Convening of Digital Rights Dissenters

The digital rights field has turned against its free expression roots. We are planning to change that.

liber-net, the digital civil liberties initiative I lead, is hosting a convening of digital rights dissenters this May in Catalonia, Spain.

What are digital rights? Digital rights is the common term used among NGOs, academics, and philanthropy to describe our rights and freedoms in the digital world. It is sometimes shorthand for “human rights on the internet”.

The digital rights “dissenters” are those who have maintained their commitment to free speech and civil liberties, while the mainstream has shifted to advocacy for censorship and safetyism. Of course, this mainstream doesn’t believe they are censors, they describe their work in vague terms such as “anti-disinformation”, or “combating hate”. These concepts however are now mostly weaponized to silence political opponents. Many NGOs and academics have become government proxies for censorship.

The field is overwhelmingly convinced that populism is the biggest threat to freedom online. I believe the captured digital rights field itself is an equal if not greater threat because they are aggressively undermining freedom of expression norms, often in collaboration with the government. They give “virtue cover” to a new progressive authoritarianism.

From personal experience, I know that many are unhappy with this state of affairs, but that ideological conformity and fear of punishment are stopping many from speaking out. A very unhealthy state of affairs indeed for a field that prides itself on “freedom of expression”.

We seek to break this silence by convening the dissenters. If you are one, please apply. The full call is pasted below. Accommodation and meals are covered for all participants, as are flights for those that need it.

I stress that we are looking for people currently or previously involved in the digital rights field, or related academic, media or tech endevours. The idea is that those on the inside are in a strategic position to renormalise the principle of free speech and challenge the capture of philanthropy, government, and the censors.

Whilst we are targeting a very specific set of participants that may not include everyone here, I hope that the initiative itself is of interest to subscribers more broadly.

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Call for participants: Convening of digital rights dissenters

May 6-10, 2024

Catalonia, Spain

Applications due: March 15

Interested participants are invited to submit their application via this webform. Accommodation and meals are covered for all participants, as are flights for those that need it.

The digital rights field is captured. Its original values of free speech, open inquiry, independence, and civil liberties have been overturned in pursuit of safetyism, censorship, and paternalism. While ten years ago the field celebrated the democratization of information, it is now panicking.

Fear rules among academics, NGOs, and foundations who today pursue authoritarian solutions to what they label an “infodemic” but is often just the expression of unpopular or dissenting ideas. These top-down solutions are masked in a range of seeming virtues – from combating “disinformation” and “bias” to stopping “hate speech”, and protecting “public health.”

The Twitter Files revealed how intertwined governments have become with social media, and how some academics, NGOs and Big Philanthropy have worked with them to advocate for speech controls. In the West, the Trojan Horse for these new controls has been the Internet research and digital rights fields themselves: “anti-disinformation” NGOs and academics worked with Big Tech and mainstream media to censor true but politically inconvenient news, like discussion around the now-verified "Hunter Biden’s laptop"; they set up “anti-disinformation” initiatives such as Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security and pushed for the removal of legal but politically adversarial content, likely violating the US First Amendment; the Virality Project advised Big Tech to consider “stories of true vaccine side effects” as “misinformation;" NATO’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a key player in these censorship programs, has repeatedly been given their own program at RightsCon, the digital rights field’s biggest event. The list goes on.

“Anti-disinformation” groups and “fact checkers” not only failed to defend free speech during the years-long Covid panic, they used it as an opportunity to join forces with government and Big Tech to “fact check” and censor views that questioned government diktats. Academics from Harvard and Stanford were deliberately “deboosted” and “shadow-banned” for questioning components of the pandemic response, suggestions of a lab origin were roundly labeled “conspiracy theory," and ineffective vaccine passports introduced a level of government surveillance previously unimagined.

In parallel, longstanding subjects of concern have become taboo across the sector; as topics were coded as “right wing,” the “left wing” digital rights field has largely failed to engage with and oppose them. While just a few years ago it was a "conspiracy theory" to suggest governments could bring in widespread digital ID, today there are more than one hundred such initiatives in open development. Suggestions that governments might develop their own centralized digital currencies (CBDCs) were also met with the “conspiracy theory” label, now too dozens of CBDCs are in open, public development, including a digital Dollar, Pound, and Euro. (Just a few years ago progressives fought the Indian government's attempts to bring in biometric ID systems and no one labeled them "right wing.")

Those who oppose this sharp values-inversion and newfound rigid ideology of our sector risk losing funding, friends, and jobs.

While the Jacobin threat of cancellation has kept many quiet there are many who have not succumbed to the new progressive authoritarianism. 

We are looking for you!

No more whispered conversations on the side of conferences. No more skittish checking of what topics can be broached among friends. No more “struggle sessions” and inquisitions. No more standing by as mobs descend on the mildly independent, merely curious, or those that pronounce the bleeding obvious.

No more biting of tongues.

Participating

We are looking for advocates, NGO workers, journalists, media-makers, academics and researchers who have "escaped" or otherwise dissent from the monopoly of pro-censorship digital rights, open technology, or "Internet freedom" fields.

We stress that you MUST have a current or previous involvement in these spaces. There is much to be done to defend free speech, and our strategy right now is to focus on the biggest threats and drivers of censorship and digital authoritarianism: our own sector.

We are looking for people who already understand this sector, and therefore have the capacity to advocate for a return to the norms of free speech and civil liberties. We seek to build a new, independent, heterodox and values-driven space beyond tribalism or political affinity and rigid ideologies. We believe the answer to disinformation is more speech, and a new spirit of openness and inquiry. We want to develop new charters, new ways of doing things, new relations, and new networks.

About the retreat

The event will be a participatory event of approximately 30 people. It will take place over 4 nights and 3 days outside of Barcelona. Travel support is provided for those who need it.

Who are we?

liber-net is a digital civil liberties initiative working to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the default standard for our networked age. We have spent more than two decades in the digital rights, open technology, and internet freedom fields.

Our approach is independent and values-driven, eschewing political tribalism.

Apply here.