Philosophical essay on liberty, technology, and network age without concrete allegations

In our own age, a fundamental conflict lingers as well. This is the struggle between individual liberty and connection. We have to ask a version of Hayek’s question: Are we happier, better off, more justly fulfilled through ceaseless linkage to the fast systems all around us? The appeal of constant connection is not a mere economic fact. It’s become a feature our personalities and psychologies and even the biochemistry of our brains. To be disconnected, in so many senses, hurts. And while the human twitch for freedom remains as alive as a protection for us all, Hayek's second safety catch is eroding. Networks of deep connection, speed and intelligence will be powerfully more efficient than central planning; they know more than any central bureacrat might have. And they may yet be even more productive at times in their connection and intelligence than our existing structures or markets or electoral systems. Think of the way centralized, linked dispatch systems make a “sharing” economy of on-demand cars and rooms available in ways the market itself could not. Similar alluring evolutions lie ahead in medicine, in finance, in politics. The temptation to throw all in for some sort of technological political fusion, one that promises better returns on our time and money in exchange for our liberty, will grow. When we depend so much on connection for our identity, our work, and our safety how far from John Stuart Mill’s line from On Liberty might we tread: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”34+ Are we sovereign over our own bodies and minds? Over the machines? This is nota puzzle today’s power class can or should touch. They may accidentally lead us to disaster. Hayek’s fear, that in pursuing one end (freedom) leaders would secure its opposite (tyranny), is what we should share. The tools of the network age are ripe for misuse. In some senses, they are built for misuse: They are opaque. They are blindingly fast. They seduce and enmesh us with their new power. They demand, as a result, new sensibility for their final control. There are many ways we will explore the Seventh Sense. The rise and fall of startup technology companies or terror groups or epidemics will lead us. We will examine, carefully, the tensions of a network age to understand where the cracks are coming from, and where new ideas are emerging. But I’m trying at least to write a bit with that challenge of Master Nan in mind. If we are, really, facing an ephochal change then we should handle the problems of our era with particular care; we should study the opportunities with real urgency. Two hundred years from now when the great companies and billionaires and revolutionaries of our age are crushed down below the horizon of history, it is the massive movements of states and populations that will remain, with their awful or wondrous traces. Will we live in an age of war or peace? Is that something we can actually decide? 34 When we depend so much: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and the Subjugation of Women, (New York: Penguin Classics 2007) 19. 33 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018265