Thanks to the net, free speech has already won
The internet didn’t go as planned. Connecting billions of humans did not, as hoped, create the vast glittering tissue of one global mind. It created a nightmare adrift without a brain. It stamped rage and amnesia into circuit-boards, day after day, hour after hour. And now there’s Don Brash and the freedom fighters to contend with.
Yup, fresh from working over Ma¯ ori wards on councils with the Hobson’s Pledge group, Brash the bruiser is back.
Hobson’s Pledge was depressingly successful in helping silence Ma¯ ori voices around the country, presumably at a financial cost to multiple councils forced to run referendums overturning councillors’ decisions. Now he has joined a group of lawyers, academics and political commentators (add journalists and used-car salespeople and you’d have a true pentagram of horror) that raised $50,000 in a day to seek a judicial review of Auckland Council’s decision to bar two Canadian far-Right speakers from its venues. It appears staff didn’t want the security and safety headache of having them on ratepayer turf. Mayor Phil Goff muddied the waters by tweeting support for the decision, from which many inferred it was his call.
And so, like someone complaining of thirst while being waterboarded, the resistors are fighting for freedom of expression. I mention this water-on-water redundancy because the whole fight – besides smelling like a publicity stunt – seems pointless. It’s a joke.
Obviously the two speakers could try booking into private venues, or somebody’s lounge for that matter, if they really wanted to share their views in the real world. Their right to speak is separate from the council decision. And many have pointed out inconsistencies from some of the group’s members in their commitment to freedom of speech. (I believe Don believes in what he’s doing.)
But in the end, this freedom coalition, or whatever they call themselves, is wasting precious time on a quaint debate that was decided while we sleep-walked through the start of the millennium. Free speech has already triumphed: there is no freedom from expression.
We can seek judicial reviews till the cows come home, but social media runs things now. Without the restraint of reality, information of the kind spread online by the speakers is a virus, and you can’t philosophise your way out of influenza. The disease simply consumes the weak and susceptible.
I don’t know how to fix the problem, but launching freedom alliances to protect the contagion seems to be missing the point. Saying we can fight their arguments with better arguments just sounds downright homoeopathic.
I heard one of the Canadian speakers interviewed on a New Zealand radio station. The woman, whose name I can’t remember and isn’t worth looking up, was rattling off talking points. She spoke about future mass immigration across our borders and dilution of our national character.
There are two ways New Zealand could be overrun by uncontrolled foreign hordes. One involves teleportation, and the other is by our tectonic movement towards the rest of the world. Actually, there could also be some form of magic. The point is, none are happening any time soon.
There’s a reason New Zealand is the panic room of the world’s billionaires. We have a cool, laidback population, solid infrastructure and a stable democracy. And most importantly, the rest of the world has never heard of us. We have been occasionally left off maps. We are out here, hanging on to the Western world by our fingertips. We are the last gas stop before Antarctica. We have the world’s biggest ocean on one side, and on the other its tiny psychopathic cousin, the Tasman.
And while it might look pleasant from the window of your flight to the Gold Coast, any suggestions that clunky ships crammed with huddled families would swarm down the Tasman are ridiculous. (I am haunted by the thought of humans desperate enough to try to come here in some rust bucket, across a sea often likened to a giant washing machine. In my mind’s eye, the only residue from that attempted journey would be a soggy Care Bear, a spent flare gun, a torn shoe, washing up on Bondi Beach.)
The ideas when spoken aloud by the Canadian seemed idiotic in the local context. But still deeply poisonous.
So what I mean to say is that, thanks to the web, we are in freefall and there are no rules except gravity. Also, we can probably expect more of these types touring here, trailing in the wake of their own digital garbage.
I don’t know what to do about it. Nowadays we carry the weight of the world in pocket devices. Sometimes the most terrifying thing about the web is that it truly makes you realise you’re not alone.
The ideas when spoken aloud by the Canadian seemed idiotic in the local context. But still deeply poisonous.