Stardate 20021125.1637

(Captain's log): I think that the primary reason web loggers want to be permalinked by others is to get exposure. Depending on your site, a certain number of people who visit for the first time, no matter how, will find it attractive and decide to visit it again. I call that the "stickiness" of a site. If you work hard and produce good material consistently then you will have a decent rate of stickiness. But working hard and producing good material doesn't bring people to you for the first time, except when others link to you. So while there's nice bragging rights associated with being permalinked by someone "big" or "important" or "influential" or "well respected", the real value of it is that it gets people to view your material.

Either they link to specific things you've written, which will probably give you a big but brief pulse of visits, or even better they add a permalink to you on the main page of their site, which will ideally drive a continuous low level of traffic your way.

The more outgoing permalinks a site has, the less valuable each is because that divides the traffic pie into more pieces. The more traffic the site gets, the more valuable each permalink becomes because the traffic pie to be divided is larger.

Each time you add a new permalink, all the existing ones become less valuable. Which is one of two primary reasons I keep my list short. (The other is a technical one having to do with the site formatting. If the list becomes too long I have to make a change in the template because I'm atavistically using tables for this site instead of nice modern standard-compliant CSS, about which I have no interest whatever in learning.)

Any given person who visits your site for the first time may decide to visit again. If you work hard, produce a lot of good material on a consistent basis, then you will likely have a pretty good "stickiness" for first-time visitors. But no amount of hard work can suck people to your site; the web doesn't work that way. Traffic has to be pushed; it can't be pulled.

When you're trying to get established, and trying to build up a steady readership, ultimately you have to have people directed to you for the first time, and these days the most common way for that to happen is from another web log. (The second most common is via a search engine. Getting a link from the mainstream is unlikely until you're already established.)

Link etiquette is one of those things which is evolving as the blog medium develops, aided in part by a healthy dose of First Amendment libertarianism: "It's my site, I'll link to whoever I damned well want to". It's pretty well established now that if you find something through someone else's site to which you in turn link, that it's polite to tell people how you found it. Not doing so isn't exactly plagiarism but it has something of the same feel; you're stealing and taking credit for work someone else did. On the other hand, it's pretty well established now that a permalink is a privilege and not a right, which can be rescinded any time without explanation or apology. (I'm probably going to be significantly changing my list soon, and a lot of sites on it will be dropped to make room for others.)

The other side of that same coin is that it's pretty well established that publicly or privately threatening someone with permalink removal is at least impolite, if not downright manipulative and rude. Remove it or don't, but threats are always impolite.

Of course, there are always people who take themselves too seriously and who think they are more important than they truly are. And an unfortunately large number of those are on the political left, where there is a rising horror at the way that we bloodthirsty rabid warbloggers are perverting their medium to deliver the wrong message.

One site, "Rittenhouse Review", has decided to do something about it. Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs has been a major blip on the leftist radar for a while now, and RR has publicly stated that from now on RR will not link to any site which itself permalinks to LGF.

This strikes me as a beautiful example modern leftist activity: it's public, it's in-your-face, it demonstrates moral and ideological purity, and it will have negligible practical effect. It's pragmatically null. It's a tempest in a teapot.

Initial examination of RR's site instantly conveys an unmistakable pomposity anyway. Simply having a huge section on the sidebar dedicated to listing testimonials strikes me as strange; having it first made it worse. Hosting the site on good old free Blogspot is OK but at the same time the comment "trademarks pending" suggested that somehow the name of the site is valuable and needs to be protected at a level beyond simple copyright. (Apparently there's concern that someone else might also call their site "Rittenhouse Review", which trademark would prevent but copyright would not.) The site uses one of the standard Blogspot pre-made format templates; for all the apparent self-importance with which Capozzola approaches his work, he doesn't seem to think there's any need to actually have a distinctive look. (I'm no artist, but even I did better than that.)

The material posted on the site equally projects an impression that the author is rather full of himself. One example is the following entry, quoted in its entirety:

WEIRDO WATCH: I was thinking today that my use of the phrase “international Zionist conspiracy” on Thursday is likely to bring a whole new batch of nuts to the site.

It seems unlikely that few will actually notice, frankly.

What with having over a hundred permalinks in its blogroll, it's not obvious that any of those sites would suffer much from losing one of them. RR has no hit counter on its site so we can only speculate about its overall traffic level, but whatever it might be is divided so many ways that each individual link will mean little.

When I took a look at what sites were actually listed there, most of the ones I recognized are best described as "the usual suspects", and there was a clear ideological similarity to them. Any site which links approvingly to Warblogger Watch, This Modern World, Ted Barlow, Tapped, Sullywatch, Shadow of the Hegemon, Smirking Chimp, Media Whores, Eschaton, and Counterspin Central is applying a distinct filter to the choices. (Which is RR's privilege, of course.) I also found links to Brian Linse, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (and Teresa), and Avedon Carol, none of which do I consider extremist voices.

On the other hand, I found no links I recognized which were in any way "rightist" or "warbloggerish" or however you'd like to phrase it. What I found myself wondering was this: are any of the hundred-some blogs on RR's permalink roll actually in peril from this threat? Do any of them actually currently permalink to LGF? And if they do, will they care enough about RR's threat to remove their link to LGF so as to avoid losing RR's link to them?

I didn't wonder about something else: I have no doubt whatever that this will have zero important effect on LGF.

Deep down, what I suspect is that RR's writer is hoping to somehow start a movement, where others will join him and in turn attempt to enforce a blog-wide embargo of links to LGF. It is, shall we say, likely to be futile.

There are two levels on which this could conceivably operate; one is from my point of view acceptable and the other is not. It turns out that these issues, from an ethical standpoint, are explored quite deeply by John Stuart Mill in his critically-important book "On Liberty". There was no Internet in the middle of the 19th century, but this is still an example of something more general that he does analyze: how one should deal with people whose opinions are legal but which you find deeply repugnant. I found his arguments very persuasive. (I found all of his arguments persuasive; Mill was an amazing philosopher, and Mill and Bertrand Russell are the two historical minds who have influenced me the most strongly.)

In essence, you have no obligation to associate with people like that. You have no obligation to in any way help them spread their opinions. But you should not attempt to actively suppress them, to actively work to try to prevent them from expressing their point of view. In part that means you should not attempt to use the power of government to persecute them, but it also means you should not attempt to coerce others to join you, except through the power of argument on the basis of the issues. Where you cross the line is when you do anything which works to prevent others from making up their own minds.

Translated into modern terms and choosing an example, it would go like this: if you hate the Nazis, you should not link to their web site. If you find others who do link to the Nazis, you can send them mail and try to convince them that the Nazis are despicable and that the link should be removed on that basis. But when you go beyond that, and try to use means not related to the issues (e.g. threatening a boycott of the person's business) then you've crossed the line. You've ceased to try to deal with the issues, and moved into attempts to suppress information to prevent others from even being exposed to the issues. That's where disapproval ends and censorship begins.

Mill differentiates between not helping others find opinions of which you disapprove (which he thinks is acceptable) and actively working to prevent them from accessing those opinions (which he condemns).

RR is completely justified in not linking to LGF. RR is completely justified in attempting to convince others that LGF is not worth linking to. But with this step, RR is moving beyond that to attempt to use a level of direct coercion which I don't consider acceptable.

It is, in a sense, fortunate that RR's gesture is empty and meaningless (just as most of the gestures from the left these days I see seem to be) because if it were actually effective it would be a serious threat to freedom of expression. Whether you think that this particular case is justified, even if you think that there is no important moral difference between LGF and the Nazis (which I don't accept; I don't consider them even remotely similar) the problem is that once this idea became established as having been successful one time, it would inevitably be applied again to progressively less defensible cases. If we use coercion to enforce a ban on links to Holocaust deniers today, and to LGF tomorrow, then do we do the same to Democrats the day after? What you end up with is the Internet descending into ideological gang warfare, with thought-police roaming around looking for people who demonstrate thought-crime by linking to bad guys (with "bad" defined by the thought police, and different groups of them having different opinions) and using threats to force removal of those links.

The real reason that freedom of expression is important to a free society is that it's the flip side of freedom of access to expression. The real reason for the First Amendment is not ultimately to protect our freedom to speak. It's real purpose is to protect the broadest possible freedom to listen.

As a free citizen I want to be able to read and evaluate as wide as possible a range of opinions on any given subject so that I have the greatest amount of information possible on which to make up my own mind. Since I cannot read what no one has written, then my freedom of access depends on others having the freedom to write what they think. And since access on the Internet is based on linking (that is, after all, why it became known as "the web", because everything is directly or indirectly hooked together) then when people begin to actively attack the process of linking on ideological grounds the whole thing could fall apart, and the greatest weapon ever forged for spreading liberal democracy to the world could self-destruct through internecine warfare.

No medium has ever come remotely close to the potential the Internet has for providing unfettered access to the widest-possible range of information on every subject to such a large number of people around the world, thereby weakening oppressive governments everywhere. By the nature of the process, that means much of that information will be wrong, unwise, even evil (and the majority of it will be prosaic and prosaic); but there's no way to avoid that, and in general I'd much rather that I – and everyone else – have too much access to too much information, than to not have enough.

From my reading of Mill, I find it completely acceptable for RR (or anyone else) to not link to LGF if they find LGF's material repulsive. It is equally valid for them to attempt to directly convince others who do link to LGF to remove that link, by making an argument that LGF's message is a bad one. But I consider it wrong to use any kind of coercion outside of the issues involved to attempt to force others to remove a link to LGF involuntarily. If you can't get the link removed based on direct argument about the issues, you should move on.