PEN was founded 100 years ago, just after the First World War, among other things to give writers the opportunity to come together and have a common purpose in the world beyond those who individually play with their individual works.
For much of its history, PEN America, the national group of which I am president, has focused on threats to free speech and persecuting writers outside of the United States.
In the last half decade, however, the focus has increasingly turned to America itself.
Much of the democratic crisis we are witnessing in America today is a crisis of free speech and expression.
Of course, there has never been so much speech, so much opinion freely and uninhibitedly expressed as there is today.
Twenty-first century technology has weakened the power of the media and even many governments, empowering voices that were previously unheard.
However, this new freedom is a central fact within a great paradox.
For while public speaking has clearly become freer in some respects, we are in the midst of a cultural shift in the United States today toward a discourse of punitive prohibitions.
Contemporary identity politics forces upon us conflicting moral maps that determine what speech is and is not acceptable to which group.
There is a growing climate of digital intimidation, and with it a fear of speaking freely or even thinking freely.
Also on the rise is a widespread intolerance of views deemed unacceptable or even “immoral”.
money through discord
Complicating this troubling picture is technology that is creating an increasingly toxic environment for free speech.
Social media platforms have refined their business models and learned that they make more money by encouraging anger, inconsistency, and contention.
Their sophisticated measurement methods draw on users' words, posts, photos, likes and comments and form the basis for programming that amplifies what is always the most outrageous and controversial.
It’s an algorithmic, millisecond-by-millisecond curation of all global opinion that makes money—big money—by sowing discord to attract attention, and harvesting the data to serve ads at every step of the process, if possible to sell.
Not only has this business model changed all public speaking, but—perhaps more importantly—the importance of listening.
One of the first victims
The fact that human speech is capitalistically exploited has created a digital apartheid in which groups separate themselves according to identity criteria and only want to take note of statements that correspond to their view of things.
These are opinions, not truths.
Worse about opinions raised to the truth.
And with that, the ground is being prepared for a gigantic and passionate proliferation of disinformation as the driving force of society.