Posts Tagged ‘Youtube’

presented at the 2009 Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at Lincoln Center. About 10 minutes of it is a minor update (rehash) of An Anthropological Introduction to youtube, but the rest is new. The gathering may have been the highest concentration of amazingly creative and concerned global citizens I have ever been around. Hallway conversations were different than your typical conversations. Instead of lots of people saying, ‘You know, somebody should …’ there were lots of people saying, ‘So I did this, this, and this, and now Im working on doing this, this, and this and we should collaborate …’ In other words, it was a bunch of people blessed with what I once heard Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins call critical optimism. Nobody there was blindly optimistic, thinking technology was going to make everything better. They were all continually trying to figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes. In other words, it was my kind of crowd. Special thanks to Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej for organizing the conference.

Hate speech is basically an impossible concept. All you have to do is turn up your sensitivities and then EVERYTHING counts as hate speech. Due to its subjective nature its essentially unworkable. Islam is very good at getting offended by almost anything, as is scientology. Both are very heavy on trying to classify people who call them on their psychotic beliefs as hate-mongers. Further the recent UN resolution to attempt to criminalize blasphemy is both a step in the wrong direction and is unworkable. However when people are using their free speech to advocate the killing of others, they have broken the law. But what to do when such a minority constitutes a significant portion of the population? Options include education of western values, imprisonment, or segregation. Naturally if they can present a convincing argument in an open forum for changing the law, then thats fair enough, but before you have to acknowledge that you are not allowed to threaten anyone who disagrees with you with death or violence. Finally youtube. C0ctapus got suspended. He helped out with our recent protest against youtube. Apparently no reason was given. I dont remember too much about his videos other than they were of a similar topic (the problems with religion etc) to this channel. He also was a supporter of free speech. Thetaomega had a satire of Fred Phelps taken down: www.youtube.com C0ct0pus is back at: www.youtube.com