A time will come when books will be banned. Access to information will be restricted, limited only to what either governments, big tech companies or both working in concert, will supply.
At that time, people will sneak out in the dead of the night to access secret libraries and reading points. Physical books will be highly treasured. People found distributing books will arrested, charged and killed. There will be a pandemic of disinformation and limitation information.
Free thought will become, not a luxury, but a thing to deeply fight for. There will be deep hunger and thirst for knowledge, and those who have it will be highly (but secretly) sought after. The business of knowledge will be dangerous business.
The internet as we are experiencing it today has already given us ideas of how this might happen. For example, when former US president Donald Trump was erased from virtually all major social media platforms early this year, it set a new precedent in which persons who expressed themselves in ways that were considered contrary could be silenced and completely wiped off the internet.
Soon after he was banned, a couple of other high profile people from various places around the world were banned from several social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram. The reasons given to justify these measures were along the lines of fighting “hate speech” and avoiding the spread of “misinformation”.
So how, exactly, does one define “hate speech” and “misinformation”? Even as one goes about defining them, one wonders what, in future, will constitute “hate speech” and “misinformation”? As it is, the definition of what constitutes “hate speech” and “misinformation” continues to expand daily to include even more categories. Eventually, virtually anything to which majority of the population does not agree with will be eliminated until there will remain only a small quantity of information available or too much of information that people neither need nor want.
While the act of banning users off of internet platforms did raise red flags amongst many, how the internet handles the case of musician R. Kelly following his conviction on sexual abuse charges among others- specifically if his music will be taken down from existing platforms, will be wildly sobering.
Should R. Kelly’s music be wiped off all music platforms, that will be a foretaste of the bitter things yet to come- that at any point in time, if a good enough reason can be crafted, information sources such as books can, and will be erased from the internet some day.
Nobody ever saw COVID-19 happen. Nobody ever saw a time when school, work and travel world over would be interrupted for at least a year or two, and still counting in several other countries.
For COVID-19, it seemed perhaps too farfetched as the signs were not very apparent. This, though, has the evidence all around us. The power of Big tech is already known to many and has been severally discussed but the worst of it like cat’s claws, remains tucked away in the soft paws of entertainment, fighting misinformation, and promoting tolerance.
Occasionally, though, they come out to scratch- like in the case of Donald Trump and other people erased from these platforms. We can only imagine what the scene will be like when they go feral- R. Kelly being the first exhibit that will prove that books too, will disappear some day.
Kind regards,
Anna Grace 💕
