[…] when we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them—I want to stress that; all of them—invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information. This makes sense when we realize that (A) preventing someone from writing/saying/releasing something in the first place is the only way to 100% wipe out its presence, and (B) encouraging self-censorship is, dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do.
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A great question to get at this is: Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail?
If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox. Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists. The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship—self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power.
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Let’s look at another example closer to the present than the Inquisition: comic book censorship in the 20th century. […] Grocery stores and most comics shops then stopped shelving comics that didn’t undergo its censorship, bankrupting publishers and hurting authors and artists. Now, fast forward to the 60s and 70s, when the US Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and again Congress could take no direct action against it, But publishers of comics centering Black heroes such as Black Panther suddenly found that the Comics Code Authority censorship process was being much more picky about their Black characters than their White characters, declaring things even as mild as a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut as “too graphic” since it “could be mistaken for blood.” This resulted in grueling extra work and perennial delays for such titles, pressuring comics companies to depict fewer Black heroes.
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When we hear self-censorship discussed in the media, these days it is most often brought up when discussing cultural pressures or other non-state action […] this rhetoric advances the illusion that self-censorship is primarily a civilian phenomenon caused by public attitudes and individual or community actors, making it easier to disguise how often it is, in fact, a direct and intentional result of government or other large-scale organized action.
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But that sense of desperation and lack of manpower is only visible in the internal presentation of such regimes, carefully concealed from public view. It is in the external propaganda of such regimes that they present themselves as always on top of things, always everywhere, always watching […] This illusion of infinite resources itself is one of the goals of such regimes, making people more afraid, and less willing to defy. It is about projecting power, and we must not fall for it as we evaluate the actions of such regimes asking “Why did they do A not B?” If we believe they have infinite resources, we will always imagine some strategic mastermind plan behind it, and fear that, if we don’t see the reason, there must be something big and scary underway that we don’t know about. If we remember that Nineteen Eighty-Four is fiction, its infinite resources impossible, that these organizations all need to conserve resources, many more of their tactics become transparent.
From the blog post:
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