I’ve studied 6 languages, and to me, big words can be fascinating.
The word obscurantism, for instance, means the use of technical or overly-complex language to confuse a meaning or make understanding a concept more difficult than it needs to be.
Even if you haven’t heard this word before, you don’t need me to tell you it is often used as a tactic by a governing class or social elite to create the impression of sophistication and superior knowledge in an attempt to buttress their authority.
Until recently, NZ had a proud tradition of resisting obscurantism in everyday speech. We’d call a spade, a spade. How quaint that now seems!
That Kiwi colossus, Lord Ernest Rutherford, insisted that if an expert cannot express a new idea to a layperson in language they will understand, the expert likely doesn’t understand the idea properly themselves.
The British writer George Orwell echoed this view when he said ,“Never use a long word when a short one will do.”
He was, as you know, deeply suspicious of jargon and pseudoscientific terms, especially when used by politicians and bureaucrats, because that’s where ‘newspeak’ comes from.
In an environment where we are constantly responding to the latest free speech fight, it's important to celebrate the wins.
And connected to all this, we definitely have a win worth celebrating.
The Disinformation Project has closed its doors.
Yes, the Disinformation Project (the organisation that has been platformed as ‘darlings of New Zealanders would-be-censors’, making claims of ‘trans-genocide’ and ‘infodemic’) has the right to make their case. But when taxpayers' money is being used for such a nonsense mission, it's only a matter of time before the people see past the facade.
We'd say this is what has happened. And they've collapsed as a result - not from suppression, but from counter-speech.
The Disinformation Project represented so much of what is wrong with the censorship culture we’re experiencing in democracies like New Zealand today.
The very word disinformation itself has a deeply troubling history, invented by no less a tyrant than Josef Stalin, himself.
As editor of Pravda, a communist propaganda ’newspaper’ designed to influence and control public opinion in Soviet Russia (Pravda ironically means ‘truth’ in Russian), Stalin wanted to designate some ideas or perspectives as necessarily out of bounds.
Stalin in the early 1920s coined the term ‘desinformatsya’ to describe the concept. He wanted it to sound both sophisticated and French in order to reinforce the image that the ‘enemies of progress’ were diabolically devious and manipulative with language. How ironic. (The French word, désinformation, didn’t appear till almost 60 years later).
Combatting ‘disinformation’ (maybe we should start calling it desinformatsya so we remember where it comes from) might sound like a good thing, but more often than not, it simply becomes an excuse to ban ideas and speech some people don't like.
That is exactly what we saw with the Desinformatsya Project.
Tohatoha is another organisation that has also (thrillingly) recently shut down after losing financial backing from InternetNZ. (Tohatoha means to share, disperse and distribute, lovingly and wisely.)
Another great intention, but of course, only the opinions they agreed with could be shared, dispersed, or distributed. Their mission statement is to ‘Enable big conversations with and within our communities, while amplifying the voices of those harmed by digital technologies and working toward solutions to build a just and equitable Internet.’
Pravda would be proud! (While their closure is a win, there's now an offshoot running online classes under the name 'Dark Time Academy', which is committed to the same cause.)
I think the closure of these groups is emblematic of a wider cultural change we’re working hard to achieve. As a society, we are waking up.
It's up to each one of us to make up our minds on issues and decide fact from fiction - not let others 'decipher' this for us.
Where there are lies and deception, we must come together to expose these. Free speech is what makes this possible, not censorship!