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| Mihir Sharma: Sense and censorship | | The internet is the last hope for a break-out from the ?tolerance trap? in which this country has unhappily found itself |
| Mihir Sharma / Jan 21, 2012, 00:05 IST |
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Governments in liberal democracies must suffer constant, agonising pangs of China-envy. The People’s Republic has no pesky voters, no truculent opposition, and its political transitions are done the good, orderly old-fashioned way — scheduled and settled years in advance. Finally, a year after the Arab world exploded in anger online, they’ve woken up to the fact that there’s an ungoverned internet out there. And they read about China’s Great Firewall, of sweatshops full of censors, and they think: “Now that’s how things should be done.” Citizens use the internet; citizens are answerable to you, their beneficent government; ergo the internet should dashed well be answerable to you.
How else can we explain the events of the past week? This was the week when Wikipedia interrupted its users’ eager research/plagiarism with a mourning-black screen bearing a warning that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being considered by American legislators would cause the end of the web-civilisation as we know it. This was the week when the Delhi High Court continued to examine whether 21 social networking sites were “promoting enmity between classes” and “insulting religion or religious belief”. The presiding judge helpfully name-checked China’s mythical ability to control what its citizens see online, in that hopeful, misty-eyed way in which people in authority here talk about the administrative miracles being performed to our north.
The online issues major liberal democracies have chosen to deal with correspond neatly with stereotypes about the pet obsessions of each state. Thus, India panicked that somewhere, someone was saying something that might perturb the nice gentlemen of Deoband and Nashik — or was being rude about people named Gandhi. Meanwhile, over in the UK, attempts continue to ensure that the strict libel and defamation laws that have made its legal system a bit of a laughing-stock (you can’t call homoeopaths frauds, for example) are properly extended to the internet’s dark, dank back-alleys. And America’s Congress is showing its traditional concern for corporate profits. Presumably Disney’s shareholders lose a bit of value every time someone uploads an image of a sulky dwarf from Snow White to the “Ron Paul” article on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s protest certainly focused attention on the problem. Pointless arguments about pop culture became impossible to resolve; students desperately wrote to their professors requesting extensions on research papers; and the agents of 30ish stars no doubt worked feverishly to get their clients contracts during the short window in which producers couldn’t look up their ages.
Yet those concerned about the internet’s innate anarchy would do worse than to look at the online encyclopaedia. It started with only two rules: “don’t be awful” (to put it politely), and “ignore all rules”. Technically, that’s still its constitution, but now it has a massive amateur bureaucracy, bewildering case law for content disputes and endless guidelines and red tape. Any decision takes ages and pages of closely-spaced text. The page discussing the SOPA protest has over 1,00,000 words on it — even though that resolution was uncharacteristically quick, in about 24 hours.
The internet, like the city you live in, has areas that are well-policed by users themselves, and areas that are not. Because of its decentralised nature, there’s no way that any government, even China’s, actually manages to control it. China’s online czars’ true brilliance is not that they manage, somehow, to black out all anti-Party viewpoints. That’s beyond even them. It is that they ensure that pro-Party views manage to drown them out through a clever combination of fixing search results and pushing Party shills into every major debate.
Listen to Beijing, legislators, judges and bureaucrats of the world: pre-screening of viewpoints by a central authority doesn’t work. The US Congress cannot force YouTube to examine every video of the thousands uploaded to the site every minute for copyright violations. The Indian government cannot push Google and Facebook into ensuring that every visitor to their websites is polite about religion.
Nor should it try. The truth is that India’s public debate about religion is stultifyingly polite. We mistake politeness for tolerance. Taking offence is a fundamental right. (And if not, I look forward to the UPA passing the Right to Offence Act.) The powerful and iconic are protected from attack by an exaggerated culture of respect — but one that breaks down the moment people log in, anonymously.
Frankly, there are parts of the internet that should cause the decent to despair. The average comments thread on most Indian websites is a vile stew of conspiracy theories, viciousness about the ideas, people and classes in power, and – worst of all, perhaps – truly abysmal grammar and spelling. Even so, the internet is the last hope for a break-out from the “tolerance trap” in which this country has unhappily found itself — in which a community’s status is determined by how rapidly the state bends its principles to satisfy every whim of its most illiberal fringe.
As I write this, I am surrounded by crowds at the Jaipur Literary Festival talking of one thing only: Salman Rushdie, and how he hasn’t been able to show up here, as is his and our right. Expanding the borders of rebellion against the culture of tolerance seems particularly important right now. Kapil Sibal, also here, might worry less, as telecom minister, about “intolerance” from Indians online — and a bit more, as HRD minister, about teaching them to construct a coherent argument and spell properly.
The powers that be cannot pre-screen online commentary themselves. They cannot force users into self-censorship. They can, at most, try to set up online police states that will compete to set records for ineffectuality. India’s effort to enforce politeness online will necessarily fail. As it should.
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