On Freedom

Digital oligarchs distract us with promises of a high-tech future while pinning us with brain hacks to the untenable present.

Escapism is the absolutely predictable oligarchic posture during catastrophic times. The rest of us have to endure the oligarchs’ moronic fantasies—Ukraine is Russia, immortality is possible, space travel will save us, life might be a simulation—as time runs out on our hopes for dignity and survival as a species. A poignant element of our tragedy i

Freedom cannot be selfish. To declare oneself free is to promise to act such that others can be free. We must imagine a society of free people and try to build it. Morally, logically, and politically, there is no freedom without solidarity.

It was hard for people to find spontaneous human connections when they felt that they had to demonstrate conformism to get through the day. What they cared about came to seem shameful and secret.

We cannot be free unless our truths can be greeted by others, which means that we and they must share a common human understanding that there is such a thing as truth, that someone else’s bodily experience has a dignity that I can understand even if the experience was not mine.

If freedom is the value of life, one of its forms is the self-conscious labor of making freedom possible for others. Solidarity is the guiding light of a land of the free.

The very phrase free speech, though we say it all the time, gets us on the wrong track. It suggests that speech is what is oppressed and what is to be liberated. That is incorrect. There is no speech without a Leib, without a person. Speech is not oppressed. People who speak are oppressed. Speech cannot be liberated. People must be liberated so tha

It is worth being very attentive when oligarchs talk about free speech. The issue is not just that they are insincere or hypocritical. It is that they seek to traduce freedom of speech by making it seem senseless.

Only humans go into the world to discover the new and unpredictable. The mass delivery of plagiarism and fiction can be done by machines. Reporting cannot.