("-range" coming from the French "ranger", to rank). This parody of freedom reminds us of Marx's theory that the State would wither away once the working class awoke. Instead, a pan-national state has come into being with an iron grip on our brains: the Cyber-state (and the world's workers never awoke, they just got "woke".)

Can we break out of cyber-bondage? Re-discover scattered bits of personal thought "recollected in tranquillity", phone turned off? We could replace social media with private media by turning our gaze to the physical world, to weather, birds, nature, passers-by, and our own ideas. Non-democratic governments now outnumber democratic ones on the obsessively phone-checking world stage; maybe because democracy depends on free-thinking citizens?

As we re-claim individual thought our addicted fingers might itch to start pecking again. We'll have to sit on our hands and free up our eyes. Yours might be rolling at this suggestion, but then again they might enjoy time off the scroll. They might even read a book in print. It's interesting how before the advent of the printed (or handwritten) book there was the ancient scroll -- of papyrus, say -- and after the printed book there was the online scroll. In between, we lived in a special literary moment.

Now, as in some of those earlier times, we live in a period of ideological thought control. Call something "hate" and it's banned. In former times people scratched messages in crypts, or like spies wrote coded secrets on scrolls slipped into holes in a rock wall: the romance of censor-dodging. Today, it's almost more fun to write for a world that tries to stop you than for one that scans-and-forgets you, un-noticing. 

What's ahead? More constriction, thought police and censorship as far as we can tell. So, more scrolls in the holes in walls, but also more challenges to the censors for readers are drawn to the forbidden, which becomes the secret, which becomes the mysterious. Often the best thing that happens to a book is to be banned. Sometimes it becomes a best-seller -- underground, newly "rare". Such irony: controversy sells, controversy does its own marketing ("contra"/against "verse"/speech). Speaking against is speaking for -- and often means being on a scroll. 

Civil Frights in Canada

A historic Canadian university recently changed its name. First named after Egerton Ryerson, the 19th century journalist and polymath, promoter of education and free speech, it's been re-christened Toronto Metropolitan University so as to sound less "colonial".

Its new values are anti-racism, "equity", "indigenization" and other phrases we've become used to in government-speak. 

George Brown College in Toronto also commits to anti-colonialism -- which it identifies with "anti-oppression". George Brown the person was another 19th century upholder of responsible government, literacy and journalism (founded Globe, forerunner of the Globe & Mail). George Brown College forbids "hate speech". It's not defined, but anyone with questions about what they may or may not say on campus must contact the "OAREHRS". 

Any office with that many bureaucratic letters is sure no bastion of elegant speech. It means Office of Anti-racism, Equity and Human Rights Services -- and the cause it serves is not the cause of Civil Liberties. College staff are called Thought Leaders, and their mission is to "infuse anti-racism into everything we do".

"Thought-leadership"?? Is that a cousin of thought-control? And as for "mission to infuse" ... Doesn't such language trigger certain negative historic associations -- and dubious contemporary ones? Scary, to free-thinkers and civil liberties advocates.

And while institutions of higher learning compel speech and fiddle with "equity" obsessions, the Canadian government steals our freedom from surveillance -- but everyone's equally. (Check out Canada's Digital Identity Framework.)

Whatever happened to a university's job of promoting free exchange of ideas, open-minded discussion, non-ideological scholarship, and non-denial of historical fact? On those principles, rests civil liberty.

What passes for one group's "civil rights" may stand for another group's Civil Frights. People who value freedom of thought and speech are starting to be very afraid indeed.

Here's a list of Civil Frights of the moment:    

    Censorship

    Religious fundamentalism

    Group-think

    Denial of reproductive choice

    Gun-obsession

    Surveillance

    Digital Identity Programs

Feel free to add your own fears to the list.