Boredatbutler: A Tragic Failing

Proponents of electric automobiles understand that there are few things more painful than the death of a good idea. More painful still is when that idea dies quietly and without controversy. An incredibly good idea died this past week. Information to this effect was buried deep in a Spectator news article, but the end of Boredatbutler.com's policy of unmitigated, uncensored free speech is more significant than this nonchalance would suggest.

Boredatbutler is now voluntarily corrupting the very freedom of speech that made it such a daring and oftentimes entertaining social experiment. That experiment, or at least some aspects of it, has failed. And the confluence of failure and freedom of speech is never insignificant.

For roughly the past year, Boredatbutler.com has been a digital, perfect state of nature: anybody possessing a Columbia University e-mail address or using a computer within a Columbia network can instantly post anything on the site's message board. The only right the user exchanges for the unlimited degree of freedom the Web site affords is the right to a personal identity-all posts are anonymous, and posts referencing specific names are deleted by site administrators. This allows for discussions covering everything from current events to an individual's current desire to suck off the guy in the blue shorts tanning on the quad, to borrow just one of literally thousands of other similar examples. It is a format that allows people to speak free of social constraints, to air ideas and personal feelings however base or scatological, and to do what is impossible virtually everywhere else: say whatever the hell they want to.

Until this past week, that is. On Jan. 19, Spectator reported that complaints over racially insensitive posts had led site founder Jonathan Pappas, CC '06 "to include a swear-word-counting algorithm that rates the appropriateness of a post based on the number of controversial words and removes the post should the count get too high."

It is troubling that a once-uninhibited marketplace of ideas now has a built-in censorship mechanism targeting a vague category of words (the article included no mention of what "controversial" could mean). But free speech now comes with a caveat, and incidents like last year's Muhammad cartoon riots and the Minuteman stage-storming have already suggested that we are free to speak only insomuch as others are free not to be offended. Then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan revealingly responded to the former by claiming that "freedom of speech is not a license," and could not be exercised without "responsibility" and "judgment"-which came as a shock to those who value freedom of speech precisely because it is a license, and who see despotic overtones in any assertion that it is a right reserved for some and not for others.

Minuteman stage-rusher Karina Garcia closed a recent Spectator opinion piece by expressing pride in the fact that "racist and fascist groups are not welcome at Columbia"-but this approach makes the right to free speech as equivocal as one individual's definition of "fascist" and "racist" is subjective. The cartoon riots, the Minuteman incident, and Boredatbutler.com's changes reinforce the notion that freedom of speech is less about speaking freely and increasingly about insulating ourselves from what we consider to be irresponsible or offensive.

And, as with the Minuteman stage-rushing and the cartoon riots, the Web site's changes invite the question of whether unlimited free speech is untenable and whether the unavoidable issue of extreme or offensive speech is being settled through the repudiation of Boredatbutler.com-style intellectual anarchy. This seems to be the case and the reasons for the Web site's changes indicate that Clarence Darrow's assertion that the only thing guaranteeing his freedom was the freedom of others has given way to the opposite attitude: that the only thing guaranteeing my peace of mind is your responsibility not to piss me off.

Of course, those who complained to Columbia's administration about the content of the site were deeply offended by the posts in question, but freedom of speech is, by definition, the right to offend. And if it must now be moderated in the name of sensitivity and responsibility, a disquieting question remains: if some of the smartest kids in the country can't rise to the level of responsibility unlimited freedom of speech now apparently demands, then who can?