Technology and Censorship
The CYFSWatch affair and the Ministry of Social Development’s flailing around trying to decide how to deal with the threat of people expressing themselves with a new technology (and the Prime Minister’s frothing last year about “right-wing bloggers”) brings to mind an earlier time when authorities grappled with a new technology in a similarly ham-fisted manner.
Rodney A. Smolla describes what happened in his book Free Speech in an Open Society (ch.11):
Censorship was logistically simple for the Roman censors and Church until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450. Handwritten books were laboriously produced by a small number of persons under the strict control of authority; there was no opportunity for the mass distribution of printed material challenging the orthodoxy.
It is no accident that shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press, official authorities invented the first censorship bureau. In 1485, only thirty-five years after Gutenberg made mass dissemination of the written word a technological possibility, the archbishop of Mainz - the city where Gutenberg lived - created an office of the censor. The precedent took hold.
In 1493 the Venice Inquisition issued the first list of banned books; in 1559 the Church established the Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Banned Books, binding on Roman Catholics (and thus virtually the entire population of Europe). The Index was administered by the Office of the Inquisition, which continued to operate in France as late as 1774 and in Spain as late as 1834. (Today there is no Inquisition, but there is still an Index, though the Church now regards it as advisory only.)
Governments around the world reacted similarly to Gutenberg’s new technology. Censorship was instituted in Germany in 1529. The British monarch in 1559 chartered the Stationers’ Company and limited the right to print to the Stationers’ Guild, thereby hoping to check seditious and heretical speech. A series of British licensing laws were passed on the Stationers’ model, provoking John Milton to write his famous tract on free expression, the Areopagitica.
Governments and the Church burned books and heretics alike, but to no avail. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment followed. Smolla continues:
It is futile and foolish to enact our fears into law; law cannot and should not attempt to hold back the enormous tides of technical creativity that are altering the world around us. But we are challenged to manage these changes; to take into account how technologies alter the way in which we communicate, and thus necessarily affect our rules of freedom of speech; to understand how technologies may alter even the relationship of the individual to the state, and thus affect our thinking about how to ensure basic protection for civil liberties.
To repeat a Karl Marx quote I was reminded of today: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. So, come on, just try and stop this new technology. I’ll be watching. And laughing.
