"Freedom of opinion does not exist in America." -ADT

Some people worry that Eben's style of classroom critique suppresses free speech, scares it away. Personally, I disagree. The opportunity cost of free speech in a classroom is that everyone in the room—including the speaker—can't listen to anyone else. A teacher with scarce time ought to judge which of his students' ideas fall below his intellectual standard, and redirect those to a forum where they can be developed, at less cost, to meet that standard.

If Eben believes in open information, and this class is about challenging authority, why is the classroom so much more friendly to authority than to challenges? I might ask Eben, but I have a theory: the professor wants us to absorb his opinions ("listen"), so that we can only critique them later—i.e., after thinking—i.e., intelligently. He reserves the TWiki as our forum for that critique. Eben, I oblige.

The TWiki removes the externality of speaking on listening. Ideas interact here more like J.S. Mill expected them to, more like particles in an ideal gas (i.e. here, when we don't listen, it's because we don't WANT to). It's the best forum for us to hear each other, the safest forum for us to learn from each other, and the LAST asylum for free speech. TWiki has the potential to be our town-hall democracy.

How should we use that potential?

MichaelBrown reminds me [which I deleted because it was responding to an older draft] that Eben gave us a guiding principle: the TWiki helps him "evaluate contributions/participation to a degree." I suppose we might infer from this a second principle, that it is supposed to be some kind of learning tool. That's all we've got. Default to anarchy and the rule of the strongest, unless we all agree to be a democracy. We're reenacting Dr. Zimbardo's prison experiment, and now we get to decide what sort of prisoners we'll be.

I say the prisoners should take over this prison. It's what Eben would do in our position. He didn't include the class rules in the box, but neither does a Ouija Board. They work the same way. And even if I'm wrong, and my made-up rules break his HIDDEN rules, we won't hang separately if we all agree to hang together: we're graded on a curve.

So, join my revolution! We already have a Constitution and we're working on a Bill of Rights.

We must protect free (TWiki) speech.

Once we lose free speech here, our asylum from the classroom, we lose it entirely. Therefore this TWiki should be immune from legitimate in-class suppression. If we could do more good to the TWiki than harm to one speaker by suppressing any in class speech that suppresses TWiki speech, then we should sacrifice that piece of speech for the sake of Free Speech, because the premise of the principle in paragraph 1 is to maximize the BENEFITS of discussion, as a SUM of class and TWiki (is everything a fallacy of distribution, or just me?).

Free Speech is a social not a legal function. I suspect that Kate and Barb are irrepressible enough, but yesterday's class made me fear for the future Kates and Barbs who will speak neither in class nor on the TWiki. Critiques by Authority Figures in their capacity as Authority Figures (okay, okay, I mean Eben) can be as chilling on our posts as the edicts of Public Authorities. Authority Figures can mobilize laughter, which is a kind of public force. And many of us confuse their descriptive statements for prescriptive ones, since that is what humans do. And many of us can't learn to think like lawyers by learning to argue like lawyers, because we who can't yet argue like lawyers will look stupid when we argue with real lawyers.

How would you guys vote on a First Amendment Plus No Prior Restraints (Except for this one [thanks, DanielHarris]), sanctioning speech by Authority Figures that discourages posts on the TWiki by Inferiority Figures? Eben, we haven't passed the rule yet, so you can opine too!

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Jan 2008

Please don't deactivate my account.

-- AndrewGradman - 25 Jan 2008

Your ideas of "free speech" and prior restraint are almost completely at odds with mine. Prohibiting "critiques that deter people from speaking freely," if you could do it, would be a prior restraint. The critiques are not restraint--they're speech. Prior restraint would be Eben's deactivating your account or running your posts through a moderation queue.

Eben's critiques probably /chill/ speech to some degree, but they aren't some distinct sort of "anti-speech"--even if our brains occasionally explode at the collision.

-- DanielHarris - 25 Jan 2008

Andrew and Daniel, In case you’re curious about what someone thinks about this “free speech” issue who has been, according to another observer, “blasted” by Eben, I agree for the most part with Daniel, but would tweak and expand the analysis a little further: I don’t think his critiques are meant as "anti-speech," but I assume he is aware that his critiques lead, as you say, to some of our brains occasionally exploding at the collision. And what is the nature of this collision? I think it is largely his refusal to meet our expectation that teachers respond to our remarks with a modicum of diplomacy, fewer and less intense episodes of histrionics, and more of an exhibition of what is currently termed "emotional intelligence." [Don’t get me wrong on the emotional intelligence part: I don’t think he’s devoid of it, I just think he refuses to show much of it.] In other words, it’s not so much what he says that tends to chill expression, but how he says it. I don't think he can't meet our behavioral expectations, it's just that he refuses to do so. Why? Perhaps to get us to think outside of our little self-imposed boxes, and he knows he can do this more effectively by lobbing his data, observations, and opinions into the classroom arena in this manner. My suggestion (for whatever this is worth): try not to take the theatrics too seriously (or personally), listen to what he says, but think for yourself.

-- BarbPitman - 26 Jan 2008

I'm freaked out that we need a Constitution, Bill of Rights, revolution, etc.

The way this community is using the wiki is really interesting and new to me. I've seen wiki's used in lots of companies (I even implemented MediaWiki? at my last job, woohoo me) and their general purpose is to centrally store facts relevant to the community (a funny example I've seen is a wiki category devoted to providing definitions of nonsensical words that a co-worker notorious for making up her own adjectives commonly used).

-- MakalikaNaholowaa - 26 Jan 2008

• I think this is an extremely important comment. One partial explanation that those who do work often with wikis will of course understand is that there are many people here to whom the experience is new, so they are doing a predictable thing: they are using a new tool in a familiar old way. In this case, they are blogging with it. We will start active refactoring later this week, which will melt most of the blog commentary away very quickly, because on editing we will find there's much repetitive rhetoric and unsupported speculation, which we don't need to retain. A few good points have been made along the way, and they will look all the more impressive when they're not enmeshed in the back-and-forth of commentary as they are now. But you can't learn anything about what we've read, or even about the less controversial and more theoretical portions of the ideas I have wound around the arguments we have read, by reading the wiki. Makalika is not only right that there's been much heartfelt blogging, but also that this has displaced doing the intellectual job one might have thought the wiki was here to help us do. I said the wiki was for active listening, and instead it's turned out to be for arguing with me and worrying about whether I am so retributive towards people who are arguing with me that people might stop arguing with me. We can and will change the direction, working together to use the wiki in a more conventional and collaborative fashion. But I think the best part of Makalika's comment isn't just that she has shown a problem. It's that she's asked us to think about why we have the problem--not only in the sense of determining what it costs us, but also what it helps us to do, and in what therefore its attractiveness consists. And that's a very important question. Because inexperience in using wikis is not by any means the only cause in giving this one--made in this community's image--the character it has.

AndrewGradman wrote on the 26th that he understood and accepted Makalika's conclusion, but that "at some early point [he] internalized the idea that the class is precisely About Questioning Authority," for which purpose it is clear the wiki is very adaptable. In addition, he argued, it is impossible in this class to "distinguish, for certain, the Form from the Content." These seem to me lucid and valuable statements.

Formatted and commented upon, with slight refactoring, by way of conclusion.

-- EbenMoglen - 28 Jan 2008.