Life in China is saturated with pretense. People feign ignorance and speak in ambiguities. Everyone in China knows that a censorship system exists, but there is very little discussion of why it exists.
.. The content offered by the Chinese state media, after its processing by political censors, is not free information. It is information that has been chosen, filtered and assigned its place, inevitably restricting the free and independent will of readers and viewers.
.. Judgments become distorted and rationality itself begins to slip away. Group behavior can become wild, abnormal and violent.
.. Whenever the state controls or blocks information, it not only reasserts its absolute power; it also elicits from the people whom it rules a voluntary submission to the system and an acknowledgment of its dominion. This, in turn, supports the axiom of the debased: Accept dependency in return for practical benefits.
.. The self-silenced majority, sycophants of a powerful regime, resentful of people like me who speak out, are doubly bitter because they know that their debasement comes by their own hand.
.. Because the censorship system needs cooperation and tacit understanding from the censored, I disagree with the common view that the censored are simply its victims. Voluntary self-censorship brings benefits to a person, and the system would not work if the voluntary aspect were not there.
.. Managers of artistic and cultural projects, though, need to do more than that; they need to show proactively that they “get it” and will accommodate the authoritarians and protect their public image. They know that if anything causes unhappiness higher up, a project, and perhaps an organization, will be scrubbed.
After 12 tries, Apple finally approved an app for tracking drone strikes, then immediately deleted it
Five years ago, Josh Begley, a data artist and editor at The Intercept, created a straightforward news app for iOS. It sent a push notification to your device each time a U.S. drone strike was reported by a news outlet.
There’s a map that shows you where the drone strikes occurred and a log that keeps track of each one. That’s it. No pictures, no interviews.
And yet, it was censored by Apple for years. Begley attempted to bring Metadata+, which was originally called Drones+, to the App Store a dozen times.
It finally became available for download on Tuesday, and then was abruptly removed again five hours later. Begley received an email from Apple Tuesday afternoon, notifying him that his app was removed for containing content that “many users would find objectionable.”
Racism: Avoiding Explanations that Suggest No Remedy
I think, a political and moral error to content oneself with explanations that suggest no remedy at all, or that suggest prima facie problematic responses like ridiculing, ignoring, disenfranchising, or going to war with large groups of fellow citizens, unless no other explanations are colorable. It turns out that there are lots of explanations consistent with increased susceptibility to racist appeals that also suggest remedies less vague and more constructive than, say, “fighting racism” or censoring the right-wing press.
Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing
We prepared very carefully. We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office. We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town. If we won against the post office, then the federal government was declaring that this book was not objectionable. That was the idea, and it worked out in exactly that way. The post office has its own special court, where the judge and the prosecutor are the same man. We brought in all these famous writers. Malcolm Cowley was a witness. He was particularly good because he was deaf and couldn’t hear the questions of the prosecutor—so he gave a lecture.
.. The judge, if you could call him that, ruled against us. We lost. Even so, I felt a great wave of sympathy coming from him, the way he stated things and the fact that he let us put all this evidence into the record. Getting things into the record was really important, because the judge who rules on the appeal only looks at what’s in the record. No new evidence is allowed.
.. In Brooklyn they came after me, the publisher, and charged me with conspiracy. They claimed that Henry Miller and I conspired to have him writeTropic of Cancer—that I commissioned him to write it in Brooklyn in 1933! That was a mistake, right? I would have been ten years old, and anyway he wrote the book in Paris. It was insane.
.. Now people come to Paris to buy the book, and they bring it back, and each book that gets into the United States is read by fifty people. What happens if you publish it and we actually win the case? In five years they’ll assign it in college courses and no one will want to read it!
.. His wife told me, When he gets here he’s not going to be friendly about this. I think you should publish it, but I will pretend I’m against it, because anything I say, he disagrees with me.
.. Science fiction or wandering between the centuries never appealed to me. But I tell you, if I knew how it was going to sell, I would have bought it. And if I knew how Tolkien, who was offered to me, was going to sell, you better believe I’d have published it. But I couldn’t understand a word of it. I mean, I didn’t object to it. It wasn’t like it was a fascist tract.
.. We were forewarned that Genet was a kleptomaniac. That night Loly was wearing very lovely earrings. We ate at a restaurant at the top of Montmartre, and Genet took us to the window. He said, Can you see the view, and all the things going on down there? The whole time Loly has her hands over her ears because Genet was trying to get the earrings off! But not a word was spoken about it. Jean Genet was a thief, but he was a real thief. He was a thief from the inside out. Like Sartre said, he was a saintly thief.
.. Do you think that it’s possible for a young publisher to do something like Grove again today?
ROSSET
In terms of editorial judgment, yes. If you had enough money. I told a friend the other night that if you want to be a publisher, you should inherit a lot of money. If you don’t inherit it, then you should marry a very rich girl. Preferably both! If you don’t have either, forget it. That’s the history of good American publishing.