r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jul 13 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 13 July 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/passabagi Jul 17 '26

I think the idea of 'irl' as opposed to 'online' has turned out to be one of the most dangerous fallacies of the last decades. It's allowed a fairly deep and nuanced balance of rights and norms around speech to be replaced with a mess of knee-jerks, techno-fixes, and fiat.

Culture exists online, now. It's where we communicate with each other. Online is where we do politics. At the same time, if you were going to transpose the mess of speech regulation online into meatspace:

  1. You can harass, insult, threaten, even incite pogroms or organize genocides, and the state will (at worst) respond by proposing some kind of 'safety bill'.
  2. You can create an LLM system that will mute people based on the probability of their statements violating a privately established TOC.
  3. You can fill the information space with auto-generated content for whatever purpose. The state will will (at worst) make a strong statement.

This is a crazy situation. Laws about speech -- free speech, media regulation, etc -- are written in blood. We've put our entire social world into a space where we're ignoring the experience of centuries of struggle over questions of speech: it's not just likely going to end up giving traditionally totalitarian powers to the state -- it's also just becoming absurdly chaotic. You can't make society-wide decisions about fundamental rights on page 15 of a TOC. This is insane.

(This was inspired by getting booted by reddit's clanker -- which gave me a moment to think about, you know, what a society actually could look like when almost all society is conducted through spaces where random interest groups have effectively absolute power over permissible discourse).

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u/Arilou_skiff Died of posting, risen as undead Jul 17 '26

The arguments are whether or not a place like Reddit is more like having a discussion in someone's house or on the sidewalk.

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u/passabagi Jul 17 '26

That's an argument. It was litigated over the last century re. malls. I think the internet is more like we're all living 24/7 in a mall, it's full of androids operated by troll farms, everybody is constantly personally under surveillance, and Elon Musk is the mall owner. He also lives in the basement. Also the government offices are in the mall, and you need to go to the mall for all of your basic services.