(2018) and co-author of Emma Goldman's No-Conscription League and the First Amendment (2019).
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Structure of Ideas: Mapping a New Theory of Free Expression in the AI Era, and reported the following:
The Supreme Court, for a brief moment, was of two minds about the nature of the space for discourse. Justices both sought to create an expansive marketplace of ideas that protected the most amount of speech possible and, concurrently, protect the space from forces that would distort the flow of ideas. That’s what page 99 of The Structure of Ideas covers.Learn more about The Structure of Ideas at the Stanford University Press website.
I would not pick page 99 as a representative of the entire book. The passage catches me in the middle of identifying the conceptual development of the Supreme Court’s understandings of the space for discourse. Justices eventually tossed aside the idea that the marketplace of ideas should be protected from distortion and leaned fully into an expansive, generally unregulated space where almost any expression is protected.
A reader opening to that passage, and that passage alone, would get the kernel of an idea about one of the book’s narratives about the past, present, and future of the space for human discourse, but they would not engage with the overall context of the book. Overall, that passage is doing somewhat specialized work and is far less thematic than many other areas of the work.
Page 89 gets at crucial themes about the overall structure of the space for discourse and Page 119 begins to explore the impact of non-human speakers, such as AI, on the space for discourse. So, perhaps, I was both early and late. In either case, page 99 is a foot soldier passage in a work filled with historical narratives and crucial concepts about the development and future of the space for human discourse.
--Marshal Zeringue