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There is only 1 purpose of attacking free speech - to later attack other rights
Its happened over and over in history, including why USA was created.
In general the right to free speech always has and always will mean the right to communicate to others who want to receive those communications, without permission of anyone else.
These days, there are many kinds of communication, and free speech applies to them differently.
On the Internet, if you use advanced enough software, nobody can force you to hear/read what anyone says, and communications can be automatically organized and searched. There is practically infinite space. You don't have the right to get extremely off topic in a forum thread, but you do have the right to put up your own forum where you make the rules. If you don't like someone in a chatroom, you can click Ignore.
Bitcoin proved that money can be just a number on our screens that we send to eachother, an Internet calculator that only does plus and minus. Numbers are part of communication since we say them to eachother. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are speech, just another way of organizing society through communication of symbols.
Free speech through the mouth means something different, since you don't have the right to follow someone and keep saying things to them they don't want to hear.
Money is communication. Debt is censoring. We have the right not to be in debt unless we first agree to be in debt. The "national debt" of USA is censoring that none of us agreed to. The agreements of one generation do not transfer to the next, which is supported by the idea of legal contracts. The obligation to use any specific money system is censoring all other money systems.
Votes are a kind of communication. They're similar to money except with more restrictions on how they can be used and who can use them. The obligation to use any specific voting system to organize society is censoring all other voting systems, and there are many kinds we want to try. There are already many kinds of voting on the Internet for less important things than elections.
Laws are a kind of communication, obviously since they're made of words. A contract is a law that a group of people agrees on. What we normally call a law is a contract between a much larger group of people who agree on it through democracy. Don't forget that all laws depend on democracy, and we elect leaders only because its a convenient way to implement democracy.
Without free speech and the technology to speak it over long distances as we network our ideas together, we have no way to talk about the global patterns of events that those with political and corporate power organize, so it leads to control by a small group of people instead of control by democracy.
Old legal documents like USA's Constitution were written before we learned about all these new possibilities of organizing society, and those legal documents were never intended to stop us from exploring new things they hadn't thought of. These new kinds of communication will evolve together, like http://wikipedia.org is a form of democracy and communication.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/a-technological-renaissance-peer-to-peer-non-internet-ip-walkie-talkie-nets
Since there is only 1 purpose of taking our freedom of speech, even if its only on a few subjects they don't want us to talk about (usually what we need to talk about the most), and that purpose is to weaken our ability to defend our other rights while those rights are attacked, it is logical to draw the line at "we have the right to free speech and therefore the right to build systems where we can speak freely without government controls hooked into those systems".
This is the line no government is allowed to cross, and the line is being defended by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_networks in some countries where communications infrastructure was shut down. People rebuilt their ability to communicate. We must continue peacefully defending everyones' right to free speech.
In general the right to free speech always has and always will mean the right to communicate to others who want to receive those communications, without permission of anyone else.
These days, there are many kinds of communication, and free speech applies to them differently.
On the Internet, if you use advanced enough software, nobody can force you to hear/read what anyone says, and communications can be automatically organized and searched. There is practically infinite space. You don't have the right to get extremely off topic in a forum thread, but you do have the right to put up your own forum where you make the rules. If you don't like someone in a chatroom, you can click Ignore.
Bitcoin proved that money can be just a number on our screens that we send to eachother, an Internet calculator that only does plus and minus. Numbers are part of communication since we say them to eachother. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are speech, just another way of organizing society through communication of symbols.
Free speech through the mouth means something different, since you don't have the right to follow someone and keep saying things to them they don't want to hear.
Money is communication. Debt is censoring. We have the right not to be in debt unless we first agree to be in debt. The "national debt" of USA is censoring that none of us agreed to. The agreements of one generation do not transfer to the next, which is supported by the idea of legal contracts. The obligation to use any specific money system is censoring all other money systems.
Votes are a kind of communication. They're similar to money except with more restrictions on how they can be used and who can use them. The obligation to use any specific voting system to organize society is censoring all other voting systems, and there are many kinds we want to try. There are already many kinds of voting on the Internet for less important things than elections.
Laws are a kind of communication, obviously since they're made of words. A contract is a law that a group of people agrees on. What we normally call a law is a contract between a much larger group of people who agree on it through democracy. Don't forget that all laws depend on democracy, and we elect leaders only because its a convenient way to implement democracy.
Without free speech and the technology to speak it over long distances as we network our ideas together, we have no way to talk about the global patterns of events that those with political and corporate power organize, so it leads to control by a small group of people instead of control by democracy.
Old legal documents like USA's Constitution were written before we learned about all these new possibilities of organizing society, and those legal documents were never intended to stop us from exploring new things they hadn't thought of. These new kinds of communication will evolve together, like http://wikipedia.org is a form of democracy and communication.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/a-technological-renaissance-peer-to-peer-non-internet-ip-walkie-talkie-nets
Since there is only 1 purpose of taking our freedom of speech, even if its only on a few subjects they don't want us to talk about (usually what we need to talk about the most), and that purpose is to weaken our ability to defend our other rights while those rights are attacked, it is logical to draw the line at "we have the right to free speech and therefore the right to build systems where we can speak freely without government controls hooked into those systems".
This is the line no government is allowed to cross, and the line is being defended by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_networks in some countries where communications infrastructure was shut down. People rebuilt their ability to communicate. We must continue peacefully defending everyones' right to free speech.
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