You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Nick Cohen
a dictatorship or a democracy, could imprison or fine the leaker. The threat of punishment was enough to deter newspapers from publishing or television stations from broadcasting.
That manageable world has gone for good. If one person living in a court’s jurisdiction breaks an injunction, a judge can punish him. But how can a judge punish a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand on Twitter or Facebook? If a court in New Delhi, Copenhagen or London bans the publication of embarrassing information, sites outside the jurisdiction of the Indian, Danish or British courts can publish it on the Web, and everyone with access to a computer in India, Denmark or Britain can read it, along with billions of others.
If the Web has a soul, then a loathing for censorship stirs it. The Streisand effect – first named in 2005 after the star tried to sue a photographer for publishing pictures of her Malibu mansion, and succeeded only in directing hundreds of thousands of viewers to his website – is a real phenomenon. Label a report ‘confidential’ and it becomes as desirable as forbidden fruit. Once a whistleblower leaks it, you can guarantee that the Web will broadcast its contents, regardless of whether they are interesting or not.
Optimists about the liberating potential of technology can find many reasons to be euphoric. The Net has no borders. National laws cannot contain it. Attempts to press down on the free circulation of information in one country just push it into other countries. The ability of users to copy, link and draw others into their campaigns had stripped censors of their power.
On this cheerful reading, we live in a new world where information is liquid. Wall it in, and it will seep through the brickwork. ‘An old way of doing things is dying; a new one is being born,’ announced a US cyber activist. ‘The Age of Transparency is here.’
So it appeared. WikiLeaks became the new age’s journalistic phenomenon, as it dumped masses of confidential information onto the Web about the American war in Afghanistan and the American war in Iraq and the American prison at Guantánamo Bay and the American State Department. America, the most powerful country in the world, could not stop it. WikiLeaks was based in Sweden, beyond America’s control, although everyone in America with access to the Net could read what it published.
The new technologies justified their revolutionary possibilities by playing a part in the Arab Spring of 2010–11. In Syria and Libya, they allowed the victims of closed societies to talk to the rest of the world. In Egypt, Facebook became a means of organising revolutionary protest. The Arab dictators knew the arts of torture and repression well. They could break the bodies and the will of their traditional opponents. They could not cope with the mobilisations of the young the Web allowed, because they had never experienced anything like them before.
The promise of the Net inspired politicians as well as activists. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, optimistic leaders and intellectuals believed that history was over and that any society that wanted to be wealthy had to embrace liberal capitalism. In the early 2010s, optimists switched from political to technological determinism. They predicted that genocides would become impossible when all it would take to stop an atrocity would be for witnesses to alert the conscience of humanity by uploading videos from their iPhones to YouTube. They warned dictators who censored that they were imperilling economic growth by stopping their businesses accessing the sources of knowledge they needed to compete in a global market. Any society that wanted to be wealthy had to embrace freedom of speech.
With tyrannies tumbling and computing power guaranteeing the triumph of liberal values, why write a book on censorship?
I am all for liberal optimism, and hope a new world is being born. Before euphoria carries us away, however, consider the following scenarios.
A young novelist from a Muslim family writes a fictional account of his struggles with his religious identity. He describes religion as a fairy tale and mocks the prohibitions of the Koran he was taught as a child as bigoted and preposterous. His writing shows that he does not regard the life of Muhammad as exemplary. Quite the reverse, in fact. If word of his work seeped out in Pakistan, the courts would charge him with blasphemy, a ‘crime’ that carries the death sentence. In Iran or Saudi Arabia, the authorities would arrest him, and maybe kill him too. In India, they would confine themselves to charging him with ‘outraging religious feelings’. In most Western states, prosecutors would not charge him, but he would receive the worst punishment the world can inflict on a writer other than depriving him of his life or liberty: no one would publish his work. He would find that although American and European countries do not have blasphemy laws that protect Islam, or in most cases Christianity, the threat of violent reprisals against Western publishers and authors is enough to enforce extra-legal censorship that no parliament or court has authorised.
An African feminist comes to Holland and denounces its tolerance of the abuse of women in ethnic and religious minorities. Newspaper editors and television producers cannot get enough of her fresh and controversial voice. After religious fanatics murder one of her supporters and threaten to murder her, their mood changes. Intellectuals say she is an ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ who is as intolerant and extreme as the religious fanatics she opposes. Politicians and newspaper columnists complain about the cost to the taxpayer of her police protection and accuse her of bringing rancour to their previously harmonious multi-cultural society. No one bans her books, but her work inspires no imitators. She becomes a leader without followers. Women, who were prepared to support her arguments, look at the treatment she received, and put down their pens.
The editor of a Danish newspaper wonders why comedians, who boast of their willingness to ‘transgress boundaries’ and ‘speak truth to power’, will mock Jesus but not Muhammad. He invites Danish cartoonists to satirise the Prophet. Most respond by satirising the editor. It makes no difference. They still have to spend the rest of their lives under police protection.
Two bankers, one from New York and one from London, meet for lunch and discuss an issue that has troubled them both. Not one of the great newspapers that cover high finance saw the crash of 2008 coming. Nor did bloggers make it their business to find out about the risks their banks were running. The Net was as clueless as the ‘dead tree’ press. Insiders knew that the lust for bonuses and the pressure to accede to management demands for quick profits could have catastrophic consequences. But the information had never leaked. The two bankers discuss writing a joint article for the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal exposing the continuing failure to address the structural problems in Western banking. They think that their intervention could improve public debate, but dismiss the idea as too dangerous. They know that if they speak out, their banks will fire them and they will never work in banking again. No other bank will want people marked as troublemakers on its ‘team’.
A British newspaper reporter moves from the politics to the business desk. She resolves to start digging into the backgrounds of the Russian oligarchs who have set up home in London. She has criticised British politicians without fear of the consequences for years, but her editor turns pale when she talks about using the same tactics against plutocrats. The smallest factual mistake or unsupportable innuendo could lead to a libel action that could cost the paper a million pounds, ‘and we don’t have a million pounds’. She ploughs on, and produces an article that is so heavily cut and rewritten by the in-house lawyers no one can understand it. ‘I want a thousand words on trends in fashion retailing by lunchtime,’ the editor says when she starts work the next day.
A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party reads a speech by Hillary Clinton. ‘When countries curtail Internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free enquiry that spurs people to question old ways and invent new ones. Barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which creates economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.’ The old communist is a man who has trained himself never to show his emotions in case they reveal weaknesses to his rivals in the party. But he thinks of China’s booming economy and America’s fiscal and trade deficits, and for the first time in years he throws back his head and roars with laughter.