China and 'chavnet' raise fears for internet free speech
By Mark Ballard
9 November 2018
This is the week when Xi Jinping, who presides over a China whose authorities have been in the news a lately for locking people up for their views and their ethnicity, made ominous news by calling for a global internet treaty for the sake of cyber security.
This was the same week that Rockstar Games got police in Melbourne, Australia, to raid the house of a man called Christopher Anderson, for selling games mods that allow people to cheat in its multiplayer battles. And Jeff Koons, rebellious artist of distinguished distaste, was sued for works that satirised famous adverts.
As the worlds of art and tech merge, the authorities are making it tame. And as tech democratises the world, they are taming the word, too.
Censors have long been at work in Europe, where people have been locked up for propagandising against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and are still angry long since the foundation of Israel and its brutal oppression and subjection of hostile neighbours and assassinations of its rivals. And Facebook has been removing posts made by people with bigoted views believed to have incited people to burn the houses of foreigners in Germany and spark a genocide in Myanmar.
Now China, which has long opposed the standard international internet governance treaty - the Budapest Convention of Cybercrime - has decided it wants an international agreement after all. China, Russia and their post-communist compadres are the most notable non-signatories of the Budapest Convention, an instrument drafted by the Council of Europe, but taken up by many other significant countries across the Americas, Africa and Asia. Budapest opponents tried to set up a rival internet treaty a decade ago. They wanted to have a part in drafting the rules, they said, and they wanted to drop the bit in it about civil liberties, which said police can’t just raid whatever computers they like when they see fit and there should be measures to respect people’s rights to privacy and freedom of speech.
It all seemed to be going so well in the 1980s, when New York City - the great crucible of free speech - spawned hip-hop, the sublime street art, through which ignorant, spirited people claimed their birthright by mouthing off over snatches of music pilfered from other people’s copyrighted records. That was art.
Then came Rockstar Games, which made $6bn from the sale of a single computer game about the same stereotyped ghetto streets from which the rappers and DJs of New York’s hip-hop scene claimed as their authority to speak with rough and tumble and say whatever the hell they liked because that is how it is, or how it was, largely, before mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the streets with his zero-tolerance of vagrants and repeat offenders and who, along with Tony Blair in the UK, created a clean slate, a more civil world, by the wholesale locking up of a generation of malcontents and maladjusted.
Multiplayer-game modding has been an art and a liberty since the great ID Games made it a feature of its Doom games in the mid-90s. Free software, riotous computer games and hip-hop - and yet they say the ’90s were naff.
Rockstar cashed in on the hip-hop stereotype with its riotous games, then dissed them royally, like it had twisted its heel on their heritage, like it was the stub end of an old joint. That’s art made commerce.
The Rockstar case gets right to the heart of the matter, though. That is just how hard you should hit someone who doesn’t play by your rules. Rockstar sets rules because it has money and power. How does it go? “It’s the rich wot makes the rules and the poor wot cops the blame”. And ain’t it always the same? Instead of just doing more to arrange its multilayer games to send people off when they are caught cheating, it is seeking create a new precedent for the law of copyright, so that anyone who adapts a software program without a given artistic licence will have their house raided by the police, their possessions confiscated and restrictions placed on their use of computers, as happened to Anderson, the rebellious coder in Melbourne. It would likely have them locked up as well and made to pay more money into its great coffers. Rockstar will probably hire its own police force before long and do its own raids on people who are not content with the pretence of rebelliousness that is the theme of its games. It’s those in power that make idiotic rules and those without power who are too stupid to avoid breaking them.
There is a solution to this problem, though. Digitally round up all those people dissatisfied with their lot, who can’t be trusted to play the game or express their minds. Get all those people whose sense of humour is not drawing-room civil. Get the culturally uncouth, the ill-educated, those ignorant and angry, those with numb skulls made hateful. Give them a special social network all their own, with its own special games. Call it Chavnet: a place where social inferiors can express their right to free speech without it infecting society and inciting people to burn houses inhabited by people with swarthy looks, smelly food, outlandish dress, better educations, intellects and job prospects. Hire prep-school prefects and finishing school graduates to invigilate it. And don’t let them out. Just don’t let them out. Lock up a generation.
No, that’s it. Just put them in pens like the Chinese do. Free speech is permissible only to those with power and only then for it to be used in the art of bullshit. People with power like Trump, who can say what they like because they have power, or people with civility, like Melania, who will only say what you like. Do that. Call it civil liberties.
< Originally published in Engineering & Technology >