Those who live permanently in the past can't see the inevitability of the present. Those who worship the stegosaurus would do something so comical, so anachronistic as banning a computer game that most people have never heard of, prompting nearly everyone to hear about it and wanting to play it — just for kicks, just for a slap to the face, just to prove that techno-terrorism will leave the dinosaurs behind. In the world of bandwidth, in a time when information always slips through the iron fist like water or like pus, in short, in the downloadable, Wiki-leakable 21st century — banning data is the practice of ants trapped in prehistoric amber.
The future is vulnerable and the past is perfect, that's our motto of the year — the motto of insects struggling against the lava of time. The Office of Cultural Promotion's decision to ban Tropico 5, a city-building simulation game that involves empires, coups and dictatorial exercise, is the funniest nonsense in recent memory; it cracked people up, because it shows how out of touch our cultural watch-puppy is. As soon as the laughable decision was announced, the pirates sailed into the bay and download links were distributed like supermarket coupons. Information, for better or worse, wants to be free. It's scary, but in many ways, information has been freed. Censorship is primitive and impossible (at least mentally), and those who fail to realise that are living in the unreal past populated only by ghosts, mammoths and extinct amphibians.
Naturally as the world hurtles forward, the reaction from the past-perfect specimen is intense. That's their only way to fight the vertigo brought by social changes, technology and individualism: they fight back with more bans, more surveillance, more moral paranoia, more national security alarm, more very old National Legislative Assembly members (I feel sorry for some of them), more self-righteousness, more 1970s-style audio-visual propaganda, and more conviction that the way to the future is to blast us back into the past — the political, as well as cultural and psychological past.
The banning of Tropico 5 isn't an isolated incident; it should be viewed as a sign of the times. Most reports by foreign news agencies invariably cite that the censors "operate on behalf of the country's military leaders"; to be fair, the Cultural Promotion Office had axed content long before the latest coup (remember the Shakespeare Must Die and Syndromes and a Century fiasco?) but their mandate and justification was obviously bolstered by the official practice of controlling words and thoughts. And the signs are everywhere: on television, which has become more banal than ever, streaks of radical intelligence are being checked and even publicly punished.
The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) yesterday held a seminar on the "appropriate content" of TV soaps — is the frequency regulator entertaining the idea of vigilantism? Last week, rumour spread that the NBTC was looking into the case of the TV series about sexually enthusiastic teenagers, Hormones (the commission said it was an unfounded rumour). Also last week, the NBTC, citing a regulation on national security, slapped Thai PBS with a fine for airing a talk show programme Tob Jote last year that discussed the sensitive subject of monarchy. In other words, it slits a chicken's throat in the town square as a warning.
In the early 20th century, the most powerful censorship agency in the US was the post office. To prevent indecency, foreign spies and anarchists, the post office was empowered to control letters and magazine circulation, and the climate of suppression was dramatically justified by the threat of the First World War. In its mind, the US is still at war 100 years later, and its method of control has evolved to include the sophisticated tentacles of digital surveillance — think Edward Snowden and his "traitor" label — though it at least maintains a semblance of openness by not banning computer games or TV shows.
Here, who are we at war with? Are we facing a threat of pornographers, foreign spies and anarchists? In the post-modern century, our censors still operate in the pre-modern mindset, and my worst fear is that such mindset would soon be constitutionalised (a constitution that can't be amended) by the national assembly of old generals. The only war they're fighting isn't against Tropico 5, or Hormones, or a sensitive talk show; what they're fighting against is youth, technology, and a concept of the future — an elusive future, but a future towards which the whole world is moving. The past isn't perfect, and it's sad that there are still a lot of (good) people who don't realise that the world only moves in one direction: Forward.
Kong Rithdee is deputy Life editor, Bangkok Post.