We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management is not solely the brainchild of the state. Rather, calls to increase censorship come not from the state but from below, with the educated, urban middle classes often organising on their own to help bring this about.
Take the podcaster, Joe Rogan, whose viewership is an order of magnitude higher than primetime television and has repeatedly been the subject of controversy and attempts at censorship. If Joe Rogan had lived in North Korea or the Soviet Union, his problems would no doubt stem from the government and the lack of forbearance of people such as Kim Jong-un or Nikita Khrushchev.
In the democratic United States, however, Rogan’s problem is quite different: The Joe Rogan Show has been subject to open threats of strike action by the employees at Spotify, which distributes his podcast. Their principal demand is to be handed editorial oversight over the podcast, with the power to veto what Rogan says or does.
This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” concerned by his “history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the Covid-19 pandemic”. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. Many of those who signed were nurses or students, others were general practitioners, a few were dentists, and at least one was a licensed marriage and family therapist.
It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion. But, ultimately, that’s the point — this was not a list of 270 of experts in the field, but rather a list of 270 of people from the expert class.
These class dynamics are hardly very subtle. Take Greta Thunberg, whose claim to fame, to put it pithily, is the fact that she refuses to go to school. While many of us can probably empathise with this desire, there is something strange about a person who hasn’t even finished high school acting like she belongs to a group of people who justify their rule through technocratic language.
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