Liberty, Liberally May 2023

Liberty, Liberally

Broken TV Stare

Can’t Be Deleted

The Internet Is Inherently Insecure (and always has been)

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 2021

There is a permanence to paper. Not compared to the stone carvings that preceded scrolls, but human history has unrolled on paper.

The internet, on the other hand, is a flickering flame. Quickly extinguished with the flick of wrist, the entire system of communication - or just your own ability to communicate - can be turned off. With some unknown, faraway hand on the mouse, they can simply delete your self-expression, if it goes against ‘community standards’, whatever that might mean at the moment.

The Constitution doesn’t change, they can’t go back and just edit it, it’s not a blog post. It doesn’t change with the latest update on your phone. The Law of the Land is considered to be consistent, and all individuals are guaranteed the rights described therein. The freedom of the Press is a freedom to express one’s self, one’s conscientious concerns, as the courts have defined it. This is a broad interpretation that the individual’s freedom of the press extends beyond the printing press into all modern media of mass communication, whether radio, television, or the internet, but still, the letter of the law specifically respects the individual’s right to print things on paper with the intent of public distribution.

The ‘Press’ being described in the First Amendment is, in fact, the printing press, and nothing else.

At the time this clause was written, the printing press was a powerful weapon, a tool in the hands of average people, to express their own beliefs - anonymously if necessary - in order to affect the public discourse. The founders understood how powerful this was, an antidote to the heavy-handed control of monarchs and other dictators. They had seen that it was not guns alone that secured their revolution against the monarchies of Europe, but first it was a weapon of words, made possible by the printing press.

Nowadays, we have electronic devices, that use light and technology to (temporarily) show us more information than we could ever imagine. However, more and more we see less and less information that counters the prevailing narrative. This de facto-fascistic censorship, with the government and the corporations controlling the flow of info, hasn’t technically infringed on our Freedom of the Press, but bypassed it entirely, and this danger has revealed itself more clearly than I could have possibly described it these last 13+ years. And describe it I have.

For more than 13 years, I’ve written and warned about how the internet was a bottleneck that was easily controlled, and how the potential for control of the individual’s self-expression was great. I’ve told people that while the internet makes it easy to express oneself, it also makes it easy to silence large segments of society, or even specific voices.

Honestly, most people didn’t want to hear it. Up until now, it hasn’t affected most people. But that is changing, and will likely continue, and more rapidly as it does.

Now it’s clear what I’ve been saying, and why I’ve continued to strive to keep The People’s Paper and Make A Scene Magazine alive.

We’ve been able to grow, slow and steady, over the years. In spite of the naysayers saying ‘Print Is Dead’, literally from the first edition we printed, we’ve grown.

I think this is because we were keeping something sacred.

The printing press produces actual hard copies of our self-expression. If you print something on 10,000 (NOTE: As of 2023, The People’s Paper is now at 17,000 copies per issue) separate pieces of paper, and physically distribute those hard copies to hundreds of distribution points around your community, Mark Zuckerberg can’t possibly go round them all up, can he?

Jack Dorsey of Twitter, where they’re all atwitter about Trump, can’t decide that your take on current events isn’t acceptable. He can’t make it go away with a mouse click.

Even Josh Fryfogle (yours truly, the owner of The People’s Paper) can’t possibly un-ring that bell. Once it’s printed and distributed, it’s beyond even the reach of the individual who printed them.

You might notice that people are complaining about their perceived loss of ‘freedom of speech’, but what they’ve lost is actually more akin to freedom of the press than that of speech. While the internet allows for multi-media expression, it’s the use of a medium (the internet) that makes it more like freedom of press than speech. Unlike freedom of press, however, is the lack of a material medium. There is nothing tangible or concrete to receive the ‘im-pression’ of the printing press. Nothing of permanence.

From a First Amendment perspective, this is an inherent security flaw. While the internet makes it easy to express oneself, it makes it incredibly easy to stifle that same self-expression.

The People’s Paper and Make A Scene Magazine (which I’ve stewarded for more than 13 years) are completely devoted to the voices of local people like you. We always have been. We’ve been publishing what local people send us, and nothing more, for all this time. We’ve stood the test of time, because we’re devoted to the mission of the First Amendment - to facilitate the free expression of the conscientious concerns of local people like you.

We relinquish control of the content of our paper, handing it over to the people in the community. Then, we relinquish control of the narrative, with each hard copy that we hand out to the public.

You’re welcome.

You’re welcome to publish your content, in a more permanent way, on paper at MakeASceneAK.com

We’ll do the printing and distribution.

by Joshua Fryfogle

Written on 4.19.15

We could start a revolution

But the TV wouldn't care

Just another revolution

In the cycle of despair

We would take up arms as armies

If we all were made aware

But the TV doesn't tell us

So we think there's nothing there

We could start a conversation

But really, who would dare

And face the consternation

Of the broken tv stare?

We’ve gotten a surprising number of donations from community members at The People’s Paper and Make A Scene Magazine over the years, and recently it’s increased with the publication of Liberty, Liberally.

We’ve also received many requests for subscription services, requests to mail Liberty, Liberally, and our other publications to people near and far... So we thought, why not make it easier to

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Thanks so much for your words of encouragement and financial support over the years. We take your trust very seriously, as we steward content from you and your neighbors onto the printed page. It’s an American tradition which we are blessed to uphold.