The spikiest speech bubbles usually have the fewest strong points.

It’s a fascinating paradox: we live in a time with the easiest means to disseminate ideas that humans have ever had access to, and yet so much about the free exchange of ideas seems to be getting worse, not better. The supposed truisms simply aren’t holding up.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This article (the whole thing is illuminating) touches on what may be the single biggest obstacle to widespread progress in today’s world. In order for an exchange of ideas, we have to be willing and able to trade beyond our (self-imposed, largely digital/media-based) borders.

Since “more speech” alone doesn’t seem to be helping… what might actually help the best ideas win out?

What changes to how our biggest platforms operate could help achieve those goals?

When we reward law-breakers with more puppy access, we’ve definitely screwed up.

This topic is a hot one. I am not even going to attempt to address it personally, other than to voice that as I personally see more and more of these stories, particularly in campus environments, it’s hard for me not to question if something has gone haywire in what we label as unacceptable behavior worthy of regulating.

Luckily this Atlantic article, “How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm”, does a much better (and much longer) job, not only addressing how it came to be, but both the benefits and potential dangers of a heightened sense of what’s allowable and what’s over the line. One researcher quoted in the article puts it simply:

A university that tries to protect students from words, ideas, and graffiti that they find unpleasant or even disgusting is doing them no favors. It is setting them up for greater suffering and failure when they leave the university and enter the workplace. Tragically, the very students who most need the strength to face later discrimination are the ones rendered weakest by victimhood culture on campus.

You really ought to read this one. By framing it around the term “concept creep” and addressing it academically, we’re given a much more rational way to digest and discuss a strange symptom of today’s evolving discourse. Which is just what people love to discuss over beers, right? So.

How does this trend make you feel? Has it affected you personally?

Are you happy to put up with the negative effects for the positive gains? Or vice versa?

Have we reached a tipping point, or will this go even farther? How far can it go?