Tags : Freedom of Speech

This post is a long-delayed continuation of one from April last year. Good thing I was slow—there’ve been big advances in bowdler-tech since then! The previous post began with embarrassment at David’s classical naughty bits reddening the necks of Florida conservatives. Let’s return to David to see how advanced technology can help conservatives cover up the naughty bits and protect school kids from learning that such bits exist.

One of the largest 3D printing projects ever was a full-scale David replica printed for the 2020 exposition in Dubai. The University of Florence, which ran the project in collaboration with Sweden’s Hexagon, insisted on faithful replication—of everything. So, to protect the sensibilities of conservative Muslims, David was presented to the public only from the shoulders up. The elite could ogle his nether parts from a restricted viewing room downstairs. …

These are heady times for bowdlers and censors of all stripes. Not only is there a surge in demand by culture warriors on the far right and ultra-woke left to revise histories, lived experiences, and everyday language they deem unsavory or inconvenient, but there are great new tools to get the job done. This post looks at the market for ‘bowdler-tech’, a fast-growing specialization within the broader repression-tech industry.¹ Follow-on posts look at nifty gadgets for bowdlerizing at scales never seen before.

To ‘bowdlerize’ means to remove or alter parts of a text deemed too immoral, vulgar, irreverent, or politically inconvenient for ordinary folk to see. It takes but a small liberty to extend the term to other kinds of art. The word honors Thomas Bowdler², an English editor who published a “family-friendly” version of Shakespeare’s works, with all the bits his blue-stockinged sister thought too juicy removed.

The David affair

A conservative …

On December 26, 2022, Russian police stormed the apartment of nineteen-year-old University student Olesya Krivtsova, threatened her with a sledgehammer, then arrested her for terrorism. She’d been denounced to the FSB by fellow students and a vigilante troll. Her crime? An Instagram post questioning the war in Ukraine. But this isn’t a story about a teenager’s naive mistake; it’s a story about the courage to speak truth to power even in the face of its wrath, gently, and without rancor.

This post is essentially the journal I kept while following the story, which was reported in various news outlets and blogs over the months. I’ve listed the main sources at the end, especially for the pictures.

As I followed this story, I was struck by the recurring pattern of history: snitching and denunciation in a totalitarian police state; the pathos of a new generation, including University history students, blind to the lessons of the past, meekly buying into the …