At least once a week, I come across a column by a conservative (or even supposedly “libertarian-leaning”) writer whose usual beat runs the gamut from “government is too big” to “taxes are too high” to “regulations are too onerous” to “by golly, America is turning into [insert Totalitarian Regime of the Week here] because Marxists have been running the show for decades!”

This particular column, however, is very different. It’s a paean to some miracle of the modern world — the vacuum cleaner, perhaps, or the Big Mac, or the iPad, or on-demand food delivery — and to the “free market” or “free enterprise system” which led to that miracle.

At least once a week, I come across a column by a progressive (or even supposed “socialist”) writer whose beat usually runs the gamut from “government is ineffectual” to “we need to tax the rich more” to “the corporations are running amok due to insufficient regulation and lax enforcement” to “by golly, America is turning into [insert Notorious Environmental Hellhole and Open Plutocracy of the Week here] because libertarians have been running the show for decades!”

This particular column, however, is different. it’s a paean to some miracle of the modern world — the near-disappearance of urban smog due to the Clean Air Act, perhaps, or wind and solar power coming up fast in fossil fuels’ rearview mirror due to legislation focused on climate change, or the construction of “affordable housing” using government grants — and to the decades of progressive initiatives which led to that miracle.

Well, which one is it, conservative? Do we live in an ever-worsening Marxist dystopia that stifles innovation, or in a “free market”/”free enterprise” system?

And which one is it, progressive? Do we live in an ever-worsening libertarian dystopia that destroys the environment and impoverishes the poor to satisfy the greedy rich, or in a society substantially shaped by the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and other progressive programs?

The answer to both questions is:  Both, sort of.

The present situation — all of it — is a consequence of our past actions — all of them.

Maybe we’d have come up with the vacuum cleaner, the Big Mac, the iPad, cleaner air, solar panels and wind turbines, etc. no matter what. Or not if things had gone in different directions.

All we can really know is that we DID come up with them in the real world with its real history, elements of which resemble both the dystopian low points and utopian high points of the conflicting worldviews I see in those odd “departure from form” op-eds.

The big question is: Where are we going next? Where we are and where we have been will determine that as well.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Some creators/distributors of ‘deepfake’ pornography, Nina Jankowicz writes at The Atlantic, “seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images — that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody.”

Jankowicz, who served as Executive Director of the federal government’s now-defunct “Disinformation Governance Board,” has good reason to be upset with the phenomenon of deepfake porn. She recently discovered that she’s been a subject of it. That’s presumptively both discomfiting and disgusting. I don’t blame her for not liking it one bit.

But creepy as deepfake porn — essentially using software to e.g. put a recognizable facsimile of a person’s head “on” the body of an actor in a pornographic video — may be,  it’s inescapably fiction and expression, and entitled to the same protection as other fiction and expression.

The title of Jankowicz’s piece is “I Shouldn’t Have to Accept Being in Deepfake Porn.” She DOESN’T have to. It doesn’t matter whether she does or not, because she isn’t in the porn. A photo of her — in fact,  an official US government portrait that’s in the public domain — is.

Jankowicz supports legislation that would “provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.”

But “nonconsensual porn” would involve abducting people and forcing them to engage in sexual acts on camera.  Jankowicz willingly sat for a photo that belongs to “the public” to do with as we wish.

Not everything disgusting violates rights, and only things which violate rights should be treated as crimes, or even actionable torts.

A 1996 Joe Klein novel and 1998 film, Primary Colors, featured  characters who were, recognizably, Bill and Hillary Clinton and members of the Clinton inner circle.  They’re portrayed as engaging in actions which may or may not have actually happened in real life, some of which arguably, to grab a Supreme Court ruling expression, “appeal to a prurient interest.”

Librarian Daria Carter-Clark, who had good reason to believe that one of the characters portrayed as having engaged in a sexual fling with the Bill Clinton character was based on her, sued for libel. She lost. Romans-a-clef — works in which real-life people and events are given fictional treatment — enjoy the same constitutional protections as other fiction.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

There are certainly some sick puppies out there, doing some sick things. We don’t have to like that, and it’s completely understandable when those targeted by such things feel wronged and damaged. But until and unless those sick puppies cross the actual line of coercion or violence, the only legitimate tool for changing their behavior is persuasion.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” reads the opening lines of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s notorious manifesto, “have been a disaster for the human race.”  Kaczynski, who recently died in prison, blamed that period of history not just for “severe damage to the natural world,” but for destabilizing society, making life unfulfilling and inflicting indignity and psychological suffering on humankind.

Perhaps not entirely in fairness, I fancy I detect a similar tone in Peter Bach’s recent “Letter from London” in CounterPunch. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, Bach tells us, “genuinely reckons AI and its associated technology is capable of leading this country to an economic transformation that could ‘surpass the Industrial Revolution in speed and breadth.’ Bach finds it “difficult to be entirely enthusiastic about what in essence is a constant identification of AI as first and foremost a money-making machine.”

Personally, I’m a fan of the Industrial Revolution.

That revolution was far from flawless or harmless. For example, in England it was initially powered by the “Enclosure Movement,” which dispossessed farmers of their in-common land holdings, forcing them into the cities and to factory employment, while in America, Eli Whitney’s “gin” processed cotton so quickly that plantation owners turned to large-scale slave labor to feed it.

On the other hand, I’m the grandson of a sharecropper who got his own dirt farm during the Great Depression,  his first tractor and his first truck well into his career … and his first indoor toilet in the 1970s, a celebrated event in my family.

I’m unsurprised that my mother, who was born in a log cabin and hauled the household’s water half a mile from the nearest stream until the family could afford a well, married a mechanically inclined 8th-grade dropout who moved the two of them to the city and went into factory work (as two of their three sons, including me, later did also).

Monetary profit motive was the EFFICIENT cause of the Industrial Revolution, but its FINAL cause was making lives better.  The profit (at least when political games weren’t afoot, as they often were) lay in offering consumers cheaper, higher-quality, and more plentiful food, clothing, etc.

One offsetting factor for any perceived indignity, psychological suffering, or lack of fulfillment is that we each have more time to search for solutions to those problems. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, average life expectancy was about 35 years. Now it’s about 80 years.

While exploding population and its attendant demand created by the Industrial Revolution did indeed inflict damage on the natural world — deforestation, air pollution from burning wood and fossil fuels, etc. — continued industrial advances already point us toward ways of halting and undoing that damage, and our rapidly evolving AIs will no doubt have suggestions to offer on that front.

I can appreciate the down sides of the Industrial Revolution, but also realize that my life is better than that of a medieval peasant who owns one shirt and mostly drinks weak beer because the water is full of disease.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY