CONTRIBUTOR
ASAGI HOZUMI
Membership Number: 2
Regular Member
Asagi Hozumi co-founded Antinatalism Japan in 2021, and has been the Director since then.
He is doubtful of utilitarianism, and finds much greater legitimacy in Richard D. Ryder's painism.
Oscar Piastri is his favorite racing driver.
Way too many self-proclaimed 'antinatalists' go online and post excessively aggressive or pessimistic content.
Such content often attract lots of attention by getting reposted, retweeted, screenshotted or whatever, which prevents antinatalism from gaining support, undoes hard work by serious antinatalist activists, and causes harm to painient (*1) consciousnesses who would have avoided being created if antinatalism had gained slightly more support.
Of course, some people would play a role in spreading such information in a way that works as propaganda against antinatalism because they fail (or pretend to fail) to understand that not everything antinatalists say actually reflects the content of antinatalism -- I don't intend to argue that they shouldn't be held accountable at all.
However, if you ignore the existence of such people and discharge whatever comes up on your mind onto the internet, that means you're abandoning the responsibility as an antinatalist not to hamper the progress of antinatalism, if not help accelerate it.
*1: 'painient' is an adjective meaning 'capable of experiencing pain.'
One obvious example is the damage caused by r/antinatalism (r/AN), a huge antinatalist community on Reddit.
It's one of the biggest antinatalist communities on the internet, and you can meet a wide variety of antinatalists on it; speciesist, anti-speciesist, environmentalist, misanthropic, philanthropic, etc.
When I got to know r/AN, it was filled with content that did the opposite of helping antinatalism gain support by the general public, despite the significant responsibility for shaping the public reputation of our position, which the community is burdened with, due to
the name 'r/antinatalism,'
the biggest member count of all antinatalist communities on Reddit, and
the fact it's a 'public' community, meaning anyone, familiar with the term 'antinatalism' or not, can view the content posted on it.
Such content include posts/comments where antinatalists insult pro-natalists, and those where they share their personal grief over having been created.
When I became better known for co-founding Antinatalism Japan, Oldphan, who is probably the most famous antinatalist activist on this planet, invited me to join the mod team of r/AN.
I was deeply concerned about the state of r/AN for the reasons I mentioned, so once invited, I hardly thought twice before saying yes to that offer.
If there had been any reason not to, that'd be the risk of hurting my mental well-being by exposing myself to disgusting content posted on the community.
But that wasn't strong enough to beat my sense of obligation to make good use of the opportunity given to me to stop r/AN from doing any more reputational damage to antinatalism.
I don't know if there had already been a fight between 'free speech' and 'censorship' among the mod before I joined the team, but I was always on the side of 'censorship,' arguing that we should take the power away from r/AN to hamper the progress of antinatalism by taking measures such as
banning the use of 'breeder(s),' which is a derogatory term for pro-natalists, and
switching the community to private, making it invisible to anyone who haven't joined it, taking the opportunity away from it to become the first exposure to the term 'antinatalism' to outsiders (and making r/antinatalism2, which was moderated much better than r/AN, do the job instead).
Only L, who also played a role as a moderator with the same kind of motivation as I did, understood and agreed with my views on this matter.
I have no idea why, but most of the moderators who opposed our view changed their mind at the beginning of this year, and the mod team abandoned its tradition of only removing posts/comments that violate Reddit Content Policy.
We managed to introduce 'civility rules,' which require moderators' subjective judgements when applied to posts/comments, making r/AN a slightly better place for people to encounter the term 'antinatalism' for the first time in their life.
As a result, I was finally able to allow myself to leave the mod team at the end of May this year, having a realistic expectation that the current and near future mod team would be able to minimize the damage r/AN does to antinatalism.
It's been more than 2 months since I resigned, and now I can more clearly see that the fight I experienced at the mod team wasn't really between freedom of speech and censorship.
The concept of free speech cannot be applied as some kind of absolute good to a group of people who (are supposed to) support a social movement.
Imagine some anti-racicts ranting "white people are irrational idiots" on Twitter -- they wouldn't, and shouldn't, get away with it without being told to stop doing such an irresponsible thing by serious anti-racist activists, who are aware of their duty not to hamper the progress of anti-racism.
What's happening here is clearly not censorship!
When it comes to antinatalism, it is freedom of speech that enables people to publicly support antinatalism or engage in expressive activities to advocate for it, and it is government censorship that does the opposite.
When antinatalists choose to engage in expressive activities in a way that contributes more to the growth of antinatalism instead of doing so in a way that does the opposite, we can't call that censorship.
Then what kind of content and ways of expression do I suggest?
Stay tuned for the next column by me to find that out.
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