The rise of online streaming of movies and music and the growing transition of books from paper to e-readers has profoundly altered our access to information, placing the world's knowledge and entertainment at our fingertips. Rather than run down to the library or rental store for a movie, wait in vain for months for a popular book to become available at the library or maintain bookcases of material in our homes we rarely look at, our entertainment and informational needs are increasingly outsourced to the cloud, available to us on demand. However, that externalization of information and centralization to an ever-smaller number of streaming companies means we are edging ever closer to 1984’s “memory hole.”
Streaming and digital delivery has become a way of life in the bandwidth-saturated Western world. The aisles and aisles of Blu-rays and DVDs that once adorned every big box store have become as rare today as the once-ubiquitous music CD. Armed with ever-rising bandwidth and download speeds, consumers are increasingly streaming their music and movies rather than purchasing them on disk.
Society’s increasingly mobile consumption habits are transparently met by streaming’s cross-device compatibility. A consumer can begin watching a movie on their phone on the bus ride to work, continue it over lunch on their laptop, resume on their tablet on the ride home and finish on their living room television before bed.
Most importantly, this transition to streaming has allowed consumers to access vast constantly updated libraries of many millions of movies, songs and books, rather than being forced to maintain their own meager home libraries.
Yet, while streaming has brought with it immense convenience, the outsourcing of our information and entertainment holdings to third parties brings with it great risk.
Without a physical on-premises object under our direct control, we are at the mercy of our internet provider and the existence of those third-party streaming companies to access our content. At any moment our ISP could simply disable access to that streaming provider in a net neutrality dispute or the provider could simply go bankrupt or suffer catastrophic data loss.
More worryingly, however, is the growing trend of streaming providers removing content as a form of societal activism. An entertainer accused of criminal conduct can today instantly see their content removed from the major streaming providers overnight.
While streaming providers have thus far limited their censorship to particularly egregious cases of criminal conduct at odds with traditional societal norms, the use of content removal as an activist tool pushes us ever further down the slippery slope of normalizing the inaccessibility of content that falls out of favor.
In many ways we are seeing the digital emergence of book burning.
While it lacks the spectacle of a midnight book burning bonfire, the flip of a digital switch can banish any work today to the memory hole. Worse, this banishment can happen invisibility, without drawing any attention to the works being “disappeared.”
What happens as governments increasingly embrace this idea to censor works they disagree with? For example, a government that disagrees with climate science could simply issue a court order forcing all streaming providers to silently remove every book, movie, song, magazine, journal, newspaper article or other piece of content that offers scientific evidence regarding climate change. Rather than pull books from library shelves and search homes across the country for contraband works, all it takes today is a flip of a software switch to banish an entire topic from access.
Much of our attention to censorship in the digital era has been focused on the kind of state-operated web censorship conducted by countries like China. In contrast, the increasing use of activist censorship by streaming companies has largely flown under the radar or been seen as a positive contribution to societal good.
Unfortunately, as we normalize the idea of commercial censorship, we grant private companies broad leeway to apply the same kind of content censorship that has long governed social media networks to more traditional forms of information like books.
We also remove the ability of local governments to intervene and apply their own standards.
Libraries have long celebrated “Banned Book Week” by prominently displaying books that have been or are currently officially banned in parts of the world. In the print era, a banned book could still be obtained and displayed. In the streaming era, a unified ban by all of the major e-book and streaming vendors could render a work entirely inaccessible.
What happens when streaming companies go further and begin banning works that portray themselves or Silicon Valley in a negative light? It is not too hard to imagine a world in which the major e-book companies band together to outlaw any book that argues their industry operates as a monopoly or which recommends increased regulation.
Putting this all together, as we consider the growing ramifications of censorship and control of information in the digital era, we must look beyond the obvious cases like web censorship and towards the myriad other ways our digital dictatorships increasingly control what we see, before it is too late.
