Once a month, The duty challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a notable thinker.
Since the adoption of Bill C-18 last June, we have witnessed a major standoff between the federal government and two digital giants, Meta and Google. The law requires them to negotiate an agreement with media outlets across the country, in order to remunerate them fairly for the information content that appears on their platforms. In this sense, C-18 aims to avoid the suffocation of an institution essential to democracy, journalism. But Meta and Google intend to defend their interests: Meta has recently blocked the sharing of Canadian information content on its platforms, and Google is threatening to follow suit.
In this standoff, we can rightly ask ourselves whether the Canadian state is in a position of strength. After all, his opponents are powerful, influential and determined. Let us note, however, that the pressure here weighs less on the State than on journalism, and that it is above all the latter which risks bending under the immense weight of the digital giants. However, journalism is precisely the professional activity thanks to which, in practice, we observe how authority manages our affairs for us and in our place. The removal of Canadian information content from our digital platforms therefore makes our institutions a little less transparent; it puts the conduct of each civil servant (including that of ministers) a little more shielded from public view. If, therefore, we do not yet quite understand what kind of position the Canadian state finds itself in in this standoff, let us emphasize from the outset that this is not a position of weakness.
A defender of state transparency
To explore this question further, it may be useful to consult the parliamentary speeches of Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763-1845). Both a deputy and a philosopher, he established himself in France as one of the greatest orators of the 19the century has known. An intellectual preoccupied with eminently practical problems, he participated in the establishment of several institutions that democracies use today. His interventions in the House, eagerly awaited by the public, listened to with respect by his colleagues, are small masterpieces of political thought which deserve to be rediscovered. Through contact with them, we better understand our own social and political organization.
It was in 1819 that the small group of doctrinaires, think tank policy of which he is the head, undertakes to resolve a complex problem, that of determining which facts must remain opaque to the public, and which facts must be presented to its gaze. They face a major challenge: convincing the Chamber of Deputies to grant legal protection to those who undertake to publicly denounce misdeeds committed by state officials. This involves establishing previously unprecedented transparency and lifting the veil on the way in which civil servants carry out their functions. However, many deputies were also civil servants and put up stubborn resistance to them.
Distinguish between the private sphere and the public sphere
It was largely the eloquence of Royer-Collard who, on April 29, 1819, managed to convince the Chamber of the merits of this protection. His speech shows that behind this legal question there is in fact a philosophical question. Reading it, we understand that it is squarely a question of distinguishing the public sphere from the private sphere.
Free expression must respect certain limits and stop at the threshold where private life begins. It was by penalizing defamation that we began, at the time of Royer-Collard, to delimit the contours of an individual sphere. The criminalization of defamation acts like the walls of a house: it “declares invisible” the purely personal and intimate details of life, those which do not concern the common interest. In this sphere, the individual can make his choices without fear of seeing them exposed to the unhealthy curiosity of the crowd. His reputation is sheltered from judgments, mockery and unnecessary nastiness. What makes this sphere private is therefore the exclusion of the gaze of others.
As Royer-Collard asserts from the podium, it is a question of knowing whether we want to “wall off” public life in the same way. Because the nature of the public sphere appears by reversing this picture: it is the place which, although it belongs to everyone, does not truly belong to anyone in particular, not even to those who administer it. This place remains public as long as their words, gestures and decisions can be seen by everyone to be judged. Then the authority finds itself dispossessed of its reputation; she loses control of the image through which she appears. The public’s favor or disfavor can now fluctuate depending on the choices it makes — a fundamental condition for the representativeness of institutions.
It is this dispossession which, it seems, draws authority towards the satisfaction of general needs and prevents it from making the common thing its own thing. “If you walled off public life,” he asserted to the deputies who listened to him, “if you declared that it was not permissible to say that a public official did what he did, said what he said as a public man; you would recognize that public power belongs to him as private life belongs to each individual; that public power is its domain.” Setting up a wall that is too opaque around our institutions means asserting that it is not up to the public to understand how we manage their affairs. This is to pretend that these matters in fact fall within a private sphere: that of the State and its immense administrative apparatus.
The glass house
This is why Royer-Collard declares that, behind a seemingly innocuous question of law, lies the resolution of a very old problem: that of knowing whether society belongs to its officials, or whether the officials belong to society. “If you decide that it is not permissible to tell the truth about the actions of public authorities, […] by this alone you will decide that society does not belong to itself, that it is owned by the officials, that it is subservient to them like a territory. » The figures of the individual and the citizen then disappear behind that of the administered person. This time, dispossession is on his side. We are completely administered when, willingly or by force, we have abandoned responsibility for our own fate and have delegated this responsibility to others.
If this speech by Royer-Collard is valuable, it is because it shows how individual freedom and political freedom depend on the line of demarcation between the private and public spheres. The private sphere exists through the protection of individual reputation; the public sphere, by putting the reputation of power at stake. In the first case, free expression must encounter a limit; in the second, it must enjoy the possibility of exposing the facts to the light of day. Hence this simple principle: if the private life of civil servants belongs to them, their public life, on the other hand, belongs to the public. We could take up here a strong image which was circulating in the press at the time. If it is absolutely necessary to build walls around the management of common affairs, these walls should have the transparency of glass. In other words, to ensure that our institutions truly serve our interests, they must together form a large glass house.
Our digital “walls”
Let’s return to our original question. What risks bending under the pressure exerted here by Meta and Google is journalism, that is to say the professional activity which allows the idea of transparency to become more than a simple fiction. The misdeeds, deviations and errors of authority only become visible when they are stated – and denounced – publicly. However, by interposing themselves between journalists and the public, digital giants are making the public sphere more opaque. They make themselves opaque walls.
This is why they play irresponsibly with the nature of our institutions. If information content were to be permanently removed from their platforms, and if, at the same time, the financial asphyxiation of the media continued, it would become ever easier for the State to treat its management of common affairs as its territory, as its domain. , like his private sphere. As for us, if we were not able to hold our administrators responsible for their conduct, we would slip even further into the situation of simple administrators – a situation hardly compatible with the fundamental requirements of democracy.
What would then consist of the “public sphere” that we would find on our platforms? In what space would our browser “windows” open? In a space devoid of reference points, because it is flooded with disinformation. It would also be a tasteless space, nourished by the voluntary exhibition of the intimate lives of users. Our gaze would sometimes be deceived there, sometimes drawn back to our private spheres. In other words, we would have more opaque institutions, while our own homes have already acquired, in practice, the transparency of glass.
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