Restoring Discourse (Won’t Be Easy)

My Twitter feed these days is full with back and forth on “cancel culture.” Much of it quickly reduces to bickering with each side assuming the worst possible interpretation of what the other meant or what their motives are. The latest exhibit here is the Harper’s Open Letter and the reactions to it. This is more than a bit annoying as there are some genuinely interesting issues here that are worthy of a more robust debate.

Central to this discussion ought to be an analysis of the power of speech to suppress speech. I think most people would agree that calls for physical violence against someone for speaking are a clear suppression of speech. Now that would be an example of incitement, which is notably one of the exceptions to free speech, i.e. it is not protected speech.

But what about calling for someone to be fired from their job? Consider the following two scenarios:  “<<name of CEO>> tweeted <<xyz>> and should be fired” versus “<<name of low level employee>> tweeted <<xyz>> and should be fired.” We intuitively feel that there is a difference between the two but where does it come from? The obvious answer would seem to be power, but it is worth making that more precise.

CEOs tend to be highly compensated (not necessarily true of the founder of a startup) and so CEOs are assumed not to be immediately destitute if they lose their job. But the real reason there is a power differential is that the decision to fire a CEO belongs to a board of directors. And generally we would assume a board would deliberate on the question what the right consequence should be, depending on what <<xyz>> is which might simply be a reprimand or potentially nothing at all (note: there are and have been exceptions to this also, which I will get to shortly).

This is in stark contrast to a low level employee who is both likely to actually get into financial trouble quickly and is often seen as entirely dispensable. If there are enough people calling for them to be fired, a company might conclude that it is simply bad for business to keep this employee around and summarily let them go. It is easy to remark, “well they shouldn’t have tweeted <<xyz>>” but that clearly implies a curtailment of speech, which is what this debate should be about.

There are effectively two things that are new and have come together that require we examine more deeply what is going. The first is the ability for speech of the “fire them” type to be massively and rapidly amplified in a way never before possible. This is reasonably well understood although the remedies being proposed for information cascades are largely rooted in an outdated Industrial Age regulatory mindset.

The second is the weakness of institutions in defending their constituents. This needs much more attention than it is getting right now. Why, for example, are universities so quick to give in to pressure? Because their model is super fragile today. They have taken up their price to ridiculous levels while at the same time facing competition from emerging online alternatives. Sounds familiar? Yes, because the same has been true for publishers for quite some time. Many companies find themselves in a similar position.

So where does all of this leave us? For starters nothing is helped by trying to dismiss these changes as irrelevant when they are so clearly evident all around us. Then we need to be willing to explore new and more fundamental solutions rather than trying to patch the existing systems. I have long proposed making systems such as Twitter and Facebook programmable as one digitally native way of reducing their power including defanging the risk of information cascades. It is the basis of what in my book World After Capital, I refer to as informational freedom. By itself it won’t be enough though, which is why I am also a strong proponent of economic freedom (some form of universal basic income) and psychological freedom (through having a mindfulness practice).

If we want to restore our ability as a society to have productive critical discourse, then patching our Industrial Age systems won’t do. Instead we need to fundamentally reinvent how we do things in the digital age (which I hope can turn into the knowledge age).