There’s an interesting story just come my way via Twitter. It lists the kinds of sites now being blocked – or about to be blocked – by British Internet service providers (ISPs). From sites which inform children about abuse and how to stop it to newspapers which talk about LGBT rights and how to defend them. You can read the story here. It links to a recently jump-started petition over at change.org which says things like this, amongst other pretty unhappy stuff:
Under their new pornography filters that are currently being phased in, many websites that have nothing to do with porn are being blocked. Such as many LGBT+ sites, such as LGBT Labour, LGBTory and LGBT LD. Blocking these websites will have an negative consequence, in making children and teenagers more aware of their sexuality. Blocking them access to websites that could give them advice, support and help would again, not make them more safe. It would make them less safe. Even using a homophobic tone by BT in giving parents the option to block “Gay and Lesbian lifestyles”
BT have gone even further with their blocking plans, by giving parents the option to block Sex Education websites, domestic violence support websites and even support for issues such as Self-Harming.
For children, having these websites blocked could make them isolated and blocked any help or advice they could go too which they wouldn’t want to, quite rightly, make their parents aware and therefore would be detrimental to their safety, let alone making them more safe. Added to the fact, these websites that help children have nothing to do with porn
There’s even attempts to block Political Parties and Newspapers. Again, how is this linked to porn? How will this make them more safe? It won’t. [...]
So one of my Twitter friends then commented thus:
@_Lilykins The problem is if they don’t do it then Cameron has threatened making it law.
But whilst I understand what Mark is trying to say, I would personally suggest that this is precisely what we should ask of our government. If it believes the nation asks of it an Internet censorship to such a terrifying degree, we need to demand of it a desire to take ownership on behalf of us all. At the moment, via ISPs and other private communications corporations, the government – allegedly on behalf of us all (or so it would like to argue, anyway) – is outsourcing the legislative and parliamentary process to the black boxes of the private sector. In effect, by not driving censorship legislation through the Commons and the Lords, and instead relying on probably unwilling transnationals and homegrown companies alike to do their dirty work in a most ad hoc way, Cameron & Co are avoiding all parliamentary debate: in essence, they are carrying out the ultimate privatisation of all – that of Parliament itself.
Now whilst I agree with much of what the change.org petition linked to above says, I think it’s the wrong petition. Instead, we should really be demanding that our government puts its legislation where its (big) mouth is. Only then can we begin to fight against such pernicious developments as these intangible, randomised and unpredictable Internet filters – filters which are clearly making of a once-free network a terribly gut-wrenching joke.
And as governments both at home and abroad make it evermore difficult to conduct the business of responsible citizenship on anything but this conduit for growing obfuscation, we must ask ourselves if the time hasn’t arrived to propose the creation of a completely new network, able to learn a little more sagely from the lessons of the old. It would help, of course, if responsibility, wisdom, a certain degree of human and societal kindness, maybe even a love of a kind, might be hard-wired into any parallel or substituting network which could follow the current web – a network, in fact, that would be designed from the ground up to help sustain inevitably the freedom of expression all of us should cherish.
It’s probably too big a call, mind. As security agencies far and wide spy on politicians of friendly countries just as much as on the unfriendly, on charities of an entirely benign nature just as much as on the malignant, and on people who rightly deserve the epithet of the dangerous even as some of the dangerous now appear to be doing the spying, so it would seem that between the rock of advertisers’ interests in mining our data and the hard place of governments who are obsessed with protecting our freedoms through methods that make them impossible to enjoy, there is little we can do about it, any more, but remind ourselves of far better times.
I have a couple of Twitter acquaintances whose tweets I read quite often – and with considerable interest. They are unremitting souls – they believe in nothing and no one; in no party and in no ideology. They only treasure the first-hand accounts of those who live, breathe and work at latterday coalfaces: the women who find themselves in the cross-hairs of Tory/Lib Dem policies; the disabled and sick who find themselves at the mercy of real and self-evident government cruelty; the unemployed and working-poor who find themselves being ground down to such an extent that the freshly-dug graves of 21st century contractual relationships (“jobs” to you and me) verily beckon them to jump in and die.
But these acquaintances of mine, so burnished in their precise visions, are not people I can follow into such deep wells of nihilism. Whilst it’s clear that the savage, the evil even, the individuals we might call the monetisers of the century, currently have the upper hand over the rest of us, there is still a time and place to recover humanity’s innate sense and sensibility. We do need a massive shift in the way we perceive the frame, though. And that frame needs to change for us all simultaneously.
I would like to think we find ourselves in the antechamber of the fall of Communism. Socialism for the rich has continued Communism’s path – in a sense Communism never fell but simply wormed its way into large transnationals, post Soviet Union. If we can see the pain and puzzlement, the widespread bewilderment of souls across the globe, as symptoms of such a slowly approaching medium-term fall, perhaps we can understand better when the Camerons of this world try and prevent our freedom of speech through extra-parliamentary actions – actions which clearly aim to subvert the few remaining powers and legitimacies of representative democracies.
For Thatcher and Cameron are nowhere near the same. Thatcher privatised in opposition to corporatist states. That, I sense at least, was the most fundamental driver of her time. Thatcher was a rebel. Thatcher had a cause.
Cameron, however (Cameron and the whole of his sorry lot), is a man without a cause; a man without a driver; the Brezhnev of our time. Yes. Maybe his advocates will ultimately claim him as a man of stature (on the other hand, Brezhnev is judged by some to be the most popular Soviet leader of all). But, in truth, the public-sector corporatist states which Thatcher coherently despised have been replaced by the private-sector conglomerates of Communism’s 21st century resurgence … and all at the hands of an all-too-malleable Cameronism.
So it’s hardly surprising it should be Cameron who effectively “makes law” through such conglomerates.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if cracking down on freedom of expression through forces external to Parliament will end up in the history books as Cameronism’s lasting legacy to Western democracy.
We shouldn’t stand for it, though. If Cameron wants repression, he should legislate for it. Not get the business sectors in question to do the dirty work for him.
Only by demanding the former will we be able to show people his true colours.
As blood-red a historically political inclination as the brutish hammer and sickle ever presided over.
