On Speech
Preface
From March to about the beginning of August, I wrote a lot of notes I felt I couldn’t really post. They were mostly brief notes quickly jotted down, sometimes not even full sentences. A lot of them are a lot angrier than I am now, and I don’t stand by all of them any more. I also contradict myself at various points, because I wrote these at various points in time.
People in this country live in parallel worlds. One divide is between those who can speak freely, with no consequences besides social ones, and those who risk having to leave the country forever if they say the wrong thing. Though my risk was always relatively slight, going from the latter category to the former feels like it has changed everything. And so, the person who edits and compiles these notes is not the person who has written them. This new, freer person has the power to censor the first one. So while I’ve tried to keep this post coherent and on-topic, I’ve tried to keep it reflective of how I felt a few months ago, to be fair to the previous version of me. I also tried to write about my thoughts at the time that I didn’t think to write down, but which are still important to understand all of it. I also split it into two sections, one that tells more of a coherent story than the other.
Also, I am not looking for, or interested in, expressions of sympathy. I want to instead illustrate how it becomes difficult to understand the world when we are not all equally free to speak. I want to try and help you understand what becomes impossible for you to know - what becomes impossible for me to know as well.
The Post
Some Background#
I had these notes on a file on my phone, and then they started searching people’s phones at the border. Even the mildest instances of criticizing or parodying the government had gotten people turned away. It was hard to tell what was happening, or how often, and so I took these notes off my phone. I went through all my notes, all my saved images. I was afraid to search for how to delete things for real, because they maybe can get my search history. So I downloaded files until my storage was full and deleted them. I don’t know if that was enough. In the end it didn’t matter because I never have to let them search my phone any more.
I avoided using certain words on social media. I imagined how an AI might mis-summarize my posts. If Palantir were scraping our posts, when would they do it? Probably at midnight, maybe Pacific time, mahybe Eastern time. I posted things that only obliquely hinted at my real feelings and set a timer on my phone to delete them.
People online with nothing to comply with, who had never been asked to comply, said that nobody should comply in advance.
I posted stuff here and there mostly for my own benefit, without the expectation of being understood. With the right audience you can say something that means one thing to them and something else to everyone listening. You can come at certain topics from an indirect angle. The Internet at large is not such an audience. None of you guys would ever survive under a censorship regime.
Other Places#
Years ago, a friend from a country without freedom of speech told me that plenty of university students get into the idea of democracy, but usually they grow out of it. It becomes time to put away the silly politics of college students and become serious and respectable and employed. Just like here.
Someone else said to me, is democracy really so great with what is happening to this country? Do things actually end up any better? Democracy gave you Trump, after all.
A friend from a different country told me that there it’s kind of like a democracy and kind of not. You can vote but they decide who you can vote for. They said they’d had their own Trump but eventually they had someone else. They said they weren’t worried, it was fine as long as you kept your head down and waited for it to pass, it’s bad for some people of course but most people are fine.
You can get used to anything in time.
They all said a lot of other things and here I am putting words in their mouth by selecting certain words they once said to make a point. These words do not represent them. These were all thoughtful people who were well educated. Some were brave and some were cautious. All of us, for good or for bad, mostly exist in a world outside of our control.
You might read a book or watch a movie and imagine yourself as part of some rag-tag bunch of heroes saving the day. There is an entire industry of putting words in the mouth of people in this situation. Our entire understanding of a world without free speech is based on fantasy.
And I myself only ever heard from a handful of people from these countries, and not a representative one. Even so, I am very lucky to have had such conversations, to have lived in such a world which may never come again.
On Community#
Being in community with other people is an illusion, because our experiences are completely incomprehensible to each other.
I think you can’t truly understand anything you haven’t experienced. I think that human language is too limited to accurately convey another person’s experience, and few people, myself included, have the skill to do so. And so the notion that others could understand you becomes objectionable, a replacement of your experiences with theirs.
I often felt like we were all sitting on islands in the darkness, trying to shout out into the fog, but we cannot see each other at all. The sun is setting and the other islands are growing dimmer. And worse than the growing darkness is an emptiness you cannot see, a void your eyes slide over, which you don’t even know is missing, which is growing and will swallow the world.
On Abstractions#
I wrote several paragraphs on a private slack, and someone replied with nothing but “I think maybe you’re talking about solidarity”. No, what I am saying is the words I have written. But the words I have written become incomprehensible unless I can apply them to a well understood abstraction.
You cannot see the trees for the forest. You draw a big green blob on a map and fail to see the way the veins on the leaf branch, the ant crawls through a crack in the bark, the blade of grass strains for the sunlight under a million tiny interwoven leaves in one single shrub and the dew lies on the spiderweb across it a feather lies underneath. You cannot even talk about these things without saying “yeah it’s just a forest”. The world is dead to you.
Abstractions are a mirror we use to avoid looking at a reality so ugly it would turn us to stone. You cannot understand seven billion people, everyone as complex as you. Your brain would explode if you understood they were real. You can read a book which purports to explain it all but you know nothing, not really.
On History#
I find myself repeatedly explaining to people that Japantown in SF is old, not 20 or 30 years old, not dating back to urban renewal or gentrification, but about a century old, and that it used to be much bigger, before the people there were all forced into camps. These things are written everywhere and yet people don’t know them, although they plan to start erasing that history soon.
Almost all books that have been written more than a few hundred years ago are gone, and most things that have happened or been known have never been written down. The books that were written were written by an elite few in many cases, and those that remain have passed through generations of religious and political censorship. Take a passing interest in history and soon you will discover that the things that are not known, that cannot be known, dwarf the history that we know.
The things that are happening today will soon be forgotten.
On Organizing and Mutual Aid#
Exile is where you are permanently pulled out of your community. There is no way to mutual-aid yourself out of that. It silences people and erases their memories from history completely. Community is fragile and easily destroyed.
When people talk about organizing it is always within the protective structure of the rules. “They can’t make you unlock your phone with a password. Don’t talk to them without a lawyer. It’s not illegal to have meetings or to post things online.” People cannot imagine a world where the bottom falls out.
On Figuring Out If You’re Being Reasonable#
There’s this thing called dead reckoning, where you try and find your way with just a starting point and knowing your direction and speed and so on. Without a source of truth, the further you go, the more errors compound and the more lost you get.
If you can’t calibrate your position, your thoughts get more paranoid, more irrational. Am I being reasonable? Over-dramatic? Though maybe the opposite is true. The ability to post your every thought online makes everything seem normal, pushes everyone into complacency.
Posting, I have realised, is something akin to being the Greek Chorus of the world. That is the trap of speech; you think you’re in the play but you’re just there to narrate while the real people make the decisions.
On Other People’s Points Of View#
What about the others in my situation? Are they afraid too, or are they content? Am I just too opinionated, too angry, too ungrateful?
Some are braver than me, and spoke out anyway. Some I know have more to lose, and thought even the things I did say were reckless. We are all just like a few grains of sand on the beach, with millions more we will never hear from.
It’s impossible to know anything. Maybe you know a few people who speak to you privately; maybe people who make it to the other side have something to say. But those of us who make it to the other side are the least representative.
It is very hard to find the things that don’t exist but should have been there. We are already surrounded by a vast and impenetrable silence which we cannot ever see through. If the silence slowly grows and swallows the world, who will notice?
We’re All Living in America#
My own country, one of the richer and more powerful ones, cannot even help its own citizens detained at the border. The citizens talk big but the government always defers to the US. They are scared of what happens if the US gets angry. People here say that states and borders don’t matter, as though their country doesn’t have all of the guns in the world, all the money in the world.
To be a citizen of America is to be a citizen of the world; the world is made for America. I suppose in the end I am in fact here looking for freedom; it is only through American citizenship that we can become free.