'Twas Different in Yon Olden Times

before the Twitter arose from the mists of history

I came back this morning from a couple of days in the mountains without wifi or cellphone service. Clearly, returning was a terrible mistake, and I’m sorry I’m not still up there.

Actual image of Chris Bray in California mountains

So.

Recently, Max Boot said that social media has to be handled differently than media did in the past, because in the 1980s we only had three TV networks and we mostly communicated ideas by chiseling pictures into rocks and firing them at neighboring towns with a trebuchet. Or, I don’t know, something like that, which I talked about here.

Now a Time magazine correspondent named Charlotte Alter — more about her in a moment — says the same thing, but with different periodization:

But “free speech” in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution. The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.

That’s all she says about speech in the 18th century, so it beats the shit out of me what this comparison is supposed to mean, and I kind of suspect that it beats the shit out of her, too. But again, Alter’s it was different back then is no better than the last one that got on my nerves. The idea that the conflict over information now is wholly different than the conflict over information then is just the usual nonsense.

First, the Founders had just fought a revolutionary war that was born from print culture, from an explosion of written sources that were widely shared and widely contested. Someone like the Massachusetts colonial official Thomas Hutchinson absolutely thought, and said very clearly, that he was engaged in a contest with idiots who were spreading disinformation in print. I’ve already written about this, too.

Again, here’s how the historian Bernard Bailyn sums up Hutchinson’s view of the idiots and demagogues (like John Adams) that he was arguing with in the decade before the Revolution, and tell me if it sounds the slightest bit different than the current “misinformation” discourse from our own Thomas Hutchinsons: “The common run of the people, lacking the necessary education, leisure, and economic independence to make an impartial assessment of public problems, were mercurial playthings of leaders who could profit by exciting their fears.” I’m not sure if Hutchinson was Max Boot living in a past life or David French living in a past life, but I take this as clear evidence that at least one of them did, in fact, have past lives, and that they’ve been the same elitist whiner every time the wheel of existence has turned.

Second, all of the things the Founders enshrined in the Constitution were the products of a fierce and sustained rhetorical contest in print, as Federalists and Anti-Federalists — writing pseudonymously, like some asshole on Twitter — fought over the likely practical effects of their ideological differences. Brutus and Cato thought Publius was spreading disinformation, and Publius returned the favor. Newspapers all over the country reprinted their exchanges; 18th century political discourse was wide open, it was broadly disseminated, and it ran hot. If you want to argue that “free speech” in the 21st century means something different than it meant in the 18th, you have to say how. People argued then. In print. And then the arguments went out all over the place. I Swear.

Third, the Founders and the first generations that followed them had their own contests over free speech, all kinds of them, and they turned on the same premise that we’re now fighting over — which is to say that it’s not really some stunning new tactical pivot to say that people who disagree with you are liars who are misleading people. All of the people who are saying that the past was totally different, so now we have to stop people from speaking openly and writing whatever they want, because our experience of existence is nothing like the 1980s (Boot) or the 18th century (Alter):

These people are not arguing in good faith. Their argument is, Everyone needs to be chained to the wall now, ‘cause it’s not like the old days. It’s based on nothing. They’re making it up.

Finally, a side note. I wrote recently about a stupid bill before the California legislature, and noted that the state senator who had introduced the thing was the son of a state legislator. Here’s a story from 2015 about members of Congress who are the children and grandchildren (and so on) of members of Congress. Sample paragraph:

Members who had a parent serve before them include Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., whose father, great-great grandfather and great-great-great-uncle served in the House and Senate before him. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, D-Mass., is the son of former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II and the grandson of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. In the Senate, Lisa Murkowski was appointed to succeed her father Frank Murkowski — by the man himself when he was elected Alaska’s governor.  

And so, of course, Time magazine’s national political correspondent Charlotte Alter is the daughter of the national political journalist Jonathan Alter.

Interesting social structure we’re building here: I am a blacksmith, like my father and his father before him, and all of their fathers, to time immemorial! (And I am Alter, Maker of Hot Takes….) We inherit professions like duchies. Your status is that of your lineage, apparently.

Anyway, she went to Harvard, and she writes a lot about social justice and equity.

The 21st century cannot be satirized.