On Freedom, page 30
We can behave better or worse as individuals, but we cannot reform the internet without the right principles and their application as policy. We have to start from the premise that freedom is positive. It was repressive, in this domain, to keep government out; because government did too little, the internet brought unelected and unchosen manipulators into our homes, lives, and minds. We must begin with the Leib, the knowledge we gain when we see the defensive flaccidity of others and realize that the same has happened to us. A digital policy that liberates our bodies can begin with our minds, since that is what we have to lose. Americans should all have a reasonable chance to develop and to protect their minds, a right to habeas mentem. In twenty-first-century America, a right to habeas mentem would suggest a public mandate, a private one, and a charter for fair transparency.
The public mandate is access to public school. Human children need human schools. They should learn to express themselves before things are expressed through them. Our digital oligarchs usually attended schools without screens, and they insist on the same for their children. Americans nevertheless spend more than $10 billion every year to put screens in schools so that oligarchs can profit from stunting the education of nonoligarchical children. We should pay teachers and librarians instead. (Those librarians must be able to shelve books in peace, without having to look over their shoulders for self-righteous censors or fear denunciations from angry parents.) If there is a screen in front of a child at school, it should be for the purpose of learning to code. The Online Privacy Protection Act of 2000 should be modified so that youths ages thirteen to eighteen are no longer treated as adults.
The machine has to be a tool for the pupil, not the other way around. Students need math and physics for self-defense against oligarchy. They need history for a sense of structure and possibility, and arts and humanities to develop values. Art is what shakes up the everyday and exposes the present moment for us, enabling us to make the unexpected connections from the past to the future. A lyric in a song, a peal of a bell, or a bit of stained glass can open a channel and change a person’s world. Students need books in the library that will surprise and challenge them. Every grade of every American school should publish a newspaper, based on reporting.
This mandate includes a thriving system of public universities, accessible to all. Students should not leave university with debts that block their mobility and constrain their lives. To be public means to be constructed in a way that serves the larger value of freedom of speech. Like the institution of journalism, the institution of the autonomous public university helps young Americans grow up to become free speakers.
A campaign against freedom of speech is directed against universities in the name of “free speech” itself. The plan is to destroy both the universities and the freedom. Colleges and universities teach what students will not learn elsewhere and at other times in life, and that is all to the good. Students learn, and students question. Universities enable young people, who we hope are already sovereign and unpredictable, to embrace mobility: in space, in time, in values. Aside from the instruction they receive, they enjoy years, at a critical moment in life, when they can say what they think. This is a precious chance for them to become free speakers, and for many of them it will be the last one. For this very reason, universities are attacked by tyrants and their satraps.
I was expected to work in school and during college, and six years passed between my doctoral degree and my first (and thus far only) job with health insurance. I worked a variety of jobs, from telemarketing to construction, and I can say with confidence that the degree of freedom of speech that prevails on a campus is incomparably greater than on other worksites. Students have the chance to develop opinions and reconsider values. Autonomous public universities thus serve the forms of freedom. For them to remain autonomous and public, they must be self-governing. Placing universities under the direction of political commissars would disable them and leave young people less free.
The private mandate is the teaching of professional ethics to software engineers and computer programmers and the establishment of bodies (such as exist in other professions) to sanction violations. Machines have no values. Neither freedom nor any other value will be present in computer programs unless humans put it there. Today this realm operates largely without ethics. Coaches on a playing field have ethics, but the authors of our docility do not; judges of written laws have ethics, but makers of the unpublished rules of social media do not; therapists have ethics, but influencers do not. To be sure, corporations sometimes do good things: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google did important work to defend Ukraine from cyberwar. But a better internet will depend on people who think better about the freedom of others and who understand their work as a profession with ethics and rules.
After the public mandate and the private mandate, Americans would benefit from a charter of fair transparency, which begins from the premise that machines serve minds, not the other way around, and that a person should be able to judge whether this is the case. The overall relationship between mind and machine can be established only by a collective effort, which is to say by policy.
A charter for fair transparency would be based on three principles: (1) things should be transparent to us; (2) we should not be transparent to things; and (3) we should not be oppressed by data we cannot see.
From the principle that things should be transparent to us flow five good practices. (1) Social media must ask whether users want investigative reporting in their feeds and open an appropriate algorithmic pathway. (2) Social media must ask whether users want opinions that challenge their own and open an appropriate algorithmic pathway. (3) Social media must issue corrections to users who have viewed false material that was presented to them as news. (4) Every statement and advertisement on social media must be traceable to a human being. (5) All code should be accessible, at a glance and a click, its purpose described in an intelligible English summary.
From the principle that we should not be transparent to things flow the next five good practices. (6) We should have to opt into (and not opt out of) the sharing of our data. The default setting on all software should be zero data retention and zero data transfer to third-party sites. (7) Data arising from an action should be communicated only for its plain purpose rather than stored or sold. (8) Every data harvest that does occur should be compensated and listed in a register. (9) Intimate data regarding health, location, and the like should never be stored or transferred. (10) Software must offer privacy settings that are accessible, uncomplicated, and durable (rather than having to be constantly reaffirmed).
The third principle is that we should not suffer from data inequalities. From it flow the final five good practices. (11) We should have the right to see which private entities know what about us and to correct their mistakes. (12) Algorithmic screening of job and school applicants must generate a legible record of the reason for rejection. (13) Public health data that arises from the testing of our bodies must be accessible to us. (14) Nongovernmental organizations should be authorized, at our request, to help us make sense of our data profiles. (15) When we lack traditional documentation, we should be allowed to use known data flows to establish our identity.
It takes a while for a new right such as habeas mentem to be established. In the meantime, our choices matter all the more.
Listeners
Declaring for freedom means declaring for freedom of speech. Declaring for freedom of speech means taking the side of the facts. Taking the side of the facts means supporting the institutions that give them a home.
A declaration is balanced by an accommodation. A free speaker is taking a risk. Those who take risks need solidarity, in the form of protection of the freedom of speech. A country of free speakers requires the institutions that regulate these risks and thereby make factuality possible.
Free speakers are necessary, but so are receptive listeners. We need the calm capacity to pay attention. People who live within big lies do so because they feel isolated and powerless. They do not believe that they make a difference in the world, so they accept that a conspiracy governs everything. In a vicious cycle, unfreedom advances lies, which makes people still less free. We need a virtuous cycle of freedom and courage.
A good government would take specific steps to protect investigation and encourage its reception. The legal scholar Zechariah Chafee, a leading interpreter of the First Amendment, knew that freedom of speech required that we take “affirmative steps to improve the methods by which discussion is carried out.” Around the world, the better democracies do just this. The Norwegian constitution, for one, requires the state to create favorable conditions for discussion.
Americans, when asked, say that journalists should monitor governments and companies on the basis of verified facts. This declaration should be accommodated but is not. If there are not enough journalists to do what we want, then we are less free. Americans also say, when asked, that they prefer that their views be challenged online. Since we lack the option to support actual reporting on social media, we are less free. Given that Americans spend about two hundred billion hours a year on social media, this is a consequential violation of rights.
Historically speaking, it is normal to regulate new media so that rights can be formulated, acknowledged, and respected. It is precisely these conventions that create the forms that we then take for granted, such as, for example, the book. We protect freedom of speech not only when we resist censorship or express horror at book burnings, but also when we make expression possible with norms about plagiarism and copyright. Yet the institution of copyright did not arise automatically after the invention of the printing press. It was made by people, justified by values, and enforced by the state. This lesson must be applied to social media. We will be freer when we have a setting on our platforms that promotes local journalists in our feeds. They should be supported in the precise sense of getting paid for their valuable work.
We cannot get free of the internet, but we can assert human values upon it. It is not freedom to be continuously nudged in the direction of prejudices and vulnerabilities shared by a class of people we neither see nor choose. It is freedom to make an evaluation and realize it. The brain hacks push us toward alienation and powerlessness. This is not neutral: it drives us away from factuality and thus from freedom. If social media are impossible to avoid, then they must be altered to enable liberty.
Freedom of speech is not the surging emotion of a given moment. Emotions and moments are easily managed by oligarchs and machines. Freedom of speech is grander than that and rests on the foundations of humility and risk.
News
Americans say that they want “significant roughness”: fresh and renewed factuality. The people who supply facts on a daily basis are investigative journalists. Some of the most important reporters cover local news. Candidates for local office lie—how to check? They raise money—from whom? Local governments spend money—on what? Firms pollute—where? In most of the counties in the United States, no one has any idea about any of these things, because reporters no longer cover any of these beats. Most of American territory is a news desert, and a news desert is no land of the free. We need home truths, both for their own sake and as preparation for the larger ones. A vacuum of local factuality draws in the big lies and the conspiracy theories.
As Simone Weil wrote, discovering and receiving the truth takes work, whereas producing and believing the false is effortless. Facts are indispensable; they have costs; and people aspiring to freedom will bear them. Americans talk all day long about the news but pay almost no one to report it. Most of what passes as “news” is repetition, speculation, and spin. Investigative journalists do heroic, indispensable work. But they are far too few. Specialists in public relations now outnumber journalists by about six to one. Let us imagine a country where the ratio was even.
James Madison, envisioning the future of America, hoped for a “circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people.” That once existed. When George Orwell wrote his novel 1984 (in the year 1948), there were about ten million more newspaper subscriptions in the United States than there were households. Today our reality approaches the society described in the novel: we all look at screens, and Americans in most parts of the country have no access to any human reporting about the world around them. Every American county should have a local news source with local reporting by local reporters. News deserts should be replaced with news fountains.
So long as our minds are ensnared by negative freedom, we will see no solution to any of this. If we believe that government is there to be hobbled, we will discern no policies that would enable freedom, even when they are close at hand.
The purpose of government is to establish the forms of freedom. Factuality is needed for all the rest, and factuality requires policy. Freedom of speech is hard national work. Investigation, local newspapers, and newsstands should all be subsidized. Public schools should teach reporting through field trips and live conversations. A news ombudsperson in every American county could record local meetings and the relevant documentation, all to be uploaded on a national Wiki system. College graduates should be offered a year of public service to serve as local correspondents.
Local news is a public service. It can be very easily justified in purely economic terms, as a brake on corruption and waste. But the larger point is that we all need knowledge about what is happening right around us. The resources are at hand. Internet firms make tremendous profits by distributing reporting for which they do not pay, while drawing advertising revenues away from the people who are doing the actual work. These costs could be corrected; or, as the economists say, the externalities could be internalized. Targeted advertising should be taxed to support local reporting.
Factuality is an indispensable form of freedom. As we lose it, life seems ever more chaotic, the past harder to remember, the future less assured. But factuality can be attained. We have the tools. We can be free speakers, and we can be free people.
Rings
Right before I rang that bell on the farm, I was sitting on a swing that hung from a limb of a maple tree. Its branches covered the first few rows of a cornfield. An old sycamore on the other side of the gravel lane shaded the farmhouse. The valleys marking the boundaries of the farm were still wooded. We kids explored the woods and the creeks, as our parents and grandparents had before us.
Trees ring, though in a different way than bells. Each ring of a tree records a year of growth, persistence, and survival. Tree rings convey a smooth accommodation to the challenges of the seasons, grading time by growing in space. The old sycamore has a ring for every year the house has stood. When a tree dies, the rings can tell us about the past, just as air bubbles in melting glaciers can, just as arrowheads can, just as fossils can. These little signs from other lives can help us to situate ourselves and to see our moment for what it is.
My little declaration of freedom in 1976 was loud and clear. It was mine, but it was not made by me alone. The idea to ring the bell was that of an older cousin, who often set an example. She kept us in an orderly line, a convention that allowed each of us to do what we wished when the time came. My cousins and I were all on a farm, a human landscape that we children had done nothing to create. Someone else had laid down the country roads and the gravel lane. Someone else had planted the trees. Sycamores grow by creeks; the one that shades the farmhouse was replanted, probably in 1825. Someone else, my maternal grandfather, had hung the bell.
It rang, over the decades, to bring people together. It once called children to the one-room schoolhouse on the corner of the two roads where my mother’s family settled. My mother’s father’s father, my great-grandfather, attended that school. When the school was torn down, the bell was moved to another farm, where my mother’s father was raised. There it was a farmyard bell, calling the men in the fields back for dinner. When my grandfather retired from farming, he moved the bell to the farm he took over as an adult, the one I knew as a child. It has been ringing continuously far longer than the Liberty Bell ever did, for well over a century now. Perhaps bells ought to be small.
As a boy, I had only a very broad sense of these debts. I knew that the sycamore was as old as the house. I knew who tilled the soil: my grandfather. He called his acres “Arrowhead Farms,” after the flint relics that he found in his fields. He kept them in wooden cases lined with red felt. He occasionally took them on tour, wearing a bolo tie with a blue stone.
Someone else provided me with food, drink, shelter, language, a past. I did not find out for myself about cracked bells and underground railroads. Books were laid before me; stories were told to me. Though freedom is a quality of a single life, it is the work of generations. The bell is an object of sentiment for me, but it is in my life and on these pages only because it was also an object of sentiment for my grandfather, and that was only true because it had called farmers to work and children to school. Only an individual can be free, but only a community can make individuals. And yet for a community to do this, generation upon generation, its practices must be examined in light of the demands of freedom.
