"Of course freedom of reach is freedom of speech."
From an originalist perspective, it's really not. In the founding era, without real-time communication over distance, actual speeches - standing up at a meeting or on a street-corner and talking to all those within the sound of your voice - was one of the major modes of organization and …
"Of course freedom of reach is freedom of speech."
From an originalist perspective, it's really not. In the founding era, without real-time communication over distance, actual speeches - standing up at a meeting or on a street-corner and talking to all those within the sound of your voice - was one of the major modes of organization and proselytization.
By contrast, there were only something like 50 printing presses in the colonies in 1775, and while the presses and their owners were made free by the Constitution to print what they wanted without fear of government imposition, they very much did not grant the public the right to common access of printing services. (Interestingly, no major historical work, to my knowledge, has been done on the ideology of printers as a class in revolutionary America, or whether any publication bias may have resulted).
Unfortunately, modern communications technology has collapsed the two categories - now the only way people meaningfully communicate is via distributed micro-presses (by analogy), which still remain in consolidated ownership. The conflict in visions over how to handle social media is really caused by that change in the scope of relevant political discussion and organization.
I think this really needs a deeper exposition. My basic impression of AGM's thesis as connected with my rather loose knowledge of early post-Revolutionary US:
> it’s pretty clear what conditions our democracy was born in: the most vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and often violent tumult of the Founders’ era, which makes modern Twitter look like a Mormon picnic by comparison.
is that his take is basically correct. But I'd love to read more in-depth academic texts regarding of that 1780-1812 timeframe of how politics happened locally->nationally in the US.....
"Of course freedom of reach is freedom of speech."
From an originalist perspective, it's really not. In the founding era, without real-time communication over distance, actual speeches - standing up at a meeting or on a street-corner and talking to all those within the sound of your voice - was one of the major modes of organization and proselytization.
By contrast, there were only something like 50 printing presses in the colonies in 1775, and while the presses and their owners were made free by the Constitution to print what they wanted without fear of government imposition, they very much did not grant the public the right to common access of printing services. (Interestingly, no major historical work, to my knowledge, has been done on the ideology of printers as a class in revolutionary America, or whether any publication bias may have resulted).
Unfortunately, modern communications technology has collapsed the two categories - now the only way people meaningfully communicate is via distributed micro-presses (by analogy), which still remain in consolidated ownership. The conflict in visions over how to handle social media is really caused by that change in the scope of relevant political discussion and organization.
I think this really needs a deeper exposition. My basic impression of AGM's thesis as connected with my rather loose knowledge of early post-Revolutionary US:
> it’s pretty clear what conditions our democracy was born in: the most vicious, ribald, scabrous, offensive, and often violent tumult of the Founders’ era, which makes modern Twitter look like a Mormon picnic by comparison.
is that his take is basically correct. But I'd love to read more in-depth academic texts regarding of that 1780-1812 timeframe of how politics happened locally->nationally in the US.....
I found this book really illuminating (and amusing):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCFST7W/