What if the ruling class does pay attention to us? Back in the dubya days (and to be honest lately too) I often thought the trouble was that Washington's elites were so far removed from us that they didn't care about our struggles.
But they are not removed enough to not be afraid of us. Things that we informed citizens think are important enough to tell the general public about don't get traction in the mainstream media. I'm starting to see a pattern. Officials don't want to panic people. Panicking people are more difficult to control. In Japan they lied to the public about how much radiation was being released. In the gulf they lied about how much oil was being released. They lied about fucking boom placement.
I wish for protests the world over to be non-violent and articulate about their political motivations. But sometimes it's more messy than that. And while David Cameron is arguing that the riots in London are "criminality pure and simple", there are other voices in authority saying it's a social issue. I am distressed at the damage that was caused by public rage in London. I am also distressed that public safety is being used by some to justify choking public access to free speech. I am concerned that we are buying the frame that public safety trumps free speech without debating what public safety entails.
In San Francisco on Thursday, BART officials got wind of a demonstration being planned to protest the shooting death of Charles Blair Hill. There had been an earlier protest that had disrupted commuter traffic, and so this time because their intelligence indicated that social media would be used to coordinate the demonstration they shut down wireless services in selected BART stations.
It's an interesting situation. Is social media protected speech? Internet activists have been fighting for unmediated access to the internet. The interfaces we all use are businesses, providing a service for us. So what right do we have to demand uninterrupted service? But many of the businesses we use to communicate live or die according to the amount of attention we pay to their tools to connect. Whether or not we are giving them money we are certainly giving them enough relevance that they can make their case to investors. Don't we take it for granted that the conversations we have online are ours? Do we really own those conversations if we can't depend on them to do our will in a crisis situation? Who gets to decide how much danger trips the switch and kills our access to public unmediated communication? Who gets to decide what is dangerous and what is the public rising up and demanding change?
Up till now there has been a bright line between the countries that stifle online speech to control citizen protest and those who do not. That line is beginning to blur. The UK is considering blocking potential criminals from social media. BART just went ahead and cut services without a public debate. They say they did it to maintain safe riding and working conditions.
Duncan Geere wrote an interesting perspective over at Wired yesterday. He wonders why we would shut off social media services in the interest of stifling citizen panic and yet do nothing about the mainstream media hysterical panic inducing coverage of events. As he points out:
Hitwise reckons that 3.4 million people in the U.K. visited Twitter’s homepage on Aug. 9, the day with the most hype around the riots, compared with numbers from Sky News and BBC News 24 of 9.2 million and 13.1 million, respectively. With so much of a greater a reach, clearly the scaremongering potential of traditional media is far higher than that of social networks.
But what if the panic we are trying to stifle is the panic of those in power? Leaders emerge from protests. Citizens become engaged in the struggle to make living conditions better for their fellow citizens. It gets more difficult to railroad us where they want us to go.
I have occasionally railed at the bad rap populism gets with the Serious People including journalists and politicians. To me, populism boils down to ensuring the laws benefit the greatest number of citizens possible. To the Serious People I suspect populism brings uncomfortable visions of pitchforks and the dread of what might happen if our baser emotions were unleashed.
Which brings me to yelling FIRE in a crowded theater. Pointless death if some idiot just yells it out when there is no fire at all. The rational limit of free speech. And if there is a fire it's bad because people panic and stampede and more people get killed than get saved from the fire. But I suspect that our leaders are feeling a little like a theater owner who knows there is a fire and it's between the patrons and the exit. People are going to die. Later, Questions will be Asked. And the attention in that moment is not on the people and how they will be best helped, but on the sorry ass of the owner and how they will be best shielded from the fallout.
I submit that we are past the point where we have a discussion on the rational limits of free speech. We need to figure out what we are going to do when the powers that be shut down our ability to organize online because they state that there is a public safety issue. We need to decide who has the right to define public safety. Because when people are out in the streets demanding change that is also a function of democracy. Demonstrations have both the potential to threaten public safety if they get out of hand, and the potential to threaten people in positions of power who are invested in seeing the laws of our land benefit the elite instead of the working people. I'd like to feel confident that public safety isn't used as a shield to preserve the current power imbalance.