From Farm Equipment to Wiki DNA Databases; Access to Tools

             I was recently given a piece of writing by Lee Worden which is to be published in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. It is titled "Counterculture, cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing civilization, then and now." It's worth talking about here because it deals with authority and counter-forces, protecting or upholding rights, the role of government and when it should be embellished, reevaluated, checked, or diverted, and how to integrate/evaluate and regulate technological advancements.

            Worden tracks a pretty surprising network of people from the mid 60's Whole Earth foundation; through the Apple, Wired, and all of the Dot-com 90's madness; into the free culture movement that spawned; and up to the current (shocking) synthetic biology movement and its anarchist twin, the Biohack movement. I was surprised by the connections, and it took a while to pull them all together. I made this chart to track some of it. 

            Lee points out surprising "ironies" (hypocricies?) in the ideologies held by Steward Brand and his fellow of hippies-turned-"Digerati," but finds some consistent threads as well: dismissal of regulation + acceptance of capitalism, staunch individualism at the expense of designated responsibilities and/or expense of accoutability. "Without the hindrance of rules and regulations," and, as I have written on the chart, with a "vehement embrace of the Enlightenment values of reason, individual initiative, and the grand narrative of progress through scientific discovery"¹

 

Legal Censorship

I've gone into the precident of 5 doctrines that were established to provide for free expression, and which have been reassessed and applied to new telecommunication mediums until the Internet.

I'm going to offer a few specific examples just to demonstrate that the principles of common carriage et al. are not voluntarily adhered to without government regulation. As Nunziato writes, "Broadband providers have the incentive to cater to the interests of the majority of their subscribers, who may disfavor certain types of unpopular—yet constitutionally-protected—expression"¹ This pooling is a bit Google-heavy at the moment, and I apologize for that, (sorry Google!) but I have followed some of the notes from Virtual Freedom and there is more documentation on Google than its competitors or ISPs. I will continue to look around and get a broader cross-section.

(A few examples of) censorship by ISPs, email clients, ads, search engines, news aggregators :

5 Doctrines to Uphold the First Amendment

         I introduced the division between the Negative/Affirmative way of interpreting the First Amendment in the last post. Nunziato breaks down  5 doctrines that have upheld the "Affirmative" conception of the First Amendment until the mid twentieth century, after which they were gradually, significantly weakened; the unwillingness of the court to apply these historical doctrines to new technologies and the increasingly narrow, negative interpretation of the doctrines has resulted in today's situation where there is little or no public space on the Net while privately controlled speech conduits go almost entirely unregulated.

       Because she writes with the thoroughness (read: redundancy) of a lawyer, I am going to further break those doctrines down, and describe them at their strongest, most "affirmative" embodiment in court rulings. Later I will address how they have since been weakened.

+ vs -

There is a difference between these two things:

1)  facilitating free speech in a democracy

2)  a democratic government that does not censor speech

            Nunziato quotes her fellow GWU Law School professor Jerome Barron: "'The marketplace of ideas' has rested on the assumption that protecting the right of expression [from government censorship] is equivalent to providing for it."¹

Dawn Nunziato's Virtual Freedom; Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age (2009) frames the issue by saying there is basically two ways to look at our First Amendment. One way, the government simply has no control over communications conduits (e.g. Comcast as an ISP, or Google's search engine, email, and news) who enjoy the ability to "dominate or monopolize the relevant forum for discussion"², because this ability is the legitimate outcome of competition in the marketplace.

In other words,