[leppr]

Censorship is the last-resort solution. Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed.

It's a real shame, because it seems we had reached a peak with the advent of mandatory state school and television. Now things are going downhill with more and more diverse subcultures allowed to build upon themselves and explore the limits and avenues for improvement in their ideas.

There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.

[whimsicalism]

Recognizing the satire, I agree with the implicit critique that you're making.

That said, I think we also have to recognize that there is no true vacuum of discourse - ie.

> There has to be a way to keep people in line with our society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom.

Even if this is not what we're moving to with public schooling, it is essentially what we're moving to in the private sphere post-Citizen's United, etc. only the values are dictated by those with wealth, rather than procedural, governmental power.

[calinet6]

That last point is the kicker to me.

We need to start understanding that there is no such thing as a natural state of freedom; there is only freedom from and freedom to, within specific environmental constraints and power structures. We are always influenced--the question is just what influences we want to prevent, design, or control and which we want to leave undesigned or "free."

[whimsicalism]

Philip Pettit's writing on the difference between freedom as non-interference and freedom as non-domination are very interesting on this issue.

[mjfl]

> Ideally, you'd want to have control over people's education and social structures to prevent deviation before any censorship is even needed.

Is this satire?

[leppr]

It's trying to explicit and bring grandparent's ideas to their logical conclusion. I dislike slippery slope-type arguments, but I fail to see how one can coherently agree with their comment and not mine.

[ulzeraj]

I appreciate the sarcasm. Some responses in this thread are giving me a bad vibe. This site is full of users thinking they can somewhat engineer society towards what they think its a proper state and that aligns very well with the currant behavior of big social media corporations. I wonder when did we tech people deviated so much towards being aspiring tyrants...

[calinet6]

It makes more sense when you think about the fact that society is already engineered to be in some state, and the power of social media companies appears to be influencing that in the wrong direction.

If you're okay with putting society to the whims of its current incentives and the corporations' addictive advertising-optimized technology, you're free to your opinion, but that seems even more dystopian to me than attempting to do better.

At the very least I think arguing for sustaining the current complex designed incentivized structured state of society is morally equal to arguing for some different state.

[Kye]

It's fanfic of that scene in 1984 where the person (whose name I forgot) responsible for designing NewSpeak talked about how the goal was to simplify language until dissent was impossible to reason about, much less discuss.

[calinet6]

Very funny; not arguing for censorship here, but for the design of social media technology that reinforces humanity and not primitive dopamine hit engagement driven advertising. What people say is not the problem.

Anyway, we are already in a balanced system that keeps people in line with society's values while still giving them an impression of freedom. The question is just which direction you go from there.

[bxk1]

The problem with your arguments is that they are full of assumptions of things that you say are good for society and humanity, while we don't actually have a scientific understanding of what the humanity is for to even be able to decide what is good or not to get there. Which, of course, makes all the arguments imply a power in someone's hands to decide what is "good" for humanity and society or what they are for as long as it's not "primitive dopamine hit engagement driven advertising", but someone more aligned with your ideals. I hope you can see how this is not much different from somebody else you don't align with having that power.

[calinet6]

First, in no world am I arguing that I personally get to decide what is good or bad. Lord no.

Second, your argument devolves to everyone should be able to decide what to do for themselves or their company without discussion about what is good or bad for society or the environment at large.

So no, I can’t agree with that.

At some point we need to be able to discuss how to make society better. If that’s not allowed, then that’s not a society I want to live in.