THE PRICE OF A WORD

WHAT MAY NOT BE SAID

von Boris Kriger

222 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Nobody has ever successfully banned a thought. This is not because tyrants lacked ambition. It is because a thought cannot be inspected, and a word can. Every prohibition in history, from the name of a god to the keyword list of an advertising platform, has therefore landed on the same small target: the token, the string, the sayable unit. And a token, once forbidden, does not disappear. It acquires a price.This book follows that price. It shows why banning a word reliably produces a new word rather than a silence, why forbidden speech survives in the brains of people who have lost the rest of language, and why George Orwell's most quoted prediction is also his least defensible one. It then asks the harder question. If prohibition is philosophically futile, why does it so obviously work? The answer is not that censors suppress belief. It is that they raise the cost of assembling around a belief, and coordination, unlike conviction, can be priced out of reach.The last third of the book arrives in the present, where the censor has quietly changed shape. The old censor was obliged to announce himself, because a ban that nobody hears deters nobody. The new one is obliged to stay silent, because an announced suppression creates an appeal, a martyr, and a headline, while an unannounced one is indistinguishable from writing something dull. He is not evil. He is cheap, fast, approximately eighty percent accurate, and paid for by an advertising department whose guidelines now constitute the most widely enforced speech code on the planet - enforced, as it happens, by nobody in particular.Written with affection for a subject that keeps outliving its opponents, this is a book about what a ban can reach, what it cannot, and who is quietly paying the difference.Keywords: censorship, free speech, taboo, language and thought, content moderation, algorithms, Overton window

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175581592
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 19.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published