Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 138th episode. In this episode I want to talk about tech censorship and why it might not be what we think. But first I need to say a few things by way of preamble. In the past week America has witnessed a horrible crime against an unarmed black man. The video of this crime has sparked yet another national conversation about racism in America. I’m not going to spend much time condemning the riots in Minnesota because that should be obvious to you. Burning down and looting businesses is not the pathway to civilized discourse. It accomplishes nothing and is a gluttonous indulgence of unintelligent emotionalism. These kinds of riots are examples of bad actors – both black and white – taking advantage of a tragedy to lay claim on self-interested plunder. People who participate in these riots have zero interest in social justice and are unwilling to do anything to actually mitigate racism.
But to be honest the rioters are not the only ones who are mishandling this tragedy. All of the virtue-signaling social media heroes are blowing it as well. I can’t count the number of posts I’ve scrolled past declaring America to be some kind of racist hierarchy whose sole bent is hunting down and exterminating black people. This kind of virtue signaling is lazy, historical ignorance that is accomplishing nothing but sucking up the oxygen which should be going toward well-developed thoughts. It is exploitative deception which is being used for political gain and advances on power. It takes zero courage, zero discipline, and zero understanding to get on Twitter and scream how everyone is racist. These social media heroes have no interest in solving social justice issues – they simply want to advertise their own perceived virtue by declaring how non-racist they are.
Getting on social media and telling everyone they are racist if they don’t stop the racism is the stupidest line of reasoning I’ve ever heard. How exactly do we tell who the racists are in order to stop them? Do you have some kind of objective analysis we can perform to determine a person’s level of racism? Who sets the parameters for diagnosing a person as racist? Do you have a metric by which to ferret out the racists from the non-racists? Once we know who they are then how do we stop their racism? Should we do it by education, by marginalization, by psycho-pharmacology, or by imprisonment? These are questions the social justice warriors haven’t even begun to answer. There are no solutions being offered by these social media heroes. That’s because they aren’t interested in solutions, they’re interested in showing off how virtuous they are.
When a police officer kills a black man, how do you know he’s not just a terrible person who did a terrible thing? How do you know he’s not a psychopath who would have done the same thing to a white person? These distinctions matter because if we want less wrongful deaths at the hands of police then we need to be precise about the cause of the wrongful deaths. Awareness of racial issues flavors our politics, our education system, our workforce, our markets, and our athletics. You could stop raising awareness about racism for the next three generations and it would still be the most advertised problem. There is perhaps no issue in America that has been given more awareness than racism. And yet the wrongful deaths keep happening.
So maybe racism isn’t the problem. Maybe inadequately trained police officers are the problem. Maybe the fact that each and every one of us is a fallen human being prone to malevolence is the problem. Maybe the further our society departs from God the less we value human life in general. Perhaps many of us, trained in a nihilistic worldview, are filled with bubbling reservoirs of resentment and rage. And then when the perfect storm of circumstances occurs this rage is set free and someone ends up dead. All of these issues are just as likely to be the cause of wrongful death as racism is. You can’t pinpoint the motive in any crime without performing multivariate analysis on each particular case. If you claim a white officer and a black man always equals racism then you’re saying there’s nothing more to a person than his or her skin. That is a loathsome, contemptible, and lazy view of human beings. Human beings are the most complicated creations in the universe that we know of. The psalmist says we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God. There is infinitely more to you as an individual than your skin color. So stop identifying yourself by this base-level descriptor and start giving credence to the many layers of unique attributes which make up your character.
Why do we always go for the low hanging fruit by calling these kinds of crimes racially inspired? I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while. Almost half of my listener base are nonwhite Americans. Everyone who listens to me knows I think it’s stupid to identify with low resolution attributes such as skin color. The color of your skin tells me nothing about your dreams and ambitions. The color of your skin tells me nothing about your worldview. The color of your skin tells me nothing about your competence. The color of your skin tells me nothing about whether I can trust you. Therefore, the color of your skin tells me nothing about why you committed a crime. We have got to stop leaping to racism every time something horrible like this happens. To do so runs the risk of missing the real reason it happened, and if we miss the real reason then we can’t solve the problem for future victims. I would suggest many of these social justice warriors are less interested in solving the problem than they are in convincing everyone that America is fundamentally racist. These groups are empowered by racial division and so they have a vested interest in keeping racial division alive and well. They could not even exist without it.
Personally, I never want to see a black person or a person of any color have the life choked out of them by a murderous cop ever again. That means I want to find out why it happened and develop intelligent strategies to prevent it from happening in the future. But if I immediately scream racism like an ideologically blinded ignoramus, then I never have the opportunity to pursue proper investigation. It’s extremely hard to improve society and it’s extremely easy to make it worse by your misguided efforts. Real change takes a lifetime of study, hard work, and sacrifice to achieve – not a simple-minded Twitter mob. If you have a system which operates at 80% efficiency, then you might be able to bump it up to 82% if you dedicate your entire life to that work. You have to be willing to suffer and you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself if you wish to inspire lasting change. An inexperienced social justice warrior fresh out of college reaching his or her untrained hands into the system stands only to reduce its efficiency dramatically. Understanding nothing about a system while declaring that system to be fully dysfunctional is how you burn down your civilization only to discover you are fully unprepared to build anything in its place. Scratching away at America’s fabric of unity is how you weaken your own nation until the moment a more unified foreign enemy seizes their opportunity to pounce. Suggesting all police officers are racist because of these tragedies is equally as stupid as suggesting all black people are looters because of the aftermath.
The people who are calling America racist are accomplishing nothing but turning neighbor against neighbor. Accusing non-racist Americans of being racist is going to cause racism to lose its definition. If everything if racist then nothing is racist. If everything is racially inspired then nothing is racially inspired. By blanketing the country with accusations of racism, you’re creating the perfect environment for genuinely racist people to thrive. You’re giving them the perfect camouflage to continue on undetected. You’re failing to address the problem of police brutality and therefore failing the memory of those individuals who lost their lives to it. And you’re also failing those who will die in the future – and I’m not okay with that.
Moving on to our topic for the day which is tech censorship. I’m going to make the case that this problem is far worse than we believe, and yet the prognosis has the potential for a very high level of optimism. First we’ll do a breakdown of what tech censorship is and why classically authoritarian governments have needed to censor free speech. I want to compare what’s happening now with what has happened in the past. I’ll explain the rationale provided by those who make the decision to censor content on their platforms today. We’ll discuss the distinction between public and private services and why that distinction matters. At the end I will explain why individual liberties cannot be preserved without also maintaining individual responsibility. By the end of this episode I think you’ll understand how a problem as big as censorship is not beyond your control. This realization is scary because it means what you do matters, but it’s also incredibly empowering because it means you can do something.
Before we break down censorship, I want to say something about fact-checking. Fact-checking is not an effective way to arrive at truth because facts have no moral quality. The truth is moral. Let me explain with an example given by the independent journalist Tim Pool. Hydroxic acid is a dangerous substance used in nuclear power plants, it has been found in large quantities in New York City plumbing. Sounds a little scary right? That statement is true by fact-checking standards. But what you may not know is that hydroxic acid is water. Instead of simply saying the pipes in New York are full of water, I framed the statement to make you think something else. I’m able to do this because facts have no moral quality. Facts can be nested inside of lies just as easily as they can be nested inside of truth. My desire to mislead you is a moral failure not a factual failure. Before you say anything – whether you notice it or not – you make a moral decision about how you want your statement to be received. The people who hold scientific facts as the final arbiter of truth are doing so because before they even begin they know they do not want to accept a world where the truth is moral. Because if the truth is moral then that means there is a moral law. If there is a moral law then that means there is a moral law giver.
I think this idea of fact-checking is in part why postmodernists believe the truth is subjective. They believe the truth is whatever the truth is to you. They come to this conclusion because their only standard for truth is factual analysis. But as you saw by the hydroxic acid example, factual analysis doesn’t lead you to the truth. What leads you to the truth is a morally calibrated presenter of the facts. The postmodernist makes a decision about what he or she wants to be true and then manipulates the facts to support his or her desire. To invent your own truth despite the reality of actual truth is a moral decision to lie. They know they’re doing this which is why they accuse everyone else of doing it. That’s why they don’t believe in free speech. They don’t believe in unique individuals having a conversation in an effort to get closer to the truth. For the postmodernist, all that exists is your own interpretation of reality – so every time you speak you are simply a mouthpiece for your group identity trying to marshal power. This toxic ideology is what lays the groundwork for censorship. After all, why should you speak if your only interest is framing the facts to support your group’s narrative?
So what is tech censorship? When we think about tech censorship the main players are search engines and social media platforms. These domains have become so large, so important, and so embedded in our society that it’s difficult to function effectively without using them. Whether they intended to or not these platforms have become the public square of human discourse. This means people from all walks of life have been given a voice where previously they had none. This technological revolution has had profound positive impacts. It has helped to expose global humanitarian crises and topple wicked dictators. It’s helped bring awareness to the suffering of the weak and has provided channels by which they can be assisted. Because of these platforms, the gospel can be shared to the ends of the earth without having to leave your home.
But these platforms have amplified the fallen nature of humanity as well. Every year children become depressed and suicidal because of their interactions with these domains. Online bullying is a scourge unique to this generation of kids. The meticulous image crafting found on social media contributes to a specific burden of anxiety previously unknown to humanity. It’s not uncommon to be at a concert or some kind of event where half of the attendees are experiencing the show through the camera on their phone even though the spectacle is right in front of them. Technology has become a crutch for many people, thus diminishing their own interpersonal skills and their ability to speak to others. This lack of interpersonal communication is followed by an array of chronic relationship problems. Chronic relationship problems cascade into increased crime rates, increased burden on the taxpayer, and overall societal dysfunction.
As humans we have a strange relationship with technology. Ask a random sample of people whether they think social media is good or bad and you’re certain to get mixed answers. Ask them whether smart phones are making life better or worse and you will get mixed answers. But despite these differing opinions on the value of technology, you’ll discover that utilization of these resources is almost ubiquitous. Everyone has a smart phone. Everyone has some kind of online account. The fact that many people believe social media has made our lives worse and yet these same people are on social media betrays our utter dependence on these platforms. You just can’t be effective in a professional landscape without using online accounts. Your ability to network is severely disadvantaged if you abstain from social media. It’s like missing out on an entire dimension where everyone else is living. Not to mention how effective use of the internet makes you more like a cyborg than a simple human being. You can access, process, and interpret information orders of magnitude faster than someone who is offline. These competitive advantages have forced everyone who desires productivity to adapt to online life.
These competitive advantages have also made us incredibly vulnerable to censorship. A social media account with a few hundred thousand followers is worth a lot of money. If you say the wrong thing and lose your account this loss is comparable to if not more expensive than losing your entire office building in a fire. It makes people uneasy to think any set of individuals can have this kind of power over your life while being able to operate outside the constraints of your constitutional liberties. These tech companies don’t have to abide by your right to free expression because they consider themselves private platforms with editorial privilege. This means they get to choose what’s allowed to be posted and by who. But this massive power comes with a cost. The problem with being a private platform who has editorial privilege is you’re also on the hook for what gets posted to your platform. If you’re a tech company who claims editorial privilege and someone posts illegal content to your platform – you have to take it down or else face legal repercussions. This becomes quite a challenge when your user base numbers in the billions.
Many tech companies have tried to get around this responsibility by also calling themselves public utilities. For instance, if criminals call each other on the phone to orchestrate a crime, the phone company isn’t held liable for the criminals’ actions because the phone company is a public utility. The biggest social media platforms have used this defense in court to avoid liability themselves. But companies which are legally protected as public utilities are also not allowed to place constraints on their customers outside the bounds of constitutional law. You can say offensive things to your friend over the phone without at&t disconnecting your call. The problem with the tech companies is that they’ve attempted to claim the protections of public utilities while also calling themselves private platforms who retain editorial privilege. This prevents them from being held liable for illegal content while also giving them the power to shut off any person they choose. Calling yourself a public utility as well as a private platform is a contradiction in terms and should not be an available option for these companies. This designation gives these companies authoritarian-like power which rightfully alarms many users.
But are the tech giants the same kind of animal as the authoritarians of the 20th century? Here’s where things get a bit tricky. I think you can make the case these platforms are fully capable of producing propaganda at least as effective if not better than those in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Maoist China. You can also say our dependence on these platforms is analogous to the people’s dependence on their government under these regimes. Because of these similarities, the founders and C.E.O.s of these tech giants are often labeled in the same category as dictators. But I actually think that’s a mistake because I think the differences are more important than the similarities. If all you do is look at similarities while ignoring distinctions you get caught in the Hitler drank water trap. This failure in reasoning basically says: Hitler drank water, and this person drinks water, therefore this person is just like Hitler. That’s an obvious and silly example but it effectively illustrates the danger of getting lost in similarities while ignoring distinctions.
The most important distinction between tech giants and real dictators is tech giants are playing with money while dictators are playing with power. Money is not equal to power because money only works in the context of a social agreement which gives the money value. If you don’t have the social agreement then money becomes worthless paper. Power is different because power doesn’t require a social agreement – it only requires really big guns. The tech giants are most interested in generating more profit next quarter than they did in the previous quarter. Are they unscrupulous in the means they use to generate these profits? Absolutely. But the fact that they’re after money still puts some constraints on their actions – whereas a dictator who uses brute force can only be constrained by one who is stronger.
Another important distinction between tech giants and dictators is that tech giants are not interested in structuring a world order. They’ll happily abide by whatever moral system brings them the most money. Dictators on the other hand are often imperialistic and wish to impose their worldview with bombs and bullets. You can tell this by how they sacrifice economic prosperity in favor of increased control over individuals. Transitioning from a free market system to a communist system does nothing but make everyone involved less prosperous. It crushes your nation’s GDP and ruins your economy. This has been demonstrated over and over throughout history without exception. A world leader who seeks national prosperity will never do it by way of a fascist or communist system. So what do they seek? They seek the power to impose the ideology which possesses them. Marx was possessed by ideology. Hitler was possessed by ideology. Mao was possessed by ideology. They each had an idea of what a perfect world would look like and they each were arrogant enough to think they could make it happen – regardless of the consequences.
The first step in restructuring society always begins with censorship. The reason you need censorship is because without it the truth always wins the day. A rule of thumb when it comes to ideologies is that they are always false. They are always built on deception. The reason they are built on deception is because they are too simple to cover the complexities of life in maximum resolution. There are even Christian ideologies where strict abidance would have you doing things which are very non-Christian. Life is incredibly complicated and therefore the truth is rarely two dimensional or simple enough to be black and white. People in the Church hate to hear that because it means in this life we can never fully grasp the truth in all of its complexity. But Paul himself understood this when he said in this life understanding the truth is like looking through a clouded mirror. I don’t think mastering the truth is what we’re supposed to be doing in this life anyway. I think it’s more like wrestling with the truth. We take into account our knowledge of God, our knowledge of the things around us, and then we have conversations with each other in order to get closer to the truth. And we just go about this process everyday until we die. That’s what it means to be a truth seeker.
We know that conversation is the best way to arrive at the truth because conversation is the first thing ideological dictators attack. That’s what censorship is. It’s an effort to manipulate the public conversation. I’m always extremely suspicious of Christians or church leaders who spurn open conversation and new information. It usually means they’ve developed a low resolution understanding of Christianity and have turned this understanding into an ideological worldview. They attempt to explain the nuances of life with their bullet-point understanding of Scripture. But an ideological worldview is not the same thing as a religion for the same reasons we mentioned earlier. The Christian religion is rich with detail and layers of nuance which include enough mystery to prevent the honest believer from becoming trapped in ideology.
Classic authoritarians pursued censorship because they wanted to impose their low resolution understanding of the world onto everyone else. They were more interested in power than they were in money. In order to foist a lie onto the entire population they needed to shut down open conversation, otherwise the truth would emerge. Complaining about your suffering became illegal in these systems because your suffering was evidence that their ideology was wrong. How could they say they’ve perfected the world if your suffering demonstrated the world was not yet perfect? Instead of attempting to correct their system to account for your ills, they just imprisoned you or killed you. While the tech giants do pursue censorship, they’re definitely not doing it for these same reasons. This is both bad news and really good news. Let me explain.
With classic authoritarian censorship you have a cadre of powerful individuals deciding what gets censored and what doesn’t. Classic authoritarianism is bad because the only way to fix it is through revolution against the government. Ideally you would stop this kind of situation from ever taking shape by developing a population of informed, mature, and invested individuals. It’s very hard for a dictator to ascend to power inside a country of properly developed people. It only happens when enough individuals become dishonest, apathetic, faithless, and altogether not very useful. But in a nation where individuals are committed to truth, to honest work, and to loving their neighbors – you become mostly safe from this kind of authoritarian, unless you get conquered by a foreign power. I think the United States is in this situation right now. Throughout modern history we’ve had enough well-adjusted individuals to be protected from the emergence of a dictator. But the number of well-adjusted individuals is shrinking. The number of individuals who are willing to be dishonest, to cheat, and who refuse to make sacrifices is growing. This degeneration of moral virtue is making us blind and vulnerable to the arrival of potential despots.
When it comes to tech censorship, the decision of what gets censored and what doesn’t is not being made by a cadre of powerful individuals. A cadre of powerful individuals does exist in the tech world, but these people are outsourcing the censorship decision to the free market. They’re outsourcing the decision because at bottom they don’t really care about what you believe, they only care about your money. The biggest names in technology make almost all of their money through advertisements. Advertisers care most about how you – the individual – perceive them. Tech giants are all about advertisers and advertisers are all about public relations. So when a person’s account gets demonetized, censored, or otherwise suspended – it’s happening because the advertisers are afraid to associate their brand with that individual. And why would they be afraid? The advertisers are afraid because mobs of simple-minded, ideologically possessed individuals are being triggered by pathological sensitivities and smearing the advertisers online. The tech giants want to keep the advertisers happy, and so they remove anyone who threatens to stir up the squishy people.
That’s why this is both really good and really bad news. This simple transaction between consumers, advertisers, and tech giants proves that you yourself control tech censorship. The more you become ideologically possessed and prone to being triggered by politically incorrect controversy, the more tech censorship you’re going to see. This is good news because it means your opinion matters and the more work you put into developing yourself as a mature individual the better off all of us will be. But this is also bad news because it means there are far more ideologically possessed people in our nation than we realize. There are enough people who get triggered over non-issues that advertisers are walking on eggshells and these massive tech companies are being shaped by the whims of intellectual toddlers in these online mobs.
And what was it that we are in danger of when our people become squishy, faithless, intellectual toddlers? That’s right: a real dictator. We already see it bubbling up in the political landscape. Leftist governors have run roughshod over the Constitution with alarming boldness. Panicky people right-of-center have responded to this violation of liberty by becoming trapped in their own ideology of believing the pandemic is a hoax. Many people on the left and on the right are putting immense effort into spreading deception, while very few people have remained committed to nuanced, mature, and truthful insight. Let me make one thing clear. If enough individuals abandon responsibility and moral virtue, if enough people are willing to sacrifice truth for power, then our Constitution becomes nothing but a worthless piece of paper. There is no freedom without responsibility. Every person’s rights are another person’s responsibilities. You have the right to free expression, so you also bear the responsibility of having your expressions criticized and marginalized in the free market of ideas. People are equal, but ideas are not equal.
As free conversation allows us to hone in on the truth, deceptions are rightfully dispensed with by public opinion. It’s your job as an individual to have the humility to admit when you’re wrong, as well as the wisdom to learn from it. Instead of attempting to shape the world around what you want to believe, you should shape your beliefs around what’s true. If you want to see the tech companies loosen their grip on censorship, the best first step is to train individuals in truth and resilience. Parents don’t allow children to watch certain movies because of the child’s sensitivities. But if you’re carrying these child-like sensitivities into adulthood then something has gone wildly wrong. A person who is secure in their faith is able to expose themselves to differing opinions without being triggered. The number one reason individuals become trapped in ideological thinking is our failure to teach them a worldview that is rich with meaning and wisdom.
Stop trying to fix global-scale problems with global-scale solutions. A pyramid is built brick-by-brick, layer-by-layer. A body is sculpted day-by-day in the gym. Scripture is taught line-by-line, precept-by-precept. Your movements as an individual ripple out into the world and bubble up to the highest seat of earthly power. The only way to make the world a better place is to make a better version of yourself. To put to death the old version of yourself and to be born into a better future. History’s most influential people are not the ones who belligerently shouted about their own feelings. They’re the ones who presented themselves as living sacrifices and gave their lives for the cause of faith, hope, and love. Jesus Christ died on a cross and reshaped the course of humanity. You can picture all of the faces in the mob contorted by rage and hatred. These faces believed they got the better of Him that day. They believed their brute force successfully twisted the fabric of reality in their favor. But today their thoughts, their names, and their faces are all forgotten – and Christ is worshiped. Follow His lead. If you want to change the world, do it the way Jesus does it. Let yourself be known not by your tribal group-identity – but by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. If you commit yourself to these things and you walk in the faithfulness of God, you will see a better tomorrow. You will see a day where problems like tech censorship are a thing of the past. You will see a day where the world truly is the way it ought to be. And then you’ll realize that you never had to do it on your own after all, you simply had to have faith in the One who does.
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