Written by Otaku Apologist
I want to be transparent with our readership, and to make a point. The reality is that free speech is an illusion.
The rule of all transactional relationships is that you do not criticize the people whose money you’re taking. While Hentaireviews is a review site, I have stated in the past we do not engage in journalism. We simply don’t have the means to be financially independent of our advertisers, almost all of whom are practically monopolies in their niches.
Every business exists in the safe cross-section of the self-interests of governments and companies. Should you speak truths that actually threaten the revenue streams of these governments and companies, you’ll quickly find yourself out of business. Journalism as a business is practically impossible with an advertiser-based model. In fact, investigative journalism in developed western nations that so pompously tout their commitment to human rights and personal freedoms, will get you slandered, cut off, jailed or killed.
We’ve criticized the products of the companies in this industry for three years now. Usually there’s been no backlash, but there have been incidents. Even small companies whose new product launches have been terrible, quickly stop dealing with us when their fuck-ups are exposed. If our content seems lame at times, it’s because we’re playing politics like everyone else.
There’s a lot of criticism of Twitter and Facebook these days, as these companies have started censoring their users. The companies have grown so big, they have to play by the rules of the governments of every country they operate in. If you want to do business in China, you install Chinese censorship tools on your platform. If your stock is owned by Saudi-Arabian dictators, you censor Saudi-Arabian dissidents.
The more socially connected you become, the less freedom you have. You live with increasing limits to your self-expression. You protect the secrets and egos of those who pay you. You self-censor to protect your public image. Powerful men can’t be wearing quirky hats in public. As I have stated my observation, the true nature of the dark side is boredom.
Governments and companies are not the only ones setting limits to what you can and cannot say. Customers have their biases and cultural sensibilities. The larger your customer base, the fewer things you can say without causing feelings to be hurt. You can only have freedom in a cultural environment that values freedom over feelings. The more diversity, the smaller our common comfort zone. If freedom is not our highest value, we have to create a common comfort zone where everyone’s feelings are protected, with heavy censorship.
Whenever someone makes an argument against free speech, they forget the most crucial aspect of free speech: It doesn’t exist.
2 comments
Hey OtakuApologist, I’ve read your piece involving Julian Assange awhile ago and this recent one about free speech. I have to say I didn’t expect to find a good read well looking for hentai games, and I really wanted to comment on the two stories with my perspective. I might still be unwise to the way of the world, but I still hold out a lot of hope for freedom of speech in particular.
It’s a open secret that nobody but the powerful are really as free as we are lead to believe, but I think it’s gotten far better in the past few decades not worse. If you want an example of cucked freedom of speech look at Iran Air Flight 655(1988). ALL and I mean ALL of U.S. media was criticized by Robert Entman of George Washington University for playing down the United States actions, especially when compared to the reporting on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 five years earlier. Entman even showed polling that proved that the unbalanced coverage swayed public opinion against the Soviet Union and Iran.
Well it’s true that print media and sites like yours have been crippled in recent years, we have experienced a enlightenment of personal freedom of speech due to the rise of the cell phone camera. Challenging authority these days is often as simple as hitting record, then upload. Now that doesn’t replace investigative journalism, but the extent to witch we ever really had that is debatable.
Are things looking up for freedom… well I don’t know. The world is complicated and the future uncertain. I am also defiantly too young and too naive to be able to tell which way the wind is blowing, but I’ll be on that hopeium until someone disappears me.
Sincerely an optimistic Canadian. (Also the email and name are throwaways sorry I hope you don’t mind to much.)
Many things are better than ever, and getting worse quickly, and we could lose everything very quickly, or / and become a space age civilization of immortals. The global economy is slated to crash and burn, while our technology is enabling the greatest growth period in human history. It’s maddening, because you cannot actually know if things are good of bad, because they are both at the same time.