The Pamphlet That Changed a Colony and the Algorithm That Would Have Suppressed It

Stephanie Curry on Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Specific Counterfactual of Revolutionary Ideas in a Platform-Moderated Information Environment

Common Sense

Common Sense by Thomas Paine was published in January 1776 and sold approximately 100,000 copies in its first three months in a colony of two and a half million people, proportionally the largest per capita circulation of any political pamphlet in history up to that point. It was passed between people, read aloud in taverns, reprinted by printers who had not received permission to do so, and distributed through networks of correspondence that were slower than the internet by twelve orders of magnitude and that managed, in three months, to move a contested idea from the margins to the mainstream of colonial political discourse in a way that the Declaration of Independence, signed six months later, formalised rather than originated. Paine’s pamphlet did the political work before the political event that is remembered. This is usually how significant political change happens. The pamphlet is rarely the remembered thing.

The Counterfactual

I have been thinking about what would have happened to Common Sense in a platform-moderated information environment. It argued for independence from a legitimate government in terms that the government would have classified as seditious. It used rhetoric that was inflammatory by design. It made claims about the rights of men that would have been flagged by any system calibrated to reduce political conflict. It would have been suppressed, throttled, or labelled in ways that would have reduced its circulation to the fraction of 100,000 copies that a suppressed pamphlet reaches versus the full circulation that distribution without friction allows. This is not a simple point about censorship. It is a point about what the friction-reduction of information distribution does to the ideas that require friction-reduction to spread. Bohiney had a media history piece this week. The London Prat connected Paine to the present. More at Bohiney Magazine. Satire: McSweeney’s.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK