Tag: censorship

So wait, Google is pro censorship?

Sometimes one is confronted with an absurdity so self-evident that it defies an introductory sentence.  So, I wrote that sentence instead.  But what’s got me gobsmacked today is a story by Adam Sherwin writing for The Independent explaining that Google insisted the popular music site Drowned in Sound censor images of certain album covers on the grounds that they are “sexually explicit” and, therefore, violate existing policy that Google will not serve ads to sites with “adult or mature content.” Really?  Last I checked, half of Google’s arguments for failing to address matters like contributing to piracy were based on a stance against censorship.

First of all, I can login to YouTube right now, search the word sex, and get scads of results with sexually explicit thumbnails.  In fact, many of these thumbnails link to videos that are not so explicit as the pictures imply. So, I guess it’s okay for Google to use pornographic thumbnails in a bait-and-switch ploy to get users to click on videos that are ad supported, but if an artist depicts the naked human form (newsflash, artists do this sometimes) in a painting or other medium, then Google can arbitrarily label it “adult mature content” and out of bounds? I know one man’s art is another’s pornography, and this subjectivity is an important standard for the protection of free speech; but somehow mainstream advertisers seem to know pornography when they see it because you won’t find their brands on actual pornographic sites (I asked a friend).  But consider this…

One of the covers targeted by Google for censorship was for the album OH (Ohio) by the band Lambchop.  The irony in this case is pretty thick considering the painting depicting two lovers in bed in the foreground with a scene of police brutality through the window in the background evokes of one of the most famous visual themes in the history of Western art — that of Olympia.  Probably the most well-known and most overly-adapted Olympia is Manet’s painting of the nude courtesan, which debuted in 1865.  It was scandalous in its time, not so much for the nudity but for the blatant depiction of a prostitute looking right at the viewer. The Lambchop cover is a painting by artist Michael Peed, a friend and former professor of frontman Kurt Wagner, and Peed references the familiar Manet composition to create a scene that is provocative in our times.  The counterpoint between the intimacy of the lovers and the abuse by the police is a wry statement that one can interpret as one may choose, but that it should be censored by Google of all entities has got to at least make you wonder what all their pro-culture, pro-speech horse shit is all about.  Take this for what it’s worth, but the censored version with pixel blurs over the “naughty bits” inadvertently makes an even more disturbing statement about America — that sex remains offensive while police brutality is not.  Well played, Company That Shall Not Be Evil.

We should not lose sight of the significance of an entity like Google exerting its influence, even in this small case.  An individual advertiser may, and should, choose what kind of media associations best suit its brand.  You probably won’t see Betty Crocker commercials during Adult Swim, for instance.  But should an ad service business — and in this case the only ad service business —  be entitled to arbitrarily label creative works “sexually explicit” and requiring censorship? If Peed’s painting meets that definition, then so does nearly every nude in every museum and gallery in the world. I thought the Internet was the proverbial garden of free expression.  I also thought Google was just a neutral highway that has neither interest in nor responsibility for the manner in which users drive.

Admittedly, even for Google-scale hypocrisy, it is an enigmatic choice to commit such a blatant act of censorship where there isn’t even a hint of gray area regarding the works in question.  Is this the result of killjoy bots?  Or is it a sign that Google will soon be throwing even more prudish sops to its new conservative friends among DC influence-peddlers?  No matter what the thinking (and I use that word generously) may be in this case, the disturbing implications of the precedent cannot be overstated.  To be outside the Google universe is to be effectively off the web, at least as far as monetization goes. This is an absurd amount of power for any single company to wield. And seeing as we are no longer able to distinguish between corporations and people in the United States, I’m not at all ready to let the whims of centaurs in Silicon Valley or anywhere else define what it means to be indecent.

The web is not a panacea.

Web

Whether you’re a democrat or a republican, I would hope that you can look at the US invasion of Iraq with analytical detachment, and  as such, I believe it is both fair and relevant to identify President Bush as having a crusader’s mentality.  For better or worse, I happen to think he legitimately believed that the relatively simple job of toppling Saddam Hussein would lead to democracy flourishing like flowers in fresh soil, and this is why he failed to heed voices warning of events that ultimately came to pass.  I raise the subject not to rehash criticism of that administration but to suggest that we might be wary of leaders, political or commercial, bearing panaceas.  And that brings us to this article from last week’s Guardian, an extraction from the book The New Digital Age:  Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, co-authored by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Google’s Executive Chairman and Director of Google Ideas, respectively.  Ominously titled Web censorship:  the net is closing in, the excerpt is ostensibly a warning against state-run censorship of the internet in nations already known to be deficient in the civil liberties department.  And while some of the analyses and predictions are thought-provoking, the underlying premises and ultimate purpose of the article inspire a frisson similar to the one I felt the day Dick Cheney said, “I believe we’ll be greeted as liberators…”  And then?

The assumption of the piece is that an “open” internet breeds democratic reform but that balkanization through state censorship will fulfill this odd prediction:  “What started as the world wide web will begin to look more like the world itself, full of internal divisions and divergent interests,” write Schmidt and Cohen.  Really? Divergent interests, you say?  Even in the era of Googletopia, diversity will persist and result in cultural divisions ranging from benign philosophical differences to sectarian violence, tribal warlords, and inhumane states? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the global, free flow of information, if it’s possible to maintain the infrastructure, but if you think American exceptionalism can be blindly arrogant at times, what Schmidt and Cohen are selling, techno-exceptionalism if you will, is something potentially more insidious.

What President Bush believed we could do with a taste of democracy, Schmidt and Cohen seem to believe can be done with information technology. In fact the assumption of all techno-utopian views tends to treat information as though, if left pure, it can only be used one way and ultimately for the greater good.  Just looking within our own already-free society, it’s pretty clear that “information” isn’t even necessarily information. An American in Idaho can be indoctrinated to jihad via YouTube without setting foot in a Mosque, let alone the Middle East.  Authorities estimate an 800% increase in domestic extremism over the last decade, and guess how these groups connect with one another. The design of Web 2.0 can be a terrible tool for data quality because it favors the crowd, favors what’s popular (i.e. trending), and is built almost exclusively on an economy of ad impressions, which means the money doesn’t need to promote a well-researched article about Syria in favor of page views on GirlsinYogaPants.com.  So, the web already does “look like the world itself,” even without government imposed balkanization, and the world just might continue to be as complexly imperfect, brilliant, and idiotic as it ever was despite the record-breaking views of Gagnam Style.

Schmidt and Cohen write about “walled gardens,” which is tech-speak for limited web environments that can be relatively benign or insidiously watched by state or corporate entities.  Facebook is a walled garden that hundreds of millions of us use daily, and it is a pretty good example of voluntary disconnection that commands a substantial amount of our web-based attention here in freedom-loving USA.  After all, isn’t Facebook something of an expanded version of social cliques that have formed naturally for centuries without technology’s assistance? Other than knowing what friends and loved ones are up to, which is nice, I would argue that using a walled garden like Facebook for information is simply bestowing the role of curator to personal acquaintances whose “filters” we trust in a given context.

Of course, the more narrow that context happens to be, if you and your friends share some extreme view like American law needs more Old Testament in it, the walls in your garden will naturally close in without any help from a state supervisor. The web can be a tool for expanding one’s world view, but it is very often an even more powerful tool for substantiating pre-existing biases. So it is a naive evangelist who believes that the web is somehow the new “city on a hill” (speaking of the Bible).  Thus, Schmidt and Cohen begin to sound a bit like the digital age incarnation of Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop, vowing to establish a foothold for the gospel whence enlightenment shall blossom, while glossing over the inherent imperialism in the enterprise.

No, I don’t want to see Iran build a “halal internet,” which would be its own version of the “great firewall of China,” but I have to question the motives of Google executives implying that this is the fulcrum on which the fate of that nation balances.  Iran managed to become the best educated, most progressive-leaning country in the Middle East before the Internet, and the forces that stand as a barrier to democratic reform are likely not due to a lack of available information or even contact with the outside world. We might just have to accept that Iran’s fate is not entirely ours to determine and that it’s a segment of the market Google doesn’t get to own. Yet.  Moreover, with the article’s final, dire words that an Iranian wall would “change the internet as we know it,” are we meant to infer that the censorship itself might spread to us and our fellow democratic societies?  Certainly, this is the belief among many out there, and it is bizarre to say the least when my fellow progressives put more faith in a multi-billion-dollar corporation to protect free expression than they do in one another.

But that’s the sleight of hand, isn’t it?  The masters of the web have convinced people that free expression hardly existed without this technology, while outside the walled gardens we find an illusion of an open web that is actually more circumscribed than many realize. Search results aren’t based on pure, boolean logic but are based on a number of factors ranging from paid positions to data mining us users, so Google algorithms can “help” us find what they assume we’re looking for. Or as a default, it seems to want to find what some seventeen year-old boy is looking for, which might explain why a search on the word “admiral” yields the top suggestion Ackbar.  And, of course, Wikipedia comes with everything.  Meanwhile, as Google pursues an agenda of consuming and monetizing every bit of data in human experience, violating privacy, trampling on intellectual property rights, and from time to time, just being evil, this one-world technological evangelism pushes us toward the day when we finally vest in a corporation the power of a state and the Information Age becomes a true Tower of Babel.  And it will be the well-meaning progressives who helped us do it.

If I had Eric Schmidt’s money and resources, and I really cared about the developing world, I can think of many places to start that are more pressing than the architecture of the internet in China or Iran.  Freedom can’t thrive on information and expression alone; it requires economic prosperity, security, and a universal belief in human rights. Off the cuff, I think of child slaves in the Cote d’Ivorie harvesting most of the world’s cocoa or the dangerous conditions of garment workers supplying the West, or the surprising number of homeless living in the New Jerusalem of Silicon Valley.  By contrast, fussing over hypothetical restrictions on Twitter just sounds dumb.

Dear Rick II – Response to Rick Falkvinge on Legalizing Child Porn

Dear Rick:

Yesterday, I opened up on you without actually taking the time to refute your positions or points. Honestly, it’s tough to read that many words, disagree with every one of them, and know quite where to begin.  I know you said you would respond, but then GoDaddy sites were down for many hours.  In the interim, I took the time to write a more analytical response to your article, lest anyone think I’m merely reacting to the nature of child porn itself.  As I said in my open letter, I think many of the fallacies in the article speak for themselves, but let’s take look at its three main assertions:

1. The ban [on child porn] prevents catching/jailing child molesters.

Your support for this premise, which you write in the present tense, is to leap immediately to a very obscure hypothetical situation ten years in the future.  Never mind the fact that your scenario has a one-in-many-million chance of happening; but even in the event that an innocent citizen inadvertently records a child molestation while wearing his Google glass, you are merely speculating that this witness would be treated as a criminal. By this argument, if I found a tape in my neighbor’s trash that turned out to be child pornography and brought the tape to the police, you insist that they would charge me with possession.

Sure, this could happen if the police are corrupt or inept, but it is certainly not the intent of the law. Moreover, when technological or societal change really does demand amendment to the law, it happens. Writing a statute that exonerates your as yet imaginary, inadvertent witness/recorder of a crime involving a naked child seems like an afternoon’s work for a decent law clerk.

Far more serious than your purely hypothetical (and frankly paranoid) example is the very real tragedy that people languish in prison right now who have been wrongfully convicted of homicide.  As terrible as that is, I’m confident we will never legalize murder in order to right these miscarriages of justice.

 2.  The laws brand a whole generation as sex offenders

You state:   “Our current laws treat the video of a seven-year-old being brutally raped, on one hand, and two seventeen-year-olds who have eyes for nothing in the world but each other making consensual passionate love, on the other hand, as the exact same thing. This is mind-bogglingly odd.”

That would indeed be mind-bogglingly odd if it were true — or had subject/verb agreement seeing as a video itself cannot be charged with a crime.  Suppose a priest rapes a seven year-old altar boy and the act is caught on surveillance video.  The priest has committed a crime for sure, but is the owner of the building guilty of possession of child pornography, even when he marches that tape straight into the authorities as he should? All smoke, mirrors, and Google glass aside, this is basically what you’re saying, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

As for your 17 year-old lovers, the age of consent in Sweden I believe is 15, and the age of consent in the U.S. ranges from state to state between 15 and 17. So these kids are free to make “consensual passionate love,” as you put it; although at that age, there’s a decent chance it’s awkward, brief, and bit bumbly to be honest.  Still, you’re really painting this picture as a provocative intro to get us to focus on criminalizing the teenager who photographs him/herself naked and presumably shares those photos via telecom.  You state that criminalizing this behavior both equates the act with serious molestation against young children and makes teens feel bad about their bodies.  Again, nothing you’re saying makes sense to me as either an experienced parent or as a citizen with a working knowledge of the law.

In the first instance, the teen in possession of photos of him/herself can be charged in various states in the U.S. with misdemeanors, ordered to engage in counseling, etc. They will not face penalties equal to those of an adult convicted of physical child abuse. You’re guilty of the same associative argument you criticize with your “jaywalking-and-murder” example.  You’re lumping it all together for dramatic effect, but what you’re saying just ain’t so.

Regardless of legality, the act is very dangerous and very stupid; and it is not proscribing the self-photography that makes teens feel bad about their bodies.  When teens feel bad about their bodies, it’s because they’re teens, who have been feeling self-conscious long before technology gave them new toys to play with. A teen who chooses to exhibit him or herself naked via digital communication might be due for a serious discussion with an adult about self-worth and self-preservation.  It’s not about criminalizing the kids to appease some prudish authority — I’m a parent and couldn’t be further from the religious nuts you refer to in your article —  it’s about helping them take care of themselves, which includes protecting them from their own ignorance about the world, about child predators, about putting something out into the digital universe that they can never get back.

 3. The free speech war is won/lost at the battle of child porn.

At last, we get to something approximating your real goal, I believe.  This statement reminds me of another one from the protectmarriage.com website, active during the Prop8 fight to ban same-sex marriage.  I may be paraphrasing slightly as the site is currently down.  They stated:

 “While abortion is a foundational issue, we see marriage as a survival issue.” 

Interesting language, if you think about it.  Like you, these Protectors of Marriage also imagine an ideological war to be won or lost on the basis of a single law that taps into people’s emotions.  And just as they claim to be fighting for the religious soul of America, you claim to be fighting for the soul of free speech itself.  Both of you, of course, are guilty of ignorance in your premises and gross exaggeration in your purposes.  They believe American law is fundamentally more religious than it is; and you believe free speech is truly in jeopardy.

I happen to believe very strongly that the secular laws we write in a free and democratic society are, at their best, a unified declaration of our humanity without requiring religious doctrine. That which we protect and that which we abhor, as expressed through the rule of law, actually does matter a great deal.  But in a very similar way to our Christian zealots, Rick, you fabricate wedge issues in order to draw oblique lines toward dangerous conclusions about the very notion of law itself. To be blunt, I believe you are a technocrat who envisions a world in which technology either obviates the need for law or demands that the law bend beyond reason to accommodate technology’s endless vicissitudes.

In truth, you may be less like the American Christian zealot in your use of child porn here than you are like Ronald Reagan using flag burning as a distraction from your real agenda.  You knew you would draw fire for appearing to be pro-child pornography, and I am reasonably confident that you do not in reality advocate harming children, so perhaps your real mission has more to do with this statement:

“There is a reason the copyright industry loves child pornography.  This reason. It opens the door to censorship.”

This is your party platform, Rick, isn’t it? If so, I think you should be more transparent about it, champion of transparency that you are. Certainly, more straight talk would afford you more opportunity for concision in your writing, and what you’re saying is really pretty simple:  “Copyright is censorship.”  And, of course, if that’s what you truly believe, it’s no wonder you see censorship everywhere you look.

I happen to find your position naive, fallacious, and destructive for some of the reasons I mention above about law and humanity. You believe those of us who would defend copyright don’t understand the Internet, but the truth is you don’t understand copyright. What you want to call censorship is in fact one of the strongest statements my country makes about the importance and the value of a single voice.  Go ahead and blast media oligopolies and their lobbyists all you like.  It’s not my role to defend everything they produce, say, or do.  But as an artist, a big mouth, an atheist, and a liberal; I’m willing to bet I care a hell of a lot more about our First Amendment than you do, and I truly resent when amateurs misuse it.