When Philip K. Dick wrote the story that became the basis for the “Minority Report” film by Steven Spielberg, one has to wonder how much of a futurist prediction that was, as opposed to just a figment of his imagination. After all, good science fiction tends to look at something one sees in the ether of reality and pushes it to the extreme to comment on where our society is headed today.
As horrific as these new laws are, the "Minority Report" society is not new. Any time someone gets taken away by police and locked in a psych ward against their will because someone thought they "posed a danger to themselves and others", that's arrest and incarceration for pre-crime in all but name. Ditto if someone who gets admitted voluntarily has the doctor change their status to involuntary because they judged the person "not stable". This simple fact is often ignored because the civil rights violations are being done to a scapegoated underclass. We have to hold to principles and recognize that unlike in that movie, no one is expert enough to detect "pre-crime" and lawfully jail someone for it.
This is a direct result of section 230 and similar laws and prevent platforms from being held responsible even when there was a direct line between posts and harm. Now gov’ts are trying to create some protections. But they let the surveillance capitalists (great phrase) have too much power. These laws may be questionable, and in democracies they will be held to the tests of constitutionality. However, villainizing government as a whole is what got us here. When we disempower governments to hire thinkers, to legislate in favor of the people, and let corporate interests run all over us, we end up divided and in danger. Neither power - government nor corporations- should have absolute power, but by villainizing one or the other that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Katherine have you read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff? It is so easy to imagine a future where the surveillance capitalism project (currently being operated by Google, Facebook, and others) fuses with state power where there is already appetite for a predictive, “pre-crime” approach.
The technology already exists to determine our personalities from our online activities, and our mood and emotions from voice and video data. In a world of ubiquitous surveillance architecture where every product becomes a smart, IoT device replete with sensors and real-time connectivity, what will stop Minority Report from proving to be prophetic?
The surveillance capitalists want to render as much of our human experience into data as possible. States are demonstrating an appetite for punishing crime before it occurs. What will stop these rivers from converging?
In my own imaginary dystopian movie, the airwaves are filled chattering class agonising on the subject of how we citizens need legislation to protect us from a supposed epidemic of ‘misinformation’. The ‘Misinformation experts’ are very concerned about this. My part is a kind of keeping-his-head-down Winston Smith who can imagine nothing more chillingly Orwellian than the concept of a misinformation expert. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
No wait... it's not my imagination....it's really happening.
More and more of these laws are being passed every year. We need a political party that is dedicated to repealing these laws and reducing the power of the administrative state to control people. I have no love of hateful groups like ethno nationalists or religious extremists. I don't like what they say, such a mentality is a posion to society. But unless they are advocating engaging in violence against people or property the correct response is to confront the bad ideas of these groups or hateful individuals with good ideas and drown out their hate with our own voices.
The idea that the government could decide one has engaged in hate speech without a person having even said anything to another person sets up a precedent that borders on thought crime. Is something someone writes as a draft but never posts really speech? Not really. Speech is inherently the conveyance of ideas from the author to others. If it is not posted, published, transmitted or spoken it is really more thought than it is speech if one considers the matter logically. Which really sets the precedent that the government has the right (it doesn't) to throw one in prison or reduce a person to destitution merely for thinking a thing without having ever expressed it to another person. Admittedly writing or typing a hateful diatrabe is more than a passing thought. But one could envision a scenario in which something someone writes in their personal journal is deemed hateful and considered grounds for incarceration without the benefit of the presumption of innocence.
And to enforce such a draconian measure the state would have to be able to search the content of ones personal computer or other digital devices at anytime without evidence constituting probable cause.
One would presume that in places like the USA that the bill of rights would make such laws null and void. However legislators have a way of twisting and torturing the language of the constitution from its literal written form to allow for what the founding fathers would have considered egregious acts of tyranny. The bill of rights is routinely violated. The courts strike down various unconstitutional laws and the next week legislators are back at work cooking up a different version of the same thing trying to squeeze through a legal loophole some violation of constitutional rights. If the government violates the constitutional laws by which it is supposed to be governed it suffers little consequence. If an individual violates the law they can be ruined. There is a massive disparity in power and accountability there. The only remedy I can think of that does not involve Jeffersonian solutions is that any politician or party that supports a law that violates civil rights is voted out of office. And never allowed by voters to return to any elected public office ever again. It would require voters to put punishing violators of civil liberty as a top priority superceding partisan politics or any agenda that a politician or party might promote that a voter might agree with.
Are we as a public capable of that? I do not know. I am dubious based on recent history. But if the status quo continues I am all but certain we will slip ever closer to an absolute state of tyranny where we find ourselves living in a country or countries that more closely resembles Putin's Russia than the free world we were told we lived in growing up. Enforcing tyranny is much easier today than ever due to technological advances that are making monitoring speech simple and cost effective. The only remedy is a defiant public that will punish tyranny in any form at the ballot box. If we do not we are truly lost.
All these hate crime bills are a clear sign the ruling elites are losing. They fear scrutiny, and nowadays controlling the corporate media is no longer effective. The Internet is dangerous to them.
There is no such thing as hate speech. There is only speech. Attempts to control it point to a collapsing system.
The UK's online safety bill that you referred to became law last year, as the Online Safety Act 2023 - see: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents/enacted
Since then there's been a series of consultations carried out by Ofcom on how to implement the Act, including one that is still being conducted (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statements/category-2/third-phase-of-online-safety-regulation).
You may be interested in the Open Rights Group's response (https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/a-dangerous-precedent-for-global-censorship/) to an earlier consultation (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statements/category-1/protecting-people-from-illegal-content-online).
As horrific as these new laws are, the "Minority Report" society is not new. Any time someone gets taken away by police and locked in a psych ward against their will because someone thought they "posed a danger to themselves and others", that's arrest and incarceration for pre-crime in all but name. Ditto if someone who gets admitted voluntarily has the doctor change their status to involuntary because they judged the person "not stable". This simple fact is often ignored because the civil rights violations are being done to a scapegoated underclass. We have to hold to principles and recognize that unlike in that movie, no one is expert enough to detect "pre-crime" and lawfully jail someone for it.
This is a direct result of section 230 and similar laws and prevent platforms from being held responsible even when there was a direct line between posts and harm. Now gov’ts are trying to create some protections. But they let the surveillance capitalists (great phrase) have too much power. These laws may be questionable, and in democracies they will be held to the tests of constitutionality. However, villainizing government as a whole is what got us here. When we disempower governments to hire thinkers, to legislate in favor of the people, and let corporate interests run all over us, we end up divided and in danger. Neither power - government nor corporations- should have absolute power, but by villainizing one or the other that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Katherine have you read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff? It is so easy to imagine a future where the surveillance capitalism project (currently being operated by Google, Facebook, and others) fuses with state power where there is already appetite for a predictive, “pre-crime” approach.
The technology already exists to determine our personalities from our online activities, and our mood and emotions from voice and video data. In a world of ubiquitous surveillance architecture where every product becomes a smart, IoT device replete with sensors and real-time connectivity, what will stop Minority Report from proving to be prophetic?
The surveillance capitalists want to render as much of our human experience into data as possible. States are demonstrating an appetite for punishing crime before it occurs. What will stop these rivers from converging?
I wonder if this will apply to radical Islam operating in Western countries.
In my own imaginary dystopian movie, the airwaves are filled chattering class agonising on the subject of how we citizens need legislation to protect us from a supposed epidemic of ‘misinformation’. The ‘Misinformation experts’ are very concerned about this. My part is a kind of keeping-his-head-down Winston Smith who can imagine nothing more chillingly Orwellian than the concept of a misinformation expert. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
No wait... it's not my imagination....it's really happening.
Well, that’s terrifying
More and more of these laws are being passed every year. We need a political party that is dedicated to repealing these laws and reducing the power of the administrative state to control people. I have no love of hateful groups like ethno nationalists or religious extremists. I don't like what they say, such a mentality is a posion to society. But unless they are advocating engaging in violence against people or property the correct response is to confront the bad ideas of these groups or hateful individuals with good ideas and drown out their hate with our own voices.
The idea that the government could decide one has engaged in hate speech without a person having even said anything to another person sets up a precedent that borders on thought crime. Is something someone writes as a draft but never posts really speech? Not really. Speech is inherently the conveyance of ideas from the author to others. If it is not posted, published, transmitted or spoken it is really more thought than it is speech if one considers the matter logically. Which really sets the precedent that the government has the right (it doesn't) to throw one in prison or reduce a person to destitution merely for thinking a thing without having ever expressed it to another person. Admittedly writing or typing a hateful diatrabe is more than a passing thought. But one could envision a scenario in which something someone writes in their personal journal is deemed hateful and considered grounds for incarceration without the benefit of the presumption of innocence.
And to enforce such a draconian measure the state would have to be able to search the content of ones personal computer or other digital devices at anytime without evidence constituting probable cause.
One would presume that in places like the USA that the bill of rights would make such laws null and void. However legislators have a way of twisting and torturing the language of the constitution from its literal written form to allow for what the founding fathers would have considered egregious acts of tyranny. The bill of rights is routinely violated. The courts strike down various unconstitutional laws and the next week legislators are back at work cooking up a different version of the same thing trying to squeeze through a legal loophole some violation of constitutional rights. If the government violates the constitutional laws by which it is supposed to be governed it suffers little consequence. If an individual violates the law they can be ruined. There is a massive disparity in power and accountability there. The only remedy I can think of that does not involve Jeffersonian solutions is that any politician or party that supports a law that violates civil rights is voted out of office. And never allowed by voters to return to any elected public office ever again. It would require voters to put punishing violators of civil liberty as a top priority superceding partisan politics or any agenda that a politician or party might promote that a voter might agree with.
Are we as a public capable of that? I do not know. I am dubious based on recent history. But if the status quo continues I am all but certain we will slip ever closer to an absolute state of tyranny where we find ourselves living in a country or countries that more closely resembles Putin's Russia than the free world we were told we lived in growing up. Enforcing tyranny is much easier today than ever due to technological advances that are making monitoring speech simple and cost effective. The only remedy is a defiant public that will punish tyranny in any form at the ballot box. If we do not we are truly lost.
Thanks Katherine. I had no idea about these dangerous laws. This is important to monitor.
All these hate crime bills are a clear sign the ruling elites are losing. They fear scrutiny, and nowadays controlling the corporate media is no longer effective. The Internet is dangerous to them.
There is no such thing as hate speech. There is only speech. Attempts to control it point to a collapsing system.