More on The Truism of the Restricted-Purpose Language

Ed Felten's written a reply to my item about " The Truism of the Restricted-Purpose Language", ending:

I believe that code is speech, and I believe that its status as speech is not just a legal technicality but a deep truth about the social value of code. What the code-regulators want is not so different from what the speech-regulators of 1984 wanted.

I agree with all of this!

But I'd say the comparison works well for exactly the opposite reasons as intended. Newspeak doesn't conjure up images of the idea that you can't make a language where certain concepts are unexpressible, therefore the Party was silly and stupid to even try. Rather, it conveys images that you can have an official system which is restrictive and oppressive and works to impoverish the vast majority of the population. That is, the comparison to Newspeak is not "it can't work", but "it can work, so beware".

Suppose we remove the literary flourishes from the description of Newspeak. That is, rather than proclaiming:

The purpose of Newspeak was ...to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted ... a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable ...

Let's have a more qualified, less hyperbolic:

The purpose of Newspeak was ...to make all other modes of thought cumbersome and onerous. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted ... a heretical thought ... should be difficult to articulate, easy to be derided and mocked, readily attacked when conveyed to others.

This lacks the punch and flourish of the stark statement of impossible. But it's a much more accurate description of what would likely be the case in practice.

And the idea of computer-language libraries in fact supports this point. What's one big problem with C and C++? The fact that there are so many different libraries which do similar, but not quite identical, functionality. Merely having the ability to extend the language by new definitions is not adequate. There must also be a process to have those definitions accepted in "society" as common, otherwise the process of communication breaks down. Every time a program needs to ported from one library to another, it's a proof that there's a big difference between having the ability to express something, and doing it in a fashion which can be effectively used by other people.

Let's also remember that the strictures of Newspeak weren't going to be enforced by its language merits. Rather, people who started creating unauthorized language-extensions were going to quickly become unpeople - rather like the idea of the DMCA, etc. that programmers or researcher who publish unauthorized expressions are going to be fined/jailed.

By Seth Finkelstein | posted in copyblight , infothought | on October 18, 2002 03:28 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)