A place for free speech?

Bathroom Graffiti: From the Bathroom Graffiti Project

Lawrence Lessig has famously written about free speech and its barriers, legal and otherwise. Free speech is circumscribed in many extralegal ways, some social and some architectural. The social limitations are inevitably tied to onymity, which in many social and political situations is strongly encouraged: it is socially unacceptable in most places to explicitly hide ones identity, and covering one's face with a mask is assumed to be a means of avoiding legal repercussions for illegal and possibly dangerous acts. We become nervous around those who hide their identities: imagine a person with a figure-obscuring large puffy coat, thick pants, gloves and a face mask sitting across from you on the subway, under an "IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING" MTA/NYPD poster. This is a person you probably want to get as far away from as possible; this is not a person you are prepared to have a casual conversation with, or someone you want to hear a political speech from. You can't tell their sex, their race, any distinguishing characteristics; and so, you imagine, they could get away with a lot: they are not constrained by the possibility of tarnishing their identity like you are. They know what you look like and you know nothing about them, and so they seem to have power over you. It is for this reason that they are not credible: you will not want to listen to them except out of fear, and you will only humor them with nods and smiles as if they were an agressive homeless person asking you for change, even if they mean well.

We are not prepared to listen to those who have this kind of power over us: we want to talk to people like ourselves, people who we can see and judge and with whom we can associate words with a face, to love or to hate. And so the constraints on socializing in a regular, day-to-day environment come strongly into play, including where, when, with whom, how and about what we can talk—in the US, if the where and when and with whom are "the office" and "lunch" and "co-workers", for example, the how and about what are often not "boistrously" and "politics". In many suburbs across the US, citizens have no particular local civic center, no nexus of public activity where the people of the town regularly mingle and interact except that of privately-owned commercial centers. The mall is a place where masses of people gather but architecture and management work together to encourage some actions and prohibit others—respectively, shopping and assembly are among the most obvious.

Ian Frazier's writing—curated lists might be a better term—on the mostly anonymous visitors' comments at the Brooklyn Museum ("Bumpin'n") and graffiti in the reading areas of Butler Library ("In The Stacks") are accounts of places that more or less level the playing field in terms of anonymity recall for me a phenomenon that would only really come into its own as a broad societal trend years after these peices were written: "anonymity" on the Internet. BBSes, then Usenet, then chat rooms, forums and so on give us more-or-less equal opportunities for a more-or-less anonymity and pseudonymity that we never had before. Anyone can be anyone else on the Internet, it's been said: when we're all wearing facemasks and puffy jackets, we are on equal ground, one not mediated by normal social conventions but instead tied to what we choose to present about ourselves, a real (virtual) marketplace of ideas. Kind of. Law enforcement and privacy advocates alike will be quick to tell you that you are not as anonymous as it may at first appear. The multitudes of servers that you access keep detailed logs of your every action, and the huge corporate ISPs track every router that you move data through, to say nothing of intelligence agencies. Highly publicized pedophilia cases have led to the Internet axiom that an underage girl in a chatroom is most likely a federal agent. In short, you can always be found out.

The ease of traceability has certainly not deterred everyone, and many workarounds and tools like TOR and WikiLeaks have been made available. These are neither perfect nor very broadly used, and the USA PATRIOT Act and similar have especially eroded what degree of privacy and anonymity can be expected of the Internet. In the physical world, the rapid rise in surveillance equipment documenting nearly every accessable space, the proliferation of portable recording devices, especially on cell phones, and the ease of uploading to social-networking sites results in what futurist Jamais Cascio calls a "participatory panopticon", or a combination of top-down "Big Brother" surveillance and grassroots "Little Brother" surveillance.

It has often occurred to me, half-seriously, that bathroom stalls may be the last bastion of truly free speech. Still, as evidenced by the actual writing on bathroom walls, these hidden places of temporary anonymity, last bastions that they may be, may be largely irrelevant to meaningful discourse. True anonymity may yield true freedom of speech, but as Frazier points out, much of this speech, untethered by social pressures, just ends up being about longing, (literal, in this case) toilet humor, and out-of-context statements with little or no standard for logic or evidence, much like YouTube comments. It becomes apparent that it is not just the statement itself but also the context and standards to which the statement adheres that enable meaning to emerge. The bathroom stall, for all its advantages, is not and has never been enough: it is one end of a scale of free speech, utterly unfettered and mostly irrelevant. Still, it is a part of our culture, and a rare place where a pen can run wild.