The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Journal of Free Speech Law: "The Connected City of Ideas," by Robert Mark Simpson
A new article from the Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Future of Free Speech Symposium.
The article is here; an excerpt:
I think we need to update the metaphors we use around free speech. Everyone can see that our communication tools and practices are evolving fast, with a mix of welcome and unwelcome results. But there is an aspect of this evolution that is seriously underappreciated. Our communication tools and practices are increasingly subject to standardizing and homogenizing pressures. We are being corralled into a narrower range of devices and methods for talking to each other. We need to actively strategize about how to deal with the threat that this homogenization poses to our abilities as creative, reflective, thinking beings. But first, we need to recognize it as a threat.
The dominant moral metaphor in free speech discourse—namely, the marketplace of ideas—inadvertently desensitizes us to this threat. This metaphor invites us to worry, primarily, about authorities controlling the ideological content of public communication. At the same time, it analogically portrays homogenization in our methods of communication as something benign or even good. We need another metaphor that frames this homogenization as something to worry about.
Cities are more liveable when they are connected, when they have an integrated mix of trains, cars, buses, cycle paths, and walking paths, which provide a diverse array of locomotive affordances. Similarly, societies are more liveable if they enable us to use a variety of idea-transmission media with diverse communicative affordances with respect to expressive formats (text, voice), stylistic options, breadths of audience, and tempos of exchange. We should be able to freely exchange ideas and information, subject to reasonable caveats. But we should not be content with this measure of freedom. We should also be free to exchange ideas using a heterogeneous repertoire of media and methods, suited to various communicative purposes. We should have a connected city of ideas.
John Stuart Mill's writing inspired the marketplace of ideas metaphor. But that metaphor has become a dead dogma of the kind that Mill saw as inhibiting our mental vitality. If we want to carry the free speech tradition's underlying ideals into the future, and refashion liberal society, we need interpretive lenses that have a deeper focal point than the marketplace metaphor gives us. We need lenses that orient our gaze toward problems that Mill, in the nineteenth century, and the lawmakers who implemented his ideals in the twentieth, couldn't yet envision.
The marketplace metaphor has established rivals. Alexander Meiklejohn used the image of a town hall meeting to illustrate the normative appeal and pragmatic implications of a democratic conception of free speech. Robert Goodin and Robert Sparrow have riffed on marketplace lingo, inviting us to think of free speech culture as a garden of ideas. Seana Shiffrin's "thinker-based" theory of free speech has, at its heart, a striking simile, likening censorship to solitary confinement.
By pitting my connected-city metaphor against the marketplace of ideas I am not insisting that the latter is the best of the currently available options. I am targeting the marketplace metaphor mainly because it is so influential. At the same time, I disagree with those critics who regard it as a totally hollow or disingenuous piece of rhetoric. I believe it has some enduring merit as a highlighting device.
To appreciate this, we have to decode the metaphor by asking, first, why markets per se are presumed valuable and, second, how the benefits of not having censorship resemble the benefits of using free markets to organize certain activities….
