# "Free speech" kinda sucks, actually

published: 2020-06-16

Today, through the Bongusta Gopher aggregator, I stumbled upon a person who pretentiously calls themselves "The Free Thinker", fresh with hot takes such as "actually, transport security is bad because it prevents me from using my shitty machines; damn everyone else". While occasionally they make a salient point, the majority of their phlog consists of either crap I don't care about or crap I don't care enough to point out why they're wrong about.

But I can't bring myself to feel any sort of negative feelings about them, for I see a lot of myself in them. From their writing, they know they stand against the majority's opinion on any given subject. They have ascended beyond caring. They have ideas they know others will find idiotic, and dare to have them anyway.

But what is the "free" in "free thinker" supposed to mean, anyway? Free as in gratis, since their posts aren't behind a firewall (and thanks to Corona-chan, I don't have to pay for the transport of bits and bytes into my home network, either)? Free as in freedom, Stallman's variety, where I don't have to use any proprietary software to reach their server, to read their words, where I can remix them as I see fit and scatter them on the wind like dandelion seeds?

Or maybe it's "free from overt outside influence".

Can speech ever truly be free? For it costs calories to move my mouth, to make my lungs push out air to form words, to move my fingers on a screen. Nearly negligible, or otherwise there would be no such thing as obese internet celebrities, but there nonetheless.

Maybe one would define "free speech" as speech done without fear of censorship by anybody else. On the surface, one would feel inclined to support this. If it is technologically impossible for one to be censored, then one could "speak" without the fear of a government or any other body of people proclaiming themselves to have power over others silencing their words before they reached anybody else or stopping the signal once it had.

There is such a place where this is possible. It's called the ZeroTalk forum on ZeroNet. And it's an absolute cesspool of people covered by all of a hysterical liberal's favorite words. Racists, fascists, peddlers of fake news, misogynists, transphobes, homophobes... If it's on a bingo board of things Orange Man Bad has been called the past four years, one is certain to find that kind of person shitting up ZeroTalk.

This can be mitigated to a limited degree. Several blocklists, including MOAB by the not-a-cesspool-dweller Styromaniac, give ZeroNet peers the ability to filter out the worst of it. But blocklists only work by user ID or zite address, not by keyword (at least, last time I checked). And ZeroNet has none of these enabled out-of-the-box. The default experience for normie newcomers is to be instantly flooded with pretty damn close to the worst humanity has to offer.

Do not misinterpret me. I am not calling for censorship. But what is "censorship", anyway? Some, including the aforementioned ZeroTalk denizens, might define censorship as "anytime someone chooses not to hear what I have to say". Under that definition, blocklists are a form of censorship as they are a blanket mute of anything a list of posters has ever posted. But if the cost of removing this "censorship" is to have to choose between seeing the same uninspired string of racial slurs ad nauseam or leaving said community to opt out, well, hasta la vista, baby.

Ideologically, I know that peer-to-peer is superior to client-server for the reasons I laid out a year ago. Client-server inherently disadvantages those without the financial resources to pay for a VPS or the technical knowhow to run their own server behind ever-restrictive ISPs. And peer-to-peer is a lot closer to apocalypse-ready since most P2P systems don't require a connection to the outside world for base functionality. (Although I don't see how one bugging in would get much in the way of communication without others to be traveling and spreading their data around...)

But my personal experience sometimes finds me preferring client-server and the control it gives the person running the server. On ZeroNet, owners of interactive zites can't easily remove submitted content, if at all. They can only suggest to other clients seeding that specific zite to hide certain users' content.

This may seem desirable at first glance. But imagine that you are an owner of a small forum on ZeroNet about a niche interest of yours. Vidya, electronics, outdoor extreme sports, sub-sub-subcategories of a certain political ideology, doesn't matter. You and a handful of others are civil and self-policing and pleasant to each other. But one day the spammers find it. They spew slurs and ads everywhere. It takes you a while, but you manage to pull together a decent blocklist and make a sticky post advising visitors to use it to get back to normal, maybe even submit it to MOAB so the rest of ZeroNet benefits.

But congratulations! Your zite is now forever mutilated. You can delete the spammy content from your side, but so long as those spammers are connected to the same trackers everyone else is using, new visitors will use them in pulling your zite to their machine, and the spammers' user-submitted content will come along with that.

On a client-server forum, the admin would just ban said spammers, delete their content, and blacklist said IP addresses from registering again (if on a network with IP addresses, that is). Communities on client-server models have greater control over what speech they are allowed to tolerate. If said servers are on darknets like Tor or I2P, they have even greater freedom to decide their own rules, for the masking of their geographical locations and the extra transport security provides a pretty damn good (but not infallible) protection against government interference. This does not have to be limited to a single server; a chat on Matrix could be spearheaded on one server, with users from other servers joining, but the admin would still have ultimate control (last I remember; they might have changed it) over who stays in the chat and who gets kicked or banned. Peer-to-peer systems that rely on invites from someone already in the forum being joined, like Briar, have greater control than ZeroNet's free-for-all system over who gets in, but once a peer gets compromised or lets a bad apple in, it becomes downright difficult to purge bad actors if not impossible.

Self-determination is one of the greatest things I put value on in this life. (I will not call it a "right", for technically rights do not exist without the power to protect them, but that is a pondering for another post.) An individual should have the ability to decide who they associate and disassociate from and be able to do so at will (given the consent of those being associated with, of course; no such consent is needed for leaving). A group should have the ability to decide their own rules for operation and grant who they feel trustworthy the power to enforce them.

I am not advocating for centralization. Far from it! I do not want the entire internet to become just Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Google. But I see the people I read quite frequently proclaiming the virtues of "user sovereignity" without also acknowledging the sovereignity of the, for lack of a better term, "usee". If this site had comments, would I not be justified in moderating them so that I would not become host to filth? Should I be disallowed from preventing known spambots and attackers from accessing my site? Am I unreasonable, as "The Free Thinker" would assuredly label me, for requiring decent levels of transport security to protect my words and your eyes from man-in-the-middling?

Would you allow random people to walk into your house and let out a steamy crap on your carpet? No! You control (or, I sure hope you do or can) who comes into your abode. So why is it okay when it happens on the internet? Let those who want to roll in filth build their houses of mud and manure, and let those who aspire to excellence build their cathedrals and sacred meeting places. And when some from both agree to meet each other and listen to what each has to say, let them build showers to meet each other halfway.

(Innuendo not intended.)

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander