Parallel universes and the freedom of speech

Sci-Fi is full of stories about parallel universes. The Man in the High Castle is one of the most vivid recent examples. It shows a universe where Nazis won the WWII, and the US has been divided between Germany and Japan. Every being that has imagination can envision an alternative future. The drama created when some people sometimes are able to cross over from one world into another. I have a similar eerie feeling when I watch Russian State TV. It feels like a parallel universe, separated from our own reality. It is a world where noble Russian soldiers are fighting evil Ukrainian Nazis, saving children and elderly people. It has this weird coherence to it; it almost feels real. Even a skeptical mind, being exposed to hundreds of hours of this, will adapt, will accept the reality despite itself. That’s what humans do – they adapt, they accommodate, they find their way in any circumstance. Survival means accepting reality, or what looks like a reality.

If you read QAnon sites, you know the feeling. It feels like strangely coherent whole universe that is like ours and yet not like ours. It is a world where Trump has won the election, and a secretive cabal of shady operatives is running the country towards its ruin. These people disagree whether it is the reptiloids, or the pedophile Clintonites, or the Jews that are behind everything. But those disagreements are within the same whole self-sufficient and parallel universe. It is the universe that is impenetrable to ours, just like ours cannot be accessed from there.

In The Man in the High Castle, Nazis have found a way to penetrate into other universes, to infiltrate and poison them. Similarly, the seemingly autonomous universes have been invading our own. Russian tanks are every bit as real as the US Supreme Court’s majority or Trump presidency.

In recent decades, the magic power to imagine has been enhanced so greatly that large swaths of humanity seem to be unable to control it. Too much imagination is psychosis, where one cannot keep straight where is reality and where is the illusion. The ability to alter video, distort information, and validate falsehoods through peer communities – those tools are too dangerous to be used uncontrollably. The classic standards for freedom of speech did well, when speech meant mostly black print marks on cheap paper. We are dealing with entire vivid, emotional, shared multiplayer universes that are better than reality. I do not know if classic liberal principles such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech can survive such an assault. When Twitter kicked out Trump, they have been criticized from the Left and from the Right, and by libertarians of all shades. But perhaps they were the first to understand the new reality we are living with. Or, to be exact, with multiple realities.

I have no answer, and a part of me protests censorship. Yet, it would be foolish to ignore the new danger of holistic fictionary worlds invading us again and again. At the very least, we need a robust debate on how to regulate tools that potentially can lead to collective psychosis.