https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5TBW9rCHO5A
You said that this was a largely Republican audience, and one of the arguments that one hears on the right and among people who are largely free market is that yes, we have a First Amendment, but that only applies to the government. And so one can’t say what a private company can or cannot do, even one that is supposed to be a platform for speech, because that is up to them privately. Regardless of the fact that you’ve got millions of followers and you have a hard time breaking through to people who might disagree with you. So I just thought I’d let you comment on that. Yeah, well, that’s a great, just as tough a question as I’d expect from you, by the way. So, it’s possible that private companies aren’t legally required to abide by the, by the requirements for free speech that bind the government. That doesn’t mean they’re not ethically required to. And I would say again, likely that, try it. You know, if you want to set up an enterprise where you place freedom of association and freedom of communication at the bottom of the hierarchy or somewhere low, sure, run your enterprise like that and see what happens. The first thing that’ll happen is you’ll lose all your best people, because who the hell wants to work in a place like that? Now, no one who has something to say, it’s gonna be self-defeating. This is another thing that’s also worth understanding, and it’s worth understanding deeply, is these things that your constitution, for example, has put so wisely in the most fundamental place, the right to free speech, which is really respect for the divine logos. It’s the same thing, respect for the divine word. It’s the same thing. Put that in the most fundamental place, it’s because complex systems, and psyches as well, but complex systems that don’t do that, fail. And so they’ll fail if they’re private too. And perhaps they have the right to fail, you know? I think in some ways, you probably have to argue that on a case-by-case basis, because it gets more complex when you have a brand new technology, let’s say like the one that underlies Twitter, and the platform is so immense that it starts to become a political force in and of itself, right? It’s difficult to understand exactly what to do about that, because of course we’ve never faced that situation. It’s a historically unprecedented situation. I mean, Twitter is far more than, we have no idea what Twitter is. It’s far more than a platform where people, you know, put up their 180 character opinions. It’s some monstrous human machine hybrid that’s, it’s a giant that’s walking the earth. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And we don’t know how to regulate it, and there are lots of giants walking the earth like that now, and we don’t know how to regulate them. We know, historically speaking, that complex state-like systems that don’t abide by the dictates of free speech, free inquiry, free thought, freedom of conscience fail. And part of the reason for that is they can’t see the world, and they can’t update themselves. And so obviously they fail. So there’s a, the ancient Egyptians had a very interesting theology. They had a god of the state, the god of the state was Osiris, and they had a god of, they had a god of transformative vision, and their god of transformative vision was Horus. And Horus is the famous Egyptian eye, right? And wide open eye, and Horus was also a falcon, and he was a falcon because falcons, birds of prey, are the only creatures who can see better than human beings. And so the Egyptians worshiped the eye. They worshiped the capacity to pay attention. They worshiped the capacity to attend and to generate information as a consequence of careful attention, and to deliver it to the authority of the state so the state could update. And so the Egyptians knew 3,000 years ago that if you built an organization, that would be Osiris, and you didn’t ally it with something approximating the ability to pay attention and to update, that the state would fall into the hands, is how the Egyptians put it. Osiris had an evil brother named Set, and the word Set becomes the word Satan, by the way, through the Coptic Christians. The Egyptians knew that if Osiris wasn’t allied with Horus, that Set would rise and destroy the state. And the Egyptian state ran on that theology for about 4,000 years. It’s a precursor to many Christian ideas, many Judeo-Christian ideas. Private companies that don’t ally themselves with the dictates, with the principles of free inquiry and free speech say, well, they’re gonna ossify and become corrupt. It’s an ancient, ancient story. And it’s always happened, and it’s always happening, and it will always happen. That’s the case with ancient stories. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]