There’s something that bothers me about the way we talk about speech. By ‘we’, I mean not just self-defined anarchists but the broader scope of civil-libertarians, from the EFF to the ACLU.
There are terms like “chilling effects” that, in denotation, are really well-defined, but in connotation are almost dog whistles. We cause a chilling effect when we create an environment where saying certain things has a social cost, and this is basically always framed as bad. But, it’s also a useful tool — when we create a code of conduct, set ground rules for our own spaces, encourage etiquette, or give someone a dirty look when they behave boorishly, we are using chilling effects to discourage certain kinds of mostly-communicative behaviors.
If you’re using soft power to shape the way people communicate in order to make a society work better, that’s an improvement over using hard power to police speech, from the perspective of anybody who might violate it in good faith, right? Having soft-power-oriented structures in place lets people choose to violate them when they feel like they must, & lets them change if it’s decided they’re counterproductive. It ultimately has the flexibility that hard power lacks: the upper limit on punishment is solitude, and each person chooses the extent to which they agree with enforcement.
So, the bigger deal is identifying soft power and understanding it *as* power. And, we do that pretty well in many cases (though newbie…