Here's an idea.
Public space on the internet is neither public nor a space.
Talk amongst yourselves.
On the internet, you meet lots of people.
You have lots of conversations with strangers.
And you end up in spots where it feels
like anyone can gain access.
So it would be understandable if you thought of the internet
as a public place.
But is it?
Is the internet a public place?
Before we talk about publicness, first we
should talk about placehood.
I imagine and talk about the internet
as a set of locations traveled between.
I'm willing to bet that you do, too.
In fact, you kind of have to.
The thing at the top your browser
is called a location bar.
You put in addresses.
You go to sites.
But even if, say, Instagram is in California,
their servers, which are powered by Amazon's
virtual private cloud, are in Virginia?
It's actually kind of hard to say.
And the content that they serve is
wherever people are looking at it all over the world.
But, OK, maybe that's too complicated.
What about a smaller website like lowpoint.com,
one of my favorite record labels.
They're in London, but their site
is by Bandcamp, which is in, quote, "San Francisco,
Montreal, Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest, a Carolina,
Pittsburgh, Vermont, the British Isles, and Berlin."
They're a California company, though.
So if I buy a record from Low Point via Bandcamp,
there's no UK value added tax as long as I'm in the US.
And if I'm in the UK, there is tax.
So Low Point is in the US when I am, and in the UK when I am,
even though they're literally in the UK.
And Bandcamp is in both places-- and others-- all the time?
So if the internet is a place that
exhibits a placehood unlike physical places.
A single internet place can be remarkably
different for different people, and even the same person
at different times, and even simultaneously.
And going to those internet places
is unlike going to physical ones.
We can be in more than one internet
place at the same time, move between them effortlessly,
and attach or detach a persistent identity at will.
None of those things are so easy when lugging
around this big meaty thing.
So maybe a duh-doi, but we're going to be explicit.
The internet isn't a location.
It's a set of technological operations out
of which emerge services, products,
and even things that do look like actual places.
So it's tempting and easy to think of yourself
as going to Twitter, Facebook, or Lowpoint,
being on, in, or at them like they're a bank branch, library,
or whatever the grown-up version of a Chuck E. Cheese would be.
But really, the internet isn't like the library
so much as it's like all of the processes that
work so you can take a copy of "Harry Potter and the Cursed
Child" home for two weeks.
The internet isn't a place.
It's a process that functions like a place.
Which brings us from m hood to publicness.
If the internet functions like a place, even if it's not one,
what kind of place does it function like?
A public one?
Well, yeah-- no-- mm?
Lots of internet services, especially social media,
are social spaces, or gathering spaces.
But they aren't public.
They aren't vacant or community- or government-owned
and open to all.
A vast majority are privately owned.
Some people are understandably very sad about this,
but insofar as websites and apps are spaces,
they're mostly private ones.
They're owned by private entities.
There are requirements for entry.
Access can be and often is restricted
for all kinds of reasons and sometimes even no reason.
These characteristics make a space the exact and categorical
opposite of public
But-- and this is a big but-- through the mid-
to late-20th century, there a kind
of lamentation that citizens, especially in the West,
became more private and didn't use physical public spaces
as they once did to gather and meet other citizens.
As a result, one line of thinking
goes, democracy actually suffered.
Not meeting in public to discuss, demonstrate,
and defend meant that we became insular sticks
in the meet space civics mud, which
is an image I'm going to let you sit with for a couple seconds.
Arguably, the internet, among other things, changed that.
It reintroduced public discussion to the public.
The internet is lousy with places
to discuss, demonstrate, and defend one's viewpoints.
And those places may be private, they often
function like public places.
And to say that this can make those places tense
is a bit of an understatement.
The closest physical analog that we
have for this public-private tension is the shopping mall.
With the growth of consumer and car culture,
especially in the US, the shopping mall
replaced the town square in some ways.
It became a social, commercial, and community center.
Except malls are owned by private companies,
which leads to some weirdness.
In 1968, a small group of people were handing out fliers
protesting the Vietnam War draft at the Lloyd
Center in Portland, Oregon.
The Center forced the group off the premises,
and the group brought suit, saying
that their first amendment rights to free speech
were violated.
The Supreme Court found that since the mall was privately
owned and the group was not prevented from distributing
their fliers on nearby public land,
no First Amendment rights were actually violated.
Source.
And again, in 1980, a similar, but more complex
situation arose in California.
A small group collecting signatures for a petition
were asked to leave the PruneYard Center
and brought suit.
The Supreme Court found in favor of the petitioners--
not the mall this time-- but only
because California's Constitution specifically
affirms the right to free speech,
meaning under the federally held First Amendment,
there is no implied right to free speech
at a private shopping center.
But under California law specifically, there sometimes
is.
Also source.
But, OK, great.
Case law about malls.
Got it.
But also who cares?
This isn't about the internet, and what
if you're not even American.
Well, so this stuff is important for two reasons.
The first is that, weirdly, malls
have paved the way for how we treat free speech online.
Just to name one case amongst many,
in 2006 the District US Court of Delaware
ruled that Google, as a private entity and a non-state actor,
is not required to run advertisements submitted
by customers and that in refusing to do so,
they don't infringe on any rights.
The plaintiff in this particular case
claimed that search engines are privately owned public forums--
like a shopping mall-- and that not running his advertisement
constitutes censorship.
The court responded thusly, "defendents
are private, for profit companies,
not subject to constitutional free speech guarantees."
And channeling both "Lloyd" and "Pruneyard," the court wrote,
"the Court has routinely rejected the assumption that
people who want to express their views in a private facility,
such as a shopping center, have the right to do so." "Private
property does not 'lose its private character merely
because the public is generally invited to use it
for a designated purpose.'"
Of course, there are counter arguments.
When Google or Facebook or Twitter
becomes so big or common or relied upon,
and there is no reasonable alternative, what happens?
The court may be off base here.
They're treating internet processes like locations
and comparing the websites of multinational corporations,
the use of which is often socially or professionally
mandated to shopping malls-- singular, static,
geographically located, spatially
limited physical spaces which are
roughly identical for each user and have
meaningful alternatives.
But still, the fact remains that in this case and a lot
of others like it, US courts consistently
rule this way, which is important the world over
because, for better or worse, the way free
speech functions in the US largely
determines how it functions online everywhere else.
Lots of countries have free speech guarantees,
but the United States is particularly broad.
Our First Amendment protects unpopular, offensive, and even
hateful speech.
And the internet collapses the space between, well, space.
This is why our case law specifically is important.
In 2006, attorney Christopher Wolf
said many see prosecution of internet speech in one country
as a futile gesture when the speech can reappear
on the internet almost instantaneously
hosted by an ISP in the United States.
In other words, give us your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to deny the Holocaust, I guess.
With recent and controversial European anti-hate speech laws,
that may be changing.
But another factor is that American culture is often
synonymous with popular culture and, therefore, internet
culture.
Though your country may not, and probably doesn't, provide
US-like free speech protection, online norms
can create the expectation that they do or should.
For me, I think it's reasonable to have two expectations.
And here we're getting into very normative territory.
The first is that there are places online that
should provide full access to free speech rights.
Build a community that respects that norm
and say whatever you want as long as it's legal.
Get all the criticism and high-fiving
that you want for your edgy, controversial, and uncommon
opinions, and revel in the civic possibility
of the marketplace of ideas.
Hmph.
The second very reasonable expectation
is that not every place online is that place,
that some online services-- like malls--
are not required to be a public forum for speech purposes.
Pursuant to the editorial, curatorial,
or community goals of its owners,
platforms may not want to, and are neither legally
nor morally obliged to, publish things they don't like.
True, that may seem unjust sometimes.
So as a corollary expectation, communities
should expect clear, well communicated,
and enforceable guidelines, terms of service,
standards-- whatever you want to call it.
You should expect those guidelines
be respected, consistent, proactive,
and community-focused.
Expect as much from one another as you
do from the powers that be, and know what options exist when
those expectations aren't met.
The result of unmet expectations shouldn't be surprising.
Misunderstandings arise when the two spaces
I just described collide on one service,
and the people running the show provide no clarification
as to which they've intended.
(COUGHING) Twitter.
Inaction is always easier.
And often it's even profitable-- I mean, preferable.
But at best, such an approach is confusing.
And at worst, it's cowardly, maybe even dangerous.
So even if it feels like every internet place should or can
be, not every one is public.
And that's OK.
What do you all think?
What are the reasonable expectations
that we can have concerning person-to-person communication
in this complex, public-private space that is the internet?
Let me know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding "No Man's Sky."
If you want to watch that one, you
can click here or find the link in the doobly-doo.
Hey, also, it's really nice to be back.
We had a really great week off.
In case you missed it, in the intervening time
during last week, I made a post on the subreddit
about the upcoming Idea Channel book club,
the first instance of this thing we're going to try.
And to start, we're going to start
reading "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,"
by Jorge Luis Borges from his "Labyrinth" collection.
And I think it's in a couple other collections, too.
If you're interested in that, we'll
put a link in the description so you can check out
the nuts and bolts for that.
We're going to have that book club discussion
on the subreddit on August 24 starting in the afternoon
Eastern time.
And I imagine that it will extend beyond that
to the next couple days.
I'm super excited.
I think is going to be really fun.
So if you're interested, yeah, links in the place
where all the links are.
Also very germane to this week's episode and something that
wasn't written when I wrote and then we filmed it
is this Buzzfeed news piece by Charlie Warzel that
is a great read and very sort of related to this conversation
about what it means to be, as Twitter has described itself,
the free speech wing of the free speech party on the internet.
It's a great read, very related, highly recommended.
And last but certainly not least, on August 31
in New York City at Union Hall, I
am going to be part of an Atlas Obscura live show,
which is going to be really fun.
If you don't know Atlas, they're a great website
that collects oddities from around the world, places
that you can go visit and see.
They're doing a show about rivals.
And I am going to be talking about the history
of the rivalry between people and chess-playing computers.
So if you're in or around New York City on August 31,
you should come hang out.
I'll put links also to where you can get tickets, you know,
around.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a subreddit links.
I mean, you know where all the links go.
And this week's tweet of the week
is everybody who included us in their top seven fave YouTubers
list.
It was really awesome and really humbling,
and very-- I was turning red for a period of about two days
seeing everybody who included us in such great company.
So thank you, thank you, thank you.
It really made not my day, but it made, you know, two to three
of my days.
So you're all tops.
And last, but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these mallrats.
It's a schooner.