A friend pointed me at the Today Programme (start at 2h24m19s)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0011cg5

…wherein Jon Ronson spends several minutes arguing that more people, with more distinct voices and life experiences, should spend more time talking to and with each other, and to more diverse audiences, without the threats of (e.g.) “deplatforming” … and then somehow swings around (2:29:23) and attempts to walk a line between (to paraphrase) “deplatforming is bad” and (to again paraphrase) “speech causes actual harms and only ‘free-speech libertarians’ might disagree”.

At least he does acknowledge that there’s a “slippery slope” at play, and perhaps the programme editor is to blame – it sounds a bit cut-up; also Jon seems more optimistic than I regarding people having more nuanced debate about “pile-ons” nowadays’ perhaps he’s not encountered much of Nadine Dorries recent opinions.

I’ll be listening — and I half-expect a book will come out, at some point — but I am not greatly heartened by the last bit of the interview (2:31:00) where — again — anyone on the internet in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, anyone who at that time sought to enable people to communicate were and are somehow automatically “libertarian engineering tech-utopians who just wanted machines to flourish the way that a machine might, and that’s their utopia we’ve all been living-in, ever since, where fake news, abuse, can just, can just flourish because the machines say that that’s what should happen; and also realising that it’s profitable, because people stay online longer when they’re screaming at each other”.

I am one of these people, and this is a gross calumny against a generation of geeks and nerds who did and do want people to have better abilities to communicate: more lucidly, more freely, more quickly, richly and privately. To express more than words can say, at the tap of a button and the speed of light. There’s an inevitable cost to our being able to do this — that the cost is inevitable is proven (if by no other means) by the ability of Douglas Adams to predict and satirise it in 1978.

Yes, better communication has a social price, but it is still, and always was, worth it.