Thoughtpolice.com
We never believed our neighbors might come to demand censorship of thoughtcrime. This is not a dystopian future. It is the disastrous state of contemporary knowledge and communication.
Just as traffic does, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms.—Ivan Illich
This remarkably prescient statement by the renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich was written in 1983, before most people had any awareness of the Internet. Yet his remark shows a perfect realization that we were headed down a path leading to the internationally-endorsed policing of online communication for ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’—conveniently defined as anything that imperial technocracy does not wish heard. A hundred years ago, when the Soviet Union began policing speech in this way, our ancestors understood the injustice it entailed.
George Orwell wrote a book about it.
Yet today, the policing of computers is not only happening, a shocking number of people have come to believe it is necessary.
Illich, while certainly a visionary, was not a futurist, and his foresight as to where we were heading was not born of anticipating the specifics of technology to come. Rather, he understood the nature of the transformation that was already occurring at his time—something he occasionally expressed in terms of the forcible incorporation of humanity into ‘the machine’.
In the essay and speech in which the opening quote appears, “Silence is a Commons”, Illich reveals how the policing of computers follows a clear trajectory that begins with the enclosure of the common grazing land at the end of the Medieval period and accelerates in the twentieth century with the transformation of streets that anyone might use with roads that are exclusively for motor vehicles.
As Illich makes clear, computers have done for communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to open pathways. In each case, we witness the transformation of our commons into spaces that can be owned and therefore policed. Even without knowing how the Internet would shape the twenty-first century, Illich already understood that the arrival of electronic computation was the industrialization of communication—and with it thought itself. For all thought rests at its heart on discourse, a principle that was well understood before the twentieth century but that has gradually been buried under the illusionary conflation of knowledge with facts.
Critics of Illich’s perspective on police and computers have stressed the ways in which the internet has brought about new commons. This is a naively utopian perspective on what happened online. For instance, Wikipedia appears at first glance as a commons for factual knowledge—yet never has there been such a heavily policed library of records. Behind the scenes, a shadowy cabal of nerds controls what can and cannot be said, what is or is not ‘notable’. Even if the majority of Wikipedia editors are acting in good faith (and I believe they are), the lack of transparent governance makes these networks easy to manipulate, and the only uncontested aspect of what Wikipedia records is its remorseless cataloging of corporate trivia.
Likewise, the global public square that was brought about by so-called ‘social media’ is now policed in precisely the manner about which Illich warned—with disastrous consequences. A series of lawsuits in the United States has gradually exposed the ways in which imperial technocrats seek to control thought online. This politically-motivated censorship is publicly represented by the White House and the EU Council but is pragmatically operated through the apparatus of unaccountable security-state agencies, which can decide which inconvenient stories should be prevented from traveling on Facebook, or which dissident perspectives can be banned from Twitter X. The surest sign that imperial technocracy has succeeded despite Illich's warnings is that the media have not been covering the shocking revelations of lawsuits such as Missouri vs Biden Administration.
Communication technology is the medium through which thought moves. To control what can and cannot be said is to police thought itself.
Orwell understood this all too well, but we always saw the problem elsewhere. We never believed our neighbors might come to demand censorship of thoughtcrime. With philosophy torpedoed below the waterline by the profit-driven successors of universities, our collective immune system for thinking has collapsed. Now, the empire can even decide which outcomes from scientific research shall be deemed legitimate and strives to prevent every dissident view from being shared.
This is not a dystopian future. It is the disastrous state of contemporary knowledge and communication.
Chris Bateman, a frequent Underthrow gadfly, is an author and editor at Stranger Worlds.
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This is a hill worth dying on. Good stuff.