has Cory Doctorow gone to the dark side?

Well I love a knee-jerk reaction as much as the next young, Interweb=dwelling blog-reader, they have responded to the controversy, and it doesn't really seem all that big a deal to me. I'm not quite ready to declare Cory Doctorow as part of the Dark Side just yet.

Addendum to the above: Whether you agree with what they did or not, it has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we turn into The Blogs That Cried Censorship every time a private organization doesn't want to post something on their web site, show something on their network, broadcast something on their radio station, etc. We can argue about whether they're doing the right thing when they do that, whether they're cowards or scumbags, or whatever. But people are way to quick to pull out the "Free Speech" thing with stuff that it just doesn't apply to.

Okay, but Boing Boing just responded to this today... after I posted this. (I don't mean to suggest that I prompted the response -- not at all. But I think the Gawker post I linked to did.) Teresa Nielsen Hayden pegs the source of the consternation in her explanation:

We do understand the confusion this caused for some, especially since we fight hard for openness and transparency.

Boing Boing has posted detailed explanations before when it has done something that appears to contradict its mission and philosophy. It didn't do that this time, which looked suspicious. I'll add that I know Teresa slightly from SF fandom, and that I've been on panels with Cory Doctorow at SF conventions. I respect them both tremendously, and I wouldn't have posted something like this -- representing my extreme disappointment -- if I didn't. I'm still not sure I buy Teresa's explanation, but I'm willing to give her and Boing Boing the benefit of the doubt... for now.

Oh, and I do think it's valid to call Boing Boing and Doctorow on this issue, because while it's not censorship in the official sense -- Boing Boing and Doctorow are not preventing anyone from posting whatever they want elsewhere -- this action, and the secrecy around it, does not correlate with Boing Boing's and Doctorow's philosophies of openness.

And that's a fair and valid criticism. Hell, I'm even inclined to agree with you there. These people know how the Internet works, they're familiar with the Streisand Effect, and they should have known better. But that being said, it really seems like it all got blown way out of proportion. And I'm not saying they shouldn't have been called on it, just that it wasn't that huge of a deal, and calling it something that it isn't (i.e. censorship) is not particularly helpful. As far as I'm concerned, Godwin's Law is in danger of being expanded to cover cries of censorship/free speech along with accusations of Nazism.

But it *is* censorship. It's not *total* censorship, but Boing Boing has censored a writer that they once considered worthy of featuring. As Teresa noted in her explanation, the Internet Archive (and presumably Google's caches) still contains records of the purged posts, which raises the question of why the site would bother to purge at all.

Well that's silly. If a TV station doesn't want to show or release on DVD a program they had broadcast back in the '50s or '60s that had sexist attitudes towards women, or actors performing in blackface or something, is that censorship? It's something they once thought was worthy of broadcast. I'd argue for them at least releasing the show on DVD, I don't think the right response to those sorts of things is plugging your fingers in your ear and pretending it never happened. To me, that sort of thing is as silly as pretending Huck Finn has no redeeming value just because it has the word "nigger" in it. So in the analogy of the TV station just not wanting to show that old program? I don't agree with it, but I wouldn't call it censorship. For whatever reason, the site decided they didn't want anything to do with the writer anymore, and didn't want to implicitly support her. And so they took down some very old posts she had made on their site. Considering how old the posts are, I'd really say it's much ado about nothing, but regardless. The content is still available, she's free to repost it wherever she wants. There's no "censorship" going on here, unless you have a very, very broad definition of what censorship is.

Your TV analogy would work if the TV station could go back in time and prevent the old material from being aired in the first place. What Boing Boing did is not comparable to simply not releasing *in a completely different form* old material -- that would only be comparable if, say, Boing Boing refused to reprint a poster's material in a book compilation. And the age of the posts is not an issue. Bloggers link to other bloggers. Sites link to other sites. All those links are now useless.

Well no analogy is perfect, of course. But where it parallels nicely is that those blog posts and TV shows would have a much, much higher number of viewings on their first airing/posting than later ones. I have no doubt that BoingBoing gets a significant amount of traffic to their archives, but the traffic to any one entry? Not going to be significant compared to when it was first posted. Hell, they said they took those entries down a year ago and people only just now noticed. I just can't get too bent out of shape about that, even though I agree with you that they did not handle this well.