The knowledge revolution and Conroy's 'Index'

Recently it was shown that the government has been getting ISPs to record their customers’ web surfing. Apparently this has been going on for a few months though the exact nature of the government directed “spying” has not been revealed. (See: "ISPs Spying On Australians: Government Document Heavily Censored".)

We can only speculate this is related to Senator Conroy's mission to filter the internet, which has little or nothing to do with child abuse and everything to do with political control.

All of Conroy's assertions about why he needs to filter the internet have been demolished by various critics. Yet he persists, and therefore it appears that Conroy is deaf to reason and wishes to blind the eye of the public, to fashion the internet according to his world view. Which is what?

Lacking all reason, a sensible explanation suggests he is continuing the Catholic tradition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Papal blacklist of banned works that sprang up in the 16th century.

Included in the Index were banned scientific publications that challenged the medieval view of the world such as the writings of Johannes Kepler, and the work of Giordano Bruno who was later burned at the stake, as well as the perceived heretical writings of Martin Luther and other Protestants.

In later centuries the Index grew in size and covered more areas including atheism and also publications that were sexually explicit, until it was abandoned, but only in 1966.

I'd like to make a connection here with the present. The Index arose only about 50 years after the Gutenberg press heralded the explosion of knowledge, so enabled by the printed text. With printed books more commonly available, knowledge travelled and ideas flourished and the world changed forever.

Before this knowledge revolution, few could read or write in Europe. There were few books and the main one, the Bible, was central to the Church and set the moral tone of the culture and imbued the theocracy with a political power. It then was fitting that this was the first book Johannes Gutenberg printed. Few could have realised the proliferation of writing that was to follow.

We are now in a similar position to that revolution started by Gutenberg where the free flow of information around the globe, enabled by the internet, is as liberating and exciting as it was the first time. And like before, the orthodoxy and the governing elite feel threatened by it: for if knowledge is power, there arises the tendency to control that knowledge.

Today the internet poses a potential challenge to traditional government control of politically sensitive information because, first, it gives the powerless a wider range of material and, second, connects them via the network. While the internet has not brought down a government yet, it must be giving some strategists food for thought.

But why is Conroy so on edge about this? Censoring the internet places us in league with China, Iran and similar authoritarian regimes. Perhaps our political system is actually more authoritarian than our flag-laden Australia Day broadcasts would have us believe.

Perhaps he is just a religious zealot who wants a return of the Restoration and does not believe in separation of Church and State. For to hold the two separate would see the Australian Christian Lobby unwelcome in the halls of power.

Or perhaps is it a defect in our national psyche based on our origins as explored by Chris Uhlmann, “Don't ask, don't tell” (whose article on the ABC website is no longer available). He in part wrote:

Australian governments are suspicious of the people and, as far as I can tell, they have been since 1788 ...

The theory is a work in progress but maybe it explains why Australian governments and their bureaucracies obsessively hide information. In 20 years of journalism I have encountered absurd secrecy at all levels of government and it appears to be a bipartisan disposition.

Perhaps Ulhmann's theory on our governments proclivity to secrecy is founded on a sense of deep insecurity, that if the people really knew the caper it was, the politicians would lose their credibility, and then their legitimacy.

Is what they are afraid of, the same fear felt in Iran, China and North Korea?

It is apparent from a long history of blacked out Freedom of Information (FOI) documents, and commercial contracts whose details are not released, that government is afraid of criticism, and in so being, is afraid of the people who they insist must be kept in the dark. So for them, the internet is a threat to their contrived power, to their self legislated self aggrandisment that no black marker can conceal.

It is therefore consistent that a government who exploits democracy only once every three years or so, but otherwise holds it in contempt, should be deeply worried about the free flow of information provided by the internet. This proposal, criticised by the US ambassador to Australia who believes it unnecessary, is a serious departure from western values. Others assert that the filtering aligns us with totalitarian regimes that are afraid of dissent.

In the first information revolution, that heralded the age of reason and then age of enlightenment, the latter whose fine principles of liberty and democracy the Australian government sadly lacks, saw those nations which embraced that revolution become great in many ways. Those that stifled debate and persecuted dissent, spending political capital shoring up the crumbling façade of power, saw their nations decline and stagnate.

The free flow of information is the free flow of creative energy that enriches and enhances a society, giving it the chance to transform itself into something that was before unimagined. To this potential wonder, there is no place for Senator Conroy and his dread dark age vision.