Selfshittification – The Suppression of Free Speech

Almost everything is filtered or removed in today's "information society"

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

When Donald Trump started throwing foreign students out of their studies, and indeed all the way out of the USA, sometimes with weeks of detention first, just because they had displayed some opinions, it wasn’t really anything new.

The USA is in the lead when it comes to restricting free speech, using social media as a source for personality checks – where such as “loyalty to the USA” and “agreement with Donald Trump’s politics” are elements being watched for, and, indeed, being considered part of a personality.

It looks grotesque when first seen in the news, but it exists all over the world, and has existed for a long time: the punishment for having thoughts and opinions.

Punishment may mean prison, or death, and it may be preceded by some kind of trial where it is claimed that having an opinion is against a law. But it can be more subtle, through life simply becoming more complicated. Not being accepted for a job or a study, not hearing back when sending various requests to authorities or companies, or seeing no response on social media posts.

The society is doing this in unison. It is one of the truly social activities in a modern world, where most other things have been dragged home to be done alone, without involving others: mocking, harassing, and punishing others for their expressions of free speech is something we help each other doing.

In the West, we like to point out how China or Russia are persecuting and prosecuting people for their opinions, “having political prisoners”, but we forget about our own, similar behavior.

Trump’s new rules for student visas is an example, a very visible one, but my own experiments on social media shows how ordinary people take part in the exclusion of people who speak about things others feel unsecure about. A like on such an article could lead to being fired or not getting a visa when you want to travel, so why risk it? Then better not interact with people who display a dangerous pattern of speech and behavior.

Most of this exclusion is based on fear, or perhaps more precisely, a lack of courage to speak up. It is easier to just pretend not to be interested and therefore not interacting, but that “pretend” becomes a habit, which becomes a conviction. Before you know it, you actually believe that they should better not say so, and you will definitely not be known to be somehow connected to or influenced by a person who doesn’t know how to behave correctly and who, say, criticize Donald Trump publicly.

Enshittification is such a great concept, which I keep getting back to, about big companies behaving badly toward their customers as soon as they have caught them in and made them dependent on their products or services.

“The enshittification of individuals” is actually a bigger thing. The way we run the errands of the suppressors of our freedom by being their eyes, ears, and arms, to report attempts to be free, through social media’s mechanisms for reporting rule-breaking (and most social media have some quite solid censorship principles in their rules, so there’s a lot that can be reported – and it happens all the time) and enforce the immediate punishment by the society by blocking them or ignoring them.

It also includes self-censoring, which is probably deciding most of what is being written, or even said, in this world. People try not to insult anyone or get banned or restricted, so they just do not say what they think, and after a while, they stop thinking it, becoming conformists.

We could call this something like selfshittification.

Selfshittification is much worse than enshittification, because we all do it. We ruin our possibilities forever to being able to speak up about what’s on our minds, and at the same time, we are preventing others from the same. We kill the free speech as a concept, making everything that is ever being said publicly a good fit for authoritarian governments’ dogma about preventing any criticism, and blaming everyone who even try.

In an enshittified world, selfshittification fills out all the gaps that may have been left for people to find a free space, a feeling of being a genuine self – like water floating in over the rubble after the societal earthquake, drowning anyone still alive. In this case, we often do stay physically alive, by our souls die from the selfshittification.

Some people may feel that they just want peace, quiet, and order, and those speaking up are disturbing all that. But think about what you are punishing other people for, when they speak up.

Is it hatred toward groups of people? No, that is in general encouraged! Every conflict in the world seems to point out a group of bad people about whom you can say all kinds of bad things, and do.

Is it lies and the invention of factoids, fake truths, building up truisms with no scientific or historical backing? No, also this is encouraged! For instance, “immigration” is considered a valid thing to speak badly about, making the immigrants everywhere legal prey for anyone wanting to claim superiority by mocking others.

Ideas such as another country being an enemy, for no obvious reasons, also find acceptance, because even though they never did anything to “us” (whoever “we” are) they probably could think of doing it, we decide.

I would say that truisms is a very American phenomenon, even though it exists all over the world, but the Americans’ lack of scientific thinking means that they often just decide what to believe, rather than seeking evidence. Belief is equal to fact in many Americans’ understanding,

Therefore, Americans are in the lead when it comes to selfshittification, as they are easy to manipulate into believing that something is against their way of life, or whatever, after which they start punishing anyone who are related to that something. But as American companies and institutions own and control most media and most communication in the World, the American selfshittification gets an immediate effect on everybody else as well.

And we all become selfshittifying to fit into these media, to not be blocked, imprisoned, or denied a visa.

Of course, the conditions for developing a selfshittifying mindset exists everywhere, in everyone, and is not exclusively an American invention, so what is spread from the USA is additionally supplemented with local selfshittification, for instance the much parodied and yet fully active and alive Law of Jante, which is originally just a thing from a novel, but as it describes a real behavioral pattern of people well, it has become commonly used as the name of that pattern.

We believe that we are maintaining a good life and some predictable rules of behavior by selfenshittifying, but, as already mentioned, we just enforce the suppression of ourselves and each other.

This makes the term “information society” a joke of dimensions. We do, in principle, have a lot of information available, and we have many ways of distributing it to every corner of the World. But we ruin all the information by our self-destructive behavior, and we can’t even blame Trump, Putin, or any other dictator for doing this to us – we are doing it to ourselves.