Welcome back, fellow conspiracy realist. We've dug through the vaults and we are declassifying one of our classic episodes, The Future of Censorship? What should people be allowed to say?
Online?
Who Buddy?
Who Doggies?
November twenty eighteen feels like another lifetime ago.
That was it kind of was.
We were asking the right questions and we hope that you find some of the exploration here, folks as prescient as we did, or better or worse?
Yeah? Who gets to control what you say and think? Is it a group?
Right?
Is it a company? Is it just an individual? Air?
Yeah?
Yeah? Or somebody commenting?
Right?
Is someone in a comment section? Do they control what you get to say or not? It's so weird, man, let's jump into it.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
They call me Ben, and we are joined with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decat most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
This is an.
Episode though was surprised we hadn't done before.
I'm gonna go ahead and stop you there. We can't continue on that line. Okay, We're gonna have to stop going down that line. So let's just move on with something else.
Okay, understood.
Well, then let's let's jump to the second point and get this out of the way first.
Very very very.
I'm sorry that one is also just oh man, we can't go there either. I'm sorry. They're just telling me. I've got them in my ear and they're telling me we can't.
Okay, well, let me phrase this in a different way way. Let's get this out of the way first. Very very few countries you will visit in the modern day are completely free from censorship.
Okay, we'll let that one stand.
Okay, all right, is that vague enough?
It's still, no kidding, a vast improvement over the days of past civilizations. Though we talk about censorship where we talk around it so often. In our show, Matt earlier, you and I dove into a very dark taiale of current concentration camps and the vast amounts of censorship that the Chinese government is applying to the weaker communities.
Absolutely, we did Unfortunately we had to We talked about that because it's real and it's something that needs to be shared at least. But in this case we're just we're talking about thought control. Really, that's what this is, this whole subject.
Yeah, ultimately this is an episode on thought control. How does it work, What if anything, can you do to prevent it? And how is it evolving in the modern day. We're talking about censorship, and the first thing that we have to explore when we talk about censorship, this word that we all hear thrown around so often, is how it is defined. What do we mean when we say censorship.
Generally it's the suppression or in many cases, the complete prohibition of books, art, films, news, speech itself, works of art that depict certain things, all of these things that could be considered, for one reason or another, obscene to a ruling group, something that's seen as politically unacceptable or in some way a threat to the status quo, or like anything basically having to do with the people who are in.
Power, right or a threat to security, or sure a threat to social, spiritual, cultural norms. And right now there are several broad category worries of what we call censorship The first one, historically speaking, is moral censorship, and right now, this is one of the most universally accepted forms of censoring things, especially regarding stuff that most of the world can get on board with, like the censorship of certain types of illegal pornography.
Absolutely, or the censorship of things like beheading videos, certain forms of violence depicted.
Not everyone agrees on that one agreed.
Not everyone agrees is terrible, but true.
But it's generally generally something that's done. There are also types of moral censorship just through social media right now, just by enough people talking and pointing out things that would be considered to be morally apprehensive.
You're absolutely right.
And we went to pornography first because it's a hot button issue and it's banned in a lot of countries. But imagine that you are, say, traveling to certain Middle Eastern countries, and in your possession you have the wrong kind of Islamic text or the wrong kind of Judeo Christian text, and additionally, you have something kind of lewde like a playboy magazine, because that's apparently you're reading material when you fly across the ocean, playboys and religious works.
To be fair, it was a vintage, vintage Playboy magazine, and it had the old article in there's an interview with Michael Jackson. So I thought it was worth it.
Okay, yeah, you thought it was worth it to play the dangerous game of passing customs with the help of Michael Jackson. In several of those countries, these works would be confiscated and you may well be detained because the possession or importation of these things is a violation of the law, and being sovereign countries, they get to decide what breaks the law. This stuff happens today, it's not just on the internet, and it's been happening for a
long time. It goes hand in hand with its close cousin, religious censorship.
Oh yes, religious censorship. It's really speaking of vintage. This is the one that goes all the way back pretty much. In this version of censorship, you're looking at pretty much any material, book, speech, otherwise art again that is questionable or seen as questionable by a religious group. Again where if you go back far enough, the religion, the religious groups are the power, right, that's your government essentially in
a lot of places. And in this you're even going to have limitations that are forced on less prevalent religions by the ruling religion in a land. Let's say a good example as the Catholic Church, which we'll see a little further on in this episode.
And I wouldn't even say questionable. I would say objectionable because this this kind of stuff reaches its heyday in places where there is no descent or times and places where there's no free speech. And as you said, man, it's the dominant religion forcing limitations on less prevalent ones. But it could also be a less dominant religion just preventing its adherents from reading anything outside of the community's approved scripts.
Sure like cult like behaviors.
Yeah, that happens all the time with cults because they don't want to They don't want your mind to be polluted by worldly things or words that are not the words of the great leaders, divine understanding, postulations, postulations, revelations, they would say, regurgitations.
Quite so, some of.
Their opponents would say, you know what, some of the cult leaders would say that too, because they're just speaking for the trees or the space gods or whatever.
They're a conduit.
They're a conduit. Yes, they're the conduit. There are two other types of closely related censorship that have I don't know, maybe some merit, that's the thing. A lot of these have some kind of merit. There's military censorship, which is just keeping its opsack, you know, it's keeping military intelligence
and tactics confidential and away from specifically the enemy. This only becomes problematic when the native civilian population is considered the enemy, which happens all the time historically speaking absolutely.
And then of course you've got the cousin to that one. They're all just distant cousins in a way. Some of them may be a little even closer related. But the act of political censorship, and this is important again, like military censorship, sometimes governments have to keep things quiet or secret so that a other countries and leaders don't know what they're doing, which is even closer related to military
censorship than I'm letting on. That's like the I don't know, the twin brother twin sister kind of deal, because a lot of times the politics and the military are that closely related. Sorry I'm going along here, but it's also really important for countries and politicians and governments to keep things from their own people to prevent them from overthrowing the throne.
Right, Yeah, to prevent rebellion. And that's so similar to religious censorship too, right. The last one, which is the rising star in the world of censorship is corporate censorship
is increasingly common in these our modern days. This is the process through which editors of a corporate media outlet would intervene, So anything from The New York Times to our very own podcast would intervene to disrupt publishing of information that makes a business or a business partner a chrony look bad and then also suppress any alternative views or, in the case of open advertisement, any alternative offers from
reaching the public sphere. So, just to pick an example out of the ether, this would be something where let's say NBC doesn't allow eight commercials for ABC shows to be on their networks. But it could also be something like Walmart moves to town and buys up all the newspaper space so that the mom and pop story can't buy a supplement to put in the Sunday paper.
That's not very nice, no, but.
It is censorship. And all of these forms of censorship are currently extant. They exist today.
In the world.
Likely some version of this kind of stuff exists in your own country, even if maybe like in the case of religious censorship, your own country doesn't condone it. I can almost guarantee you that if you have a military, your government may not completely control aspects of it, and that need to know basis is its own form of self enforcing censorship.
Absolutely, And even if you believe that you live in a country that doesn't have some kind of censorship over its people, where we unfortunately have to inform you that you're probably wrong.
Right, Oh yeah, oh my, you're so wrong. Yeah, unfortunately, especially here, guys. Yeah, it's here in the US where we record this podcast, in this episode of this podcast, And that leads us to ask, so, how long have these practices been around? This is not stuff that we just figured out as a species. Censorship is ancient. It has followed human civilization throughout history like a sinister shadow, just one step behind, sometimes looming larger than other times,
but always at every moment with us. And we'll get to the crazy stuff pretty quickly. In this episode, we want to explore where censorship came from. The modern word we use today comes from Roman civilization.
There was an.
Actual dude, there was actual person, an actual political position called a censor, and they ruled certain areas of Roman policy with absolute power. When we say we mean absolute power, we mean the other leaders could not contest or not change their findings. And then when they were done serving their time, a new censor could not change the findings of the previous.
One at all.
No, Oh my gosh, it's just your word is law, and that's all there is to it.
This is now what civilization can and can't do.
In these certain aspects of the law. The censor was responsible for maintaining the census, not a big surprise there, supervising public morality, and then overseeing some aspects of government finance.
So the most important part.
For our purposes today is there charged to supervise public morality. This was something called the regimen morum. And it's key here because the censors at first would punish or shame people as individuals, both for activities in their private lives that could be anything very serious from being quote overly cruel to slaves or quote acting in theaters. You could get in trouble for that as seen as dishonorable.
Acting in a theater mm hmm, and spoke.
Poorly to your character you could also get people in trouble for their public behaviors, perjury, taking a bribe, or keeping a good horse in bad condition, not taking good care.
Of your horse.
Okay, I can see why those would be looked down upon, perhaps or at least frowned upon. All of those, actually, especially the theater's one. And here's the other thing. The consequences from being censored can include anything from being expelled from the Senate if you were serving in the Senate at the time, or you could even be expelled from the tribe, your tribe, which would be a major blow to you and your family.
Social excommunication. Right.
Then, of course this could lead to death. Everybody dies, or most people do. It's just the timing would probably not be to your liking.
Yeah, it is crazy to think that you could be censored to death.
Yeah.
And from this original duty, this one aspect of this one to two person job, the Regiment Morham grew to include the scrutiny of public speeches and performances and then written work. And censorship was not seen as a bad, authoritarian or heavy handed thing. It was seen as a benevolent, just necessary, even noble way to maintain social order.
I think we got to just talk about this for a second, because I think it's a difficult stance, but it has to be taken that it's something that you said at the top Bend, that this type of censorship, once we get to this place where it's looking at everything, is kind of necessary to get enough people on the same page to build an empire or build a massive civilization, especially on the scale of the Roman Empire at the time.
Sure, but does necessarily make it good?
Absolutely not, right, absolutely not, But but in a way I guess in a way it is good in the moment, right, And it's good for both the status quo of the people who are trying to create this new order or whatever it's going to be, as well as for the citizens to some extent, because it sounds like they are or the attempt here is to alter people's behavior to be more in line with suiting a larger civilization.
Right And at the time, you know, these civilizations were attempting to expand and enforce systematic inequality.
Yes, by engulfing other civilizations, smaller civilizations.
Right, right, And this.
One practice of a lot of ancient civilizations was a very effective form of censorship restricting literacy to certain social classes.
Yeah, if you cannot write or read, then how are you going to change anything?
Right?
The most famous case of censorship in ancient Rome dates back to Socrates. He was sentenced to death and they told him to ingest poison in three ninety nine BCE.
What was his crime, though, corruption of youth and the acknowledgment of unorthodox divinities.
Now right, wrong parties, wrong gods, that's what that sounds like. Maybe causing the children of well to do members of society to ask too many tough questions.
I think that's exactly what his issue was.
We literally call it this democratic method.
Yeah, by listening to someone's argument, taking parts of what they say into your argument, and then coming up with a consensus.
Interesting interestingly enough, Yes, I like you brought that interestingly enough. In the Republic, Socrates student Plato argues for censorship.
Yeah. Well, in Plato and a few other of his contemporaries are the only ways we actually know anything about Socrates, because that's true. His life actually wasn't written down a whole bunch by him, At least not a lot was recorded by him in the moment.
So did he exist?
Story for another day, but it is safe to assume if we first assume they was real, it's also safe to assume he was not the first person to be punished in this way. And boy oh boy, speaking of setting a precedent, the Romans sure did. We'll see how this plays out in their descendant civilizations. Shortly after this.
We should also mention censorship was common in ancient China is very old and two twenty one BCE, an entire library was burned down in the Kingdom, and their first official law regarding censorship, surprise they were for it was introduced in three hundred CE.
But we mentioned Europe, right, so let's just go right there.
Europe has a ton of civilizations descended in some way from Roman culture, and this means it also has a long, laughable, tragic history with censorship.
Yeah, and first to get hit here is free speech. This is an idea that we hear a lot nowadays. It implies the just the free expression of thoughts. That's all it means, really, But this was a challenge to the pre Christian rulers at the time, and you know, it's it's a funny thing to have free thought and then to express those thoughts to other people and then have a group of like minded people all having free
thoughts that don't exactly go along with the church. That's very troublesome, at least to the guardians of at the time Christianity. But it's you know, it becomes much more troublesome when the church itself organizes to a point where there's an official orthodox this is what is the church and nothing.
Else, and there's dogmas exactly. Yeah, you're right, Matt.
And as more books were written and copied and even more widely disseminated, the ideas that were perceived as subversive and heretical were spread beyond the control of rulers. It didn't matter now if you killed one heretic, if they had written a pamphlet or a book and someone else had copied it, then that person's ideas lived on and they spread or metastasized, as their opponents will probably perceive it across the land.
But it's important because at this time, when you say copied, you mean actually written down in a blank paper or a blank parchment, and written down exactly what was written on the other one.
Right, And this this was an advantage over something like a subversive oral tradition in terms of storytelling her songs, because if you kill everyone who knows the song, it's fine, it won't get out. But you have to. Books don't die as easily as people. You have to burn them.
You have to you have to find them.
Right.
A book can, even even if it won't be in great condition, in the right environment. A book can just sit somewhere for decades and decades. It needs no food, it needs no cycle of sleep and wake. It's just there for someone to pick it up.
You can't coerce the book to not say it story anymore.
Right, you have to destroy or mutilate it. And as a consequence of this, censorship became increasingly rigid. Punishments became increasingly severe. And then, of course, one of the life last things that the establishment probably wanted to happen happened, and the printing press was invented in Europe in the mid fifteenth century, and this increased the need for censorship.
Printing did help, you know what, Maybe I'm being unfair, because printing did help the Catholic mission at the time to spread what it saw as a divine revelation.
You can print bibles now but it also.
Aided the Protestant Reformation and people like Martin Luther who were considered heretics. So the printed book became this huge religious battle ground, and it began a war that was also fought through the medium of books. They started making books that would communicate censorship.
Oh yeah, like a book of prohibited books, or at least a very long list of prohibited books. There was a pope, a gentleman named Paul the Fourth, who ordered the first index of capital p prohibited books in fifteen fifty nine, and then that an index, like an updated index, was issued again twenty times by different different popes who succeeded, and then finally from fifteen fifty nine all the way until nineteen forty eight, the final prohibited books list was issued.
Nineteen forty eight, that's not that long ago.
But they kept that thing in practice. It was still on the books for lack of a better phrase, until nineteen sixty six, when it was finally abolished.
Yeah, so that's.
A long time of prohibiting reading.
And the Catholic Church was the first and final judge of which books emerged on this list, right, and books didn't usually get pulled off or forgiven, and the Inquisition helped enforce this ideology by banning and burning books when they were discovered, and in some cases burning the authors along with the books. O. The most famous author that the Catholic Church band is, of course Galileo. That was in sixteen thirty.
Three, because he was heretically letting people know about, you know, the solar system and the stars.
He was going against their God.
Yeah, exactly.
So the most famous victim of the Inquisition would be Joan of Arc probably and maybe Thomas Moore. Additionally, the Catholic Church controlled all the universities and all the publications that those universities made. In fifteen forty three, they said, okay, that's it. No book can be printed or sold unless we say it's all right, unless we sign off on it.
Wow.
And then a little bit later a guy in France doubled down on that.
Oh yeah, he the uh what is he's the King of France, Charles the ninth. He declared that nothing could be printed without the special permission of the king. And then you know, when one ruler that several others their ears perk up and they go, hey, that sounds like a really good idea. So other rulers in Europe were also banning books that were not approved by.
Them as soon as they heard about it. Yes, immediately, post has this practice was pretty effective, tremendously effective because also when we consider what it took to operate a printing press, where we're looking at the possession of a lot of capital that the average European simply would not have.
You'd have to be a powerful enemy to be going against that list in distributing works at least to an effective amount.
Yeah, in a world where a lot of people can't afford to eat meat, much less stop the constant grind for survival to learn that there could be at least a different form of governance.
And that constant grind of moving this machine forward of civilization does at times require people to live below a poverty line wherever that may lie, just to be workers, to be cogs in that giant machine.
I would Yeah, I would say most government systems require the entire the largest amount of the population to be around that.
Yeah, to just be functional machines.
Essentially at least of the time. So this stuff is working so well, this strategy is working so well, that becomes a crucial part in the Grand European scheme to conquer what they called the New World, Catholic countries worked hand in hand with the religious authorities. Philip the Second of Spain reinstated the inquisition in fifteen sixty nine and then franchised it out, made a Peruvian inquisition in fifteen
seventy the next year. Just a monitor and censor unwelcome beliefs from the people who actually lived on this continent before the Europeans got there and the dissidents who are trying to escape the be An inquisition system. Really, a lot of it focused on controlling the import of books, so they would examine ships and luggage and port they would look through libraries and bookstores and printing houses, and
it was oppressive and sinister. Extended to colonies in the Americas as well, But it's still paled in comparison to another act of cultural genocide, censorship on a massive scale, in the case of the Spanish invaders destroying the literature of the Maya people. They literally erased history.
Yeah, it's gone. This is what you would call cultural genocide, right.
A lot of it was, yeah, a lot of was lost, sort of like the Library of Alexandria.
No, I just had to say. This is one of the reasons that Mayan civilization is so fascinating in a lot of places within this mysterious universe, conspiratorial world. I believe the mind civilization so interesting because so much of it, the actual explanations of what things are, it's been lost.
To history, right, Like I knew about the poulvo Vu, the cultural story that talks about the mythology and history of the Kicha people, but there was a lot of stuff that I thought I would have encountered before that I only learned through oral tradition, like the the story of how the religious syncretism occurs. But be that as it may, it is true that, for lack of a better word, they did erase history, and it sounds like we're paying. The Spanish Empire is just a load of
real pills. But Britain, France, and Germany weren't exactly progressive either. The postal service was invented in France in fourteen sixty four and it just like overnight, became this tool of state sponsored, religiously supported censorship. And then this meant that by the eighteenth century, the press in the majority of Europe was subject to the censorship. In the nineteenth century, things looked like they might have changed, or began to change.
There was an independent press that started to emerge.
Yeah, separating itself from the powers that be.
People were with more and more passionate and articulation demanding a free press, meaning one that is not governed by the state or the church. But this was not a global change. Japan had incredibly strict press laws at the time. And then if we keep going, of course, the Nazis. The Nazis were big fans of books. They found them very flammable.
They thought that was neat.
In the modern age, the USSR and the Eastern Bloc ran one of the world's most expansive, successful, and contiguous censorship programs in the twentieth century. It started in what October nineteen seventeen.
Yeah, Yeah, it lasted until the nineteen eighties.
Yeah, And it's mind boggling if you think about that. A lot of us listening to the show today were alive when people were getting arrested in the USSR in the Eastern Bloc for various things that may seem kind of silly in the modern day and speaking modern day, today we live in a world of endless, cheaply transmitted information.
What does that mean.
It means that it is possible now for anyone with a phone and a good Internet connection, almost regardless of their language, to download, in a relatively short period of time, more written work than our ancestors would have seen in their entire lives. You can right now, for example, download the entirety of Wikipedia.
Just look at it.
You can have it all on your phone and you will not need an Internet connection to read it. That's amazing. And so that means that in the wake of this massive technological breakthrough, censorship might be losing its importance or maybe its influence. Right, there's not a church in charge that can shut everything down.
Yeah, you're right, censorship is gone, doesn't exist anymore. We're done here. Thanks for this, taking this journey into history about censorship with us. Oh wait, nope, nope, that's very very wrong. Couldn't be wronger, And we'll tell you why after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy.
While futurist of Yesterdyear often argue that limitless access to information could result in a more transparent and well informed society, we're seeing that this is not the case, at least not yet in many parts part of the world. In fact, censorship is becoming much more common, rather than less common. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the ten most heavily censored countries nowadays are Eritrea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Aaran, China, Myanmar,
and Cuba. Those are just the top ten worst offenders. Some of that is probably going to change, at least in the case of Cuba, but that doesn't mean the things that aren't in the top ten are super great. Belarus is positively.
Dangerous, yis.
But what do we mean when they say heavily censored.
This is just where the laws are extremely extremely strict, and there are punishments such as harassment and imprisonment and sometimes even worse for people who go against these laws.
Right right, like the very recent incident in which Saudi Arabia of deducted, tortured and murdered a US resident and Washington Post journalist named Sala Kashagi. It was extra judicial killing. They're obviously not going to get in a lot of serious trouble from it.
From the US.
The crazy thing is it was almost covered up and then it wasn't. And I don't know what type of punishment could actually be, you know, laid out for the people who are responsible for it.
The US government would have to impose consequences for that action.
Yeah, but is that gonna happen. Probably not.
And embassy is technically this I think the soil on which like the soil of the country there. So it really goes down to how and if the US is a country that protects its residents and citizens, that's really what it goes town onto.
Yeah, and yet it is so much more complicated.
And yes it's its own episode, right, But just so just to you know, the way he died, the official explanation from the Saudi Arabian government was that it didn't happen, and then it did, and then it did happen. But there was a fistfight and he was that the guy started, and that he was killed in this fist fight. The evidence that Turkish intelligence is providing has there's I believe they have audio evidence and forensic evidence that he was sawed in half or like he was he was dismembered
while alive, which is not a fistfight. But we'll see what the we'll see what story everybody agrees on pretty soon. Right now, everybody except for Saudi Arabia pretty much agrees with the with the abduction, torture, murder narrative, especially because there was an alleged body double that was sent out later.
The story is ongoing.
I think the official position of the US Executive Branch is that this is quote unquote under investigation. The official position of the well the rumored position, the anonymously quoted position of the US military and intelligence agencies, is that yes, it is true. The guy was tortured, died, being sawed to death, and then his body was transported in pieces and hidden. But officially, according to the Executive Branch, it's
still under investigation. Anyway, it's happening. He was murdered by the Saudi Arabian government and by facets of it because he was a journalist and they didn't like what he was reporting.
Yeah, and it's becoming more and more dangerous, and it's again it seems like it shouldn't be this way in this modern era, with this technology, but it is becoming more and more dangerous for reporters to go out especially to practice investigative.
Journalism, right right, and you and I found this fantastic piece from guy named George Packer writing for The New Yorker. He said that censorship and danger to reporters is actually these events are growing more frequent, and they're growing more dangerous. We've pulled a really cool quote from here.
I think in recent years reporting the news has become an ever more dangerous activity. Between two thousand and two and twenty twelve, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, five hundred and six journalists were killed worldwide, as opposed to three hundred and ninety in the previous.
Decade, which is insane. And a guy we mentioned the Committee to Protect Journalists, right, the executive director of that outfits guy named Joel Simon, author of a book called The New Censorship Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom, and he said the trend nowadays is toward more seecretcy, more censorship, and harsher laws, rather than less secrecy, less censorship and less what would you say, punitive laws.
Yeah, yeah, we have another quote from him. Deluged with data, we are blind to the larger reality. Around the world, new systems of control are taking hold. They are stifling the global conversation and impeding the development of policies and solutions based on an informed understanding of local realities. Repression and violence against journalists is at record levels, and press freedom is in decline.
Yikes, yeah, it's true. It's true.
So there may be a lot of people, a lot of us listening now, who think, well, you know, I don't really have anything to hide, I don't have anything super controversial to say, and most importantly, I'm not an investigative journalists, so i don't have these same concerns. We'll tell you why this matters. First, we want to tell you the four reasons that he believes this rise in this new violent era of censorship, or I should say historically,
this return to this violent era of censorship. The first is that there's the rise of leaders like he cites in his work Vladimir Putin in Russia, recept type Erdogan in Turkey, presidents in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, who use their power to intimidate journalists and make it nearly impossible for them to function. He says, they're elected, but they're acting as dictators, which is why he prefers the term democratators, democratators, democratators.
Ooh, democratators.
But to me that just sounds like a potato that I've voted for. That's exactly what it is.
Would you eat them? It's the new freedom fry democratators.
You know. I just started Fallout four, and they call potatoes tats and they're tato I think they call him tators. Yeah anyway. Oh and by the way, yes, yes, I did say Fallout four, not the new Fallout that just came out. Because I'm always one iteration behind whatever the popular thing is.
I feel you, man, I'm okay with that. I'm similar.
It was ten bucks. So yeah, anyway. So the second source of censorship, at least according to Simon, is the big T terrorism, and he cites the beheading of Daniel Pearl and Karachi as being basically the beginning of a trend of turning journalists into very specific, high value targets for terrorists or for people who practice terrorism. I guess I don't know how to say that correctly. But also if you go you just look at the Iraq War.
It's the deadliest in history for journalists. There are a lot of people on the ground trying to cover the war in very dangerous places. And you know, we hear a lot about the highly targeted droning systems. The other you know, the dropping of bonds is much more targeted now. Well, the Iraq War is the deadliest in history. One hundred and fifty killed journalists, eighty five percent of them were Iraqi journalists, and most of whom were murdered like murdered, not just they accidentally got.
Killed, and their captures were performative. Their captures and executions were performative. It became a disturbingly normal part of the media landscape.
Yeah, similar to the Daniel Pearl event.
And then Simon goes on to note that he says he believes the third reason is the death of foreign news desks. So back in the days, in the golden days of journalism, every large paper of note would have something that they would call a foreign news desk. People who had the protection of a larger international news organization and often the implied protection or tacit protection of their home country would set up an office wherein they reported
on regional news in a foreign country. The problem is that with so much of independent journalism going down the tank in the past, few years, these places have closed and the only way to get news out falls to local reporters doing their best, often with no help or protection from a foreign government. Actually the only government around
their own often will want them dead. In countries like Mexico, the Philippines, Pakistan, local journalists are the target of brutal campaigns of intimidation and murder by secret service agents, armed groups. This could be just extremist religious or separatist groups, Cartel's cartels, that's another one. And you know, some of these local journalists, it's not like they went to school and dedicated their
lives to be journalists. They might just be on Twitter trying to survive because their families are being black bagged or disappeared.
You know.
And the final reason. One of the weirdest ones is the invisible global hand of digital surveillance. Various countries have gotten closer and closer to perfecting its use. But there everyone's getting better all the time. And it's not just the boogeyman you hear about in so much Western media. It's not just China, it's not just Iran. It's also the US, It's also it's also the EU, It's Israel, it's Japan. It's anyone who can afford it, you know.
Yeah. Well, and it's crazy too, because not only do we have in this country things like the NSA sure that they're looking at everything, or at least they're tracking everything, keeping notes about it, there is also this this very real thing called the search bubble, and it's also a news bubble. And it's just the thing that in which the place in which we all find ourselves where we are almost censoring ourselves.
And where does this lead us. We've looked at the origins of censorship, We've seen some of the modern trends. Now, let's ask ourselves about the future. After a word from our sponsor. All right, so the badger is out of the bag on this one. Humanity's constant, sinister shadow of secrecy and censorship is not going away. It is and I want you to hear the italics here, evolving. We
talk about the progression of technology all the time. Right now, you can tell somebody across the world what's happening to you, relatively in real time. As long as everything works, and all the pistons or firing in sequence, all them satellites, all the Internet tubes are not plugged up. The problem is that this technology that allows us to communicate is often created or influenced by the same people who create technology to monitor this sort of stuff, censorship technology, and
it only spreads the fuel of these practices. New tech is giving governments the ability to more selectively censor online materials. This is the stuff they don't want you to know about.
This.
This is where it gets spooky because we see several factors converging to make a perfect storm. The private tech sector is merging. It's increasingly monopolistic, you know what I mean. The giants of the tech industry Alpha, Google its owner, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, so on. Mean that there are fewer hubs of information transmission. Essentially, this means there's a smaller group of people at the wheel.
And this is.
What Lebowski would call not cool man. Yeah, it's problematic, Yeah, because it means they're a private company. A private company does not have a ton of laws telling it what it can or cannot show you, what it can or cannot prevent you from seeing, or what it can and
cannot do to influence how you interact online. Older media companies, it's no secret if you're a longtime listening to the show that older media companies like newspapers mainstream television have often worked in secret with intelligence agencies to censor some stories or completely ignore them, especially in wartime. Especially in wartime, yeah, or in times of great public crisis like the JFK assassination, or they've been handed talking points and told to just sort of riff on those.
Yeah.
But new media agencies seem much more comfortable with pursuing their own enigmatic goals.
Yeah. I mean, let's look, let's look at him, just because we kind of have to for.
This, all right, But no shirtless pictures.
Old aj Alex Jones. He's been making the airwaves again, even since he's not been on them so much. You don't you don't have to agree with this guy at all. You don't have to even like him at all. You don't have to be a fan in any way. But you look at the fall of Alex Jones as an
example of this. There were some private industry companies who just decided, not necessarily out of the blue, let's say there there were circumstances that were building and building, but either way, a couple of these private industries decided that he can't play on in their sandbox. They can't play on their platforms anymore. He's done, and all of a sudden he was finished or is mostly finished.
And that's totally within their right. They are a private company. They built the sandbox. He they had valid reasons for in the in their opinion, for shutting down his access to his audience. But it worked. And it's not like there was a trial. There was maybe a trial of public opinion, you could call it, sure, but it's not like he went to Twitter court.
Don't.
Don't, but take the financial motivation. These companies have to make you a paying participant. For instance, pain is in giving them cash in addition to your personal data which.
They're already using.
You know, if you have a small business, or you have news that pertains to something Facebook doesn't want people to see, for instance, you would have to make it a sponsored post. Right, you have to be incentivized to pay to play environment and for their part, that works because they're not a news agency, they are not ethically charged to correctly report things. And additionally, this is one
of more frightening parts. Censorship is becoming increasingly invisible. Forget all those old printed out paper documents and fescimile copies with the black and white text and the black back sharpy marker redacting paragraphs and paragraphs. Nowadays, you might just not see a banded web page, or you might just go to your kindle one day and a book is vanished, or you might find that, like the Maya codesies, certain parts of digital history are being erased under your nose.
Wikipedia is completely different on this page today for some reason. I don't remember what was taken out, but I don't know sure. It just looks different and there's nothing showing up on the history.
Oh yeah, there are information wars going on in Wikipedia. If you ever have the time, go to some topic you think might be controversial, instead of reading the article, click on the talk tab.
Yeah, and you will see these long.
Bitter things oftentimes by especially in geopolitical things, oftentimes by front groups posing as individuals, which is insane. No, I know, just the Middle East alone, yeah.
Crazy.
In some countries, people only learned that their social media activities monitor when they were detained or arrested for a political comment or a snarky joke. And we found a We found a fascinating map that I'd like to maybe share on our website or on our Facebook page.
Yes, it gets crazy. Did you see that thing?
Yeah, so make sure you're on Facebook check it out.
Yep.
A little bit of double think there. So these factors that we just named, increasing government surveillance and then increasing inequality of power distribution and power in the private sector coalesced to create something that might have sounded insane just a few years ago. Imagine not a world wide Web, but a splintered internet world partially world wide webs, three of them. They're divided into the three spheres, the US, China, and the European Union.
Yeah, and if you look at each of these individually, you would note probably at least that the US has they're the big player here. They have the guns because they arguably and did invent the Internet with arpenet. We've discussed not that long ago, and a large percent of the private companies that actually control large swaths of the Internet, how to access the Internet, how information is shared to
other human beings. We control that here, or at least individuals and private companies do, and at least for now, that's how things stand. But things are changing pretty rapidly in the world when it comes to the powers of the Internet. And here's the thing. In this country, I don't think you can have a blanket statement as in these companies are compliant with well, Uncle Sam when he
rolls through and has requests. But we have seen numerous within the hundreds of cases where there have been companies who have been compliant with the government coming through and asking for information. Doesn't mean they're giving. These companies would give all of the information, but perhaps parts of a user or certain posts or things to that nature.
Yeah.
And in the US, at least, and arguably in the world, the great balance between state and corporate powers swinging in favor of the corporation overtime, overtime. And I am convinced this is true. You can call up my opinion, but I am convinced it's true.
We've talked about this before. You you've predicted that there will be a corporation running for the presidency within our lifetime.
Maybe not the presidency of this country, okay, but of the country. Yeah.
Sure, And then I'm sure there will people who are I'm sure some of us listening now are thinking, well, aren't presidents kind of already at least as sponsored as NASCAR drivers. I mean, shouldn't they have to wear patches? At least the NASCAR guys are pretty open about it. Robin Williams, Man, Robin Williams.
Last time I saw him on tour, I think it was the self of self destruction. I think he had an awesome bit on that. It's like beautiful like imagery of just that. Oh all right, but I think he stole from somebody else because.
Oh no, he did that a lot unfort Oh yeah he did. I remember we're talking about that off air. But maybe he didn't do it on purpose exactly.
You gotta gotta give benefit of the doubt. But that that image, I think is unfortunately salient. It's real. It's just like the jackets with all the sponsors.
We have campaigns, systems set up to reinforce that, at least again in the US, but maybe it's different in foreign governments. In twenty ten, Google shut down its operations in China after they learned that the Chinese government had been hacking Gmail accounts of dissidents, surveilling them through the search engines to find what they liked and censor that. If it's a communication hub or to you know, I guess the euphemism would be permanently censor the dissidents, so
they shut down twenty ten. Later this year, we the American public learned that Google had been working on a new search engine for China.
It's called Dragonfly. It's not called Chrome.
The reason it's different from Dragonfly is that it incorporates all these surveillance desires of the Chinese government, and Google's internal documents don't support what they say publicly about it, which is a shame.
And there's been outcry. Yeah, there's been a lot of protesting by employees of Google lately.
Yeah. Yeah, they're smart kids. They know what's up.
And this means what we're looking at as all these factors converge is a new censorship war on the horizon, a new evolution in the paradigm of forced silence. And while it may start in a corporate boardroom or in a DC lobbyist lunch meeting, it will expand to reach you. It will expand to reach your television, your news, your laptop, your tablet, and your phone. This means that unless you go completely off the grid, you are going to be affected. It is not it's not a drill. It's not a
hypothetical thing. It is already happening. It is happening to you. In fact, you may be interested to know exactly how this continues.
So this is sold. So there you have it.
Wow, I think we have to end the show here. Let's at least let's at least talk about some questions that we have. Oh, by the way, before you even get to questions, they killed Socrates, Yeah for censorship.
Yeah, they killed so Creates.
Yeah, so creates. That's a callback to Steve Martin, one of my favorite comedians. I'm just doing that today. I don't know why, because this censorship has been so important. I'm just gonna go on a mini soapbox here. Censorship has had such an effect on free thought. And that's really what it's about. It's about other people wanting you to think a certain way and not have other thought
viruses enter your mind. Thank you, Grant Morrison. And it's it's it's terrifying to think that there are powerful forces active at this very moment that want to control your thoughts. That freaks me out. And they've been these same not the same people, but these same mechanisms have been attempting to control human thought for for thousands of years and we have to fight against it. I think I think
we do. And the way you fight against it is just talk, have an open mind, have free thoughts, and talk to your fellow human beings around us, and dogs and cats and other animals that are willing to listen.
Yes, yeah, but that that goes to the question then too, what is the line what should or should not be censored?
Ah see, then you're getting into some of that morality stuff.
We're getting into morality stuff. We're also asking ourselves what things are.
Age appropriate for people? Right?
What things are necessary for a country to function?
You know, I mean that's the toughest part about this, right, Yeah, gotta have free thought, but you got to have humans that if they're not that nice, or they're not even let's say, I don't want to say that smart, but if you've got to be able to have some kind of control mechanisms for just societal norms, or do you?
And that's where we will leave it today. This is not the end of the episode. This is the part where we leave the podcast studio and wait to hear from you. We want to hear your responses. You are the ultimate arbiters of where this goes.
And that's the end of this class episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
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