Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why is it politically dangerous to censor pornography? It’s politically dangerous to censor pornography because censorship is a very blunt instrument, and we must always imagine how a tool we set up to censor something will be used in the future by bad actors we disagree with. If you create a tool capable of censoring something, it will still exist and still be there later when people want to censor something different. Pornography is usually where major battles over censorship are fought these days because people don’t want to defend it. It’s icky and gross, and a lot of people don’t want it, or do want it but don’t want to publicly say so, don’t want to be associated with it. So, a lot of people are willing to say, “Okay, fine, censor this.” But then you create the apparatus to censor this, and the next stage is someone saying, “Oh, well, this other book — clearly this is basically the same as pornography because it depicts a same-sex couple. Let’s censor that using the same infrastructure you’ve just created.” Almost all censorship isn’t carried out by creating a new institution to do it, but by repurposing an old institution that’s already there. And new things will be censored using old tools so that when talkies came in, people were very anxious that there could suddenly be bad words in movies. All over the place — New Zealand, Australia, the US — new methods were set up for censoring movies to make sure bad words weren’t used. Well, those are the same methods that were then used to censor discussions of communism during the Red Scare and that were used to persecute free-thinking and socialist authors — the same apparatus that got created for the censorship of a bad word. Once we make it, it exists and it’s very hard to dismantle it. So, don’t let the fact that we don’t care about pornography enable people to create tools they will use to censor other things in the future. Do you agree with the common claim — which seems supported by some poll evidence — that American women are less supportive of free speech than American men?…

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