Skynet, Cyberdyne, Facebook And The Tyranny Of The Machines

I write a lot. It’s honestly a compulsion not unlike alcohol or drugs. Other guys are addicted to porn. If I don’t bang out a Guncrank column every week, I start to feel like I’m developing a skin rash. We all have our burdens.

I typically post my writing efforts on Facebook as they come out. I don’t know why, but I’ve been doing it for years. A lot of my patients are Facebook friends and comment on the latest efforts when I see them in clinic. There’s never any profanity, and my politics are pretty tame relative to the rest of the planet. I wear Jesus on my sleeve and strive to treat others with respect and kindness. I like to think that comes through in my prose.

I recently posted a piece about flying a vintage Grumman Goose floatplane with some buddies back when I was in the Army. For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Facebook tagged that as offensive content and deleted it. The stated justification was that I was somehow using subterfuge to get “Likes” or some such.

I enjoy the adoration of an army of hot, rabid cheerleader groupies just as much as the next obscure gun writer, I suppose, but I really never paid much attention to “Likes.” I just felt Facebook was a good vehicle to share my work with anyone who cared enough to read it. I had never been cancelled before. It was a weird experience.

I clicked on the review tab and, in due time, got a note back that my post was reinstated. Facebook said they had removed it by mistake. And then it got removed again. I subsequently penned a brief second rebuttal that formed the basis for this column. My story about flying WWII airplanes got duly banned once more. I still have no idea why.

Grand Scheme

I published 255 commercial writing projects last year. I am hardly the best writer in my genre, but I am arguably the most prolific. As I said, I can’t help it. However, getting banned was thought-provoking.

This is quite literally nothing. So the Facebook spam filter is set to Nazi Gruppenfuhrer and excludes homey little tales about flying in Alaska. What difference does that make? Well, perhaps a lot.

I met a young lady several years ago who had recently spent six months living in China — the massive communist sort, not the tiny free island. I asked her what that was like. She was a college student — sweet and smart but naïve. She said at first, having everything she did scrutinized was kind of novel, exciting and cool. She felt like a character in a spy movie. After a while, however, she began to notice a trend.

Whenever she would say anything, even vaguely negative, about the government or the country in an email, she noticed that her internet connection would fail for a while. Over time, that became predictable. After six months, she was starving to get back to home and freedom. Living in a draconian dictatorship for real was simply suffocating.

We’re really not so far from such stuff over here on our side of the pond as we might think. We enjoy such a precious birthright of freedom that we do not adequately appreciate. All that could be gone with a headline.

If anybody cares about my opinion, I think censorship in most any form is bad. The Nazi death camp guards thought they were the “good guys.” Whoever wrote the Facebook content restrictions probably believed they were acting in the best interest of the common good. It is simply that absolutely everyone is biased. We can’t help it.

We live in the Information Age. The free flow of information defines our everyday lives. Humankind has never lived like this before. We’re figuring it out as we go along. It’s a brave new world.

That can indeed be dangerous. I am fairly convinced this is where so much ADHD comes from. We bombard the human mind with loud, flashy stuff from the moment we first draw breath and then subsequently struggle to pay attention. Who could have seen that coming?

I certainly acknowledge that folks do stupid things in response to propaganda. History is littered with bad behavior that spawned from passionate oratory or carefully metered information. A lot more people have died as a result of behavior safeguarded by the First Amendment than ever perished by that of the Second.

That being said, methinks we still need to be careful letting the censor bots determine what we should and should not be allowed to read. I’ve seen those movies. They never end well. I don’t trust any of them. It’s not that I’m paranoid, it is simply that I’d sooner not end up someday paying taxes to my microwave.

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