The Connected City of Ideas - Robert Mark Simpson W

The Connected City of Ideas The Connected City of Ideas Robert Mark Simpson We should drop the marketplace of ideas as our go-to metaphor in free speech dis- course and take up a new metaphor of the connected city. [...] We should worry about the openness and variety of the commu- nicative formats available to people for the same kinds of reasons that we worry about the openness and variety of the viewpoints people are allowed to convey. [...] Communicative life under the System would make it harder for us to transact in certain kinds of ideas, while also homogenizing and thus depleting the richness and vitality of the cognitive activities involved in those transactions.24 The marketplace metaphor’s spotlight keeps all of this in the shad- ows, and hence dampens the anxieties we should be feeling about the homogeniz- ing forces that are. [...] For a recent attempt to defend the utility of the marketplace metaphor as a way of ad- verting to the pursuit to truth-related goods, see Eugene Volokh, “In Defense of the 153 (3) Summer 2024 181 The Connected City of Ideas Marketplace of Ideas / Search for Truth as a Theory of Free Speech Protection,” Virginia Law Review 97 (3) (2011): 595. [...] 42 This point is at the heart of Mill’s condemnation of the tyranny of the majority: “Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first.