Go and try it

Do it now, before you read the rest of this. Open the photo app on your phone, the one that has been quietly eating your life since about 2016, and type in the word weed.

Watch what happens. Which is nothing.

Not no results found, which would at least be a machine doing its job badly. A refusal. The clever new assistant they are all so proud of will not touch it, and neither will the ordinary search box that has spent ten years dutifully indexing every receipt, every braai and every photograph of your children.

Now type hemp. Works instantly.

Now type beer. There you all are. Sunburnt, delighted, going back years.

I am not naming the company. You already know which one it is. There is only one it could be, and if that reads like lawyerly caution then sit with it for a second, because an outfit that every single reader can identify from one sentence is an outfit with a frightening amount of say over what all of us get to see.

There is nobody else in the room

Every content fight I have ever had to think about comes down to a second party. Somebody who might see the thing. A child, a regulator, an advertiser of nervous disposition. You can argue about where that line sits, and it is an honest argument, because there is a person on the other end of it.

Your photo library has nobody on the other end of it.

It is yours. Your pictures, of your things, on your account, looked at by you, shown to no one. There is no audience to protect. There is fuck all to protect. No child is about to trip over your tomatoes and your five legal plants while hunting for a picture of their gran.

So what is the filter actually for?

Strip away the soothing noise about safety and community and responsible this and that, and here is what is left standing. A machine between a man and his own memory, arms folded, deciding he cannot have it.

Beer is fine, obviously

The word list gives the whole game away.

Hemp sails through. Hemp is the same plant. The entire difference is a number in a schedule and forty years of better lobbying, and the filter waves it past because hemp sounds like rope and linen and a pleasant man in a hat.

Beer sails through. Alcohol sails through. In this country alcohol fills the trauma units every Friday night, wrecks more homes than every illegal substance put together, and kills people on the N2 with tedious regularity. The machine will find it, sort it, and offer to set it to music.

Nobody looked at harm data and arrived here. This is somebody else’s drug war, fossilised, compiled into a product and exported to countries that already had the argument and came out the other way.

A rule you are not allowed to read

Now the part that ought to irritate you even if you have never touched the stuff and never intend to.

An adult in South Africa may grow and possess cannabis for private use. Nobody handed us that. It came out of our own courts and our own Parliament, and it was paid for over years by people who put their own money and their own names on the line while the rest of us watched from a safe distance.

And a filter written by people who have never heard of a single one of them, who could not find Lusikisiki with both hands and a map, overrides the lot inside your pocket. Not by making it illegal. That would need a legislature, and hearings, and somebody willing to stand up in public and be counted. Just by making it unfindable, which needs a spreadsheet.

No notice. No appeal. No regulator to write to, no reference number, no human being anywhere who will tell you what the rule even is, because as far as anyone has established nobody has explained it and nobody imagines they have to.

There are words for a rule that binds you, that you never agreed to, that you are not permitted to read and cannot challenge. Moderation is not one of them.

This is how they ban things now

And if they will do this over one man and one photograph, where there is no money at stake whatsoever, have a long think about what is happening where there is.

Nobody searches any more. They ask. They ask an assistant where to stay in South Africa, whether it is legal here, what is worth doing when they land. And behind that friendly little paragraph, a list of flagged words is quietly deciding which businesses are allowed to exist in the answer.

A guesthouse can be lawful, licensed, insured, tax paying and genuinely lovely, and simply never come up.

Not refused. Nobody tells you. There is no letter to be angry about. The tourist gets a perfectly pleasant recommendation for the place down the road that sells beer, and your business, which broke no law, was never in the running.

That is the ban now. It needs no court, no statute and no man with handcuffs. It needs a word list and a default setting, and there is nobody to serve papers on.

So we built our own bloody index

Which is exactly why CannaStaySA exists.

If the machines will not list lawful South African businesses because a plant gives their legal department a rash, then somebody local has to do it instead. So we did. It is a directory of 420 friendly places to stay and things to do in this country, put together by South Africans who know perfectly well where Port St Johns is and can spell it.

We do not sell cannabis. We never have, we are not going to, and we say so on every page. We publish information, the way any travel guide publishes information, and we hold ourselves to a compliance standard that the beer industry has somehow never once been asked to meet.

What we are is findable. The stays along the Wild Coast and Port St Johns, the Eastern Cape generally, the places that actually have somewhere outdoors you may smoke. Real businesses, real people, listed by name, with their own phone numbers on the page. No word list gets a vote.

And if you run somewhere lawful and you are sick of being invisible, put it on the directory, or advertise with us. It costs less than the silence does.

Who wins

Whoever signed off the filter, because a blunt one costs nothing and a careful one costs engineers, meetings and somebody’s quarter.

Every trust and safety department on earth, because nobody in that line of work has ever been sacked for banning too much.

And the old prohibition, which lost the public argument two decades ago and no longer needs to win it, because it does not have to be right any more. It only has to be the default.

Who loses

The woman with five legal plants who cannot find her own photographs of them.

The operator whose customers never learned he existed. That is the only customer you can never win back, because there was no moment of rejection to argue with. Just silence, and a competitor with a liquor licence.

Everybody who spent twenty years dragging this country’s law into the daylight, beaten inside a phone, by a setting, without a hearing.

And the truth, because a machine that treats a plant as unsayable teaches a hundred million people that it is unsayable, and never has to make a single argument that anyone could answer.

What we want, and it is not much

Publish the list. If you are blocking words, say which words. A secret rule is not a rule, it is a trick.

Give us somewhere to object. One button, one human, one reference number.

Work out where we are. A company that knows which suburb I am standing in can work out which country’s law governs my own photographs.

And stop calling it care. It is not care. It is a legal department with the keys to your filing cabinet, and it is kak.

Then stop building your business on an index you do not control, because it can be shut with a word list on a Tuesday afternoon and nobody will even send you an email. Come and be findable somewhere that wants you found. More of this sort of thing at Puff’nPost.

Selah. Make it before they take it.