Houman Mehrabian

Despite the increasing diversity of our online and offline communities, hate speech continues to divide us deeply. We urgently need to examine its ghastly omnipresence and our growing numbness to its harms. This article aims to identify mechanisms that exploit the right to free speech as a cover for the proliferation of hate speech in contemporary society. Chief among these is the manipulative tactic of equating resistance to today’s culture of uninhibited expression – which includes hate speech – with censorship. To begin with, I demonstrate that the idealistic “marketplace of ideas” endorsed by free speech absolutists becomes as repressive as the tyrannical censorship it fears when participants are constantly pressured into conformity. Next, I show that in this unregulated market, the idea of open dialogue gains more traction when participants are divided by hate. Finally, I examine how digital technology fosters seemingly benign habits that enable the online and offline amplification of harmful speech.

Money creeps into daily life so thoroughly that we rarely take a moment to appreciate how, as a communication technology, it steers our desires, our thinking, our connections with others. To better understand money, we need to examine the habits (both personal and social) that its use instills in us. Naturally, such an examination becomes comparative, as money has assumed various forms throughout its long evolution. This essay traces the historical trajectory of money—from early forms such as commodities and metallic coins to modern ones such as paper currency and contactless digital transactions—in order to analyze how changes in this medium of exchange have impacted individual behaviours and collective practices.