The Responsibility of the Equidistant

Technofobia is part of the electoral monodynamic and the immoral equidistance of the dogmatic left. As a matter of fact, it’s what makes repression and the taking away of rights possible, endorsing the narrative that goes along with it. The job of the right wing is to take away rights. But the left allows for a state of emergency to be declared on the internet that is later applied in the real world.

There are many recent examples of this. In the case of the chatroom for municipal police officers where the mayor of Madrid was insulted (among others), the left was in favour of persecution in a private space –the chatroom– in the name of going after hate crimes. That’s only one step away from doing the same in people’s homes and private lives. With a technophobic left that fantasizes about and takes part in taking away rights on the internet, we don’t even need a right wing.

We need to work against hate and protect those who suffer threats, but if we work against hate speech –where hate is a description of speech– we’re fighting speech, and therefore we’re reducing freedom of speech. In addition, all of these ills are generally blamed on “the internet”. As a result the internet is in danger, and for the time being it’s Twitter users who are penalized, contrary to what was expected.

The same thing happens with “fake news”, or “the danger of fake news on the internet”. They say that the internet is bad, that it belongs to someone else, that we’re trapped by it. And those on the right work to maintain the monopoly of fake news, like when Dastis went to tell Europe what had happened in Catalonia. The internet didn’t invent fake news, it was the monopoly of state propaganda and the media complicit with the status quo. If we blame the internet for having created it, we’re taking away one of the few tools people can fight back with.

One of the main documents used by the judge to keep Cuixart, Sánchez, Junqueras and Forn in prison basically seems to be a marketing strategy. It’s words that are on trial. If we’re in favour of words being put on trial, excited by the idea that we’re fighting hate, we’re neither fighting hate nor promoting coexistence. All we’re doing is reducing freedom of expression.

The essential responsibility for repression doesn’t fall on the bad guys, because the bad guys are professionals at repression. The responsibility falls on those that are above either side when the conflict gets tough– the equidistant.

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