On Freedom, page 37
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sense of the continuity: Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Grasset, 1913). Consider also Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. Eric Karpeles (New York: New York Review Books, 2018). This book was published in the original French in 1948.
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Our minds flutter: Sheri Madigan et al., “Association Between Screen Time and Children’s Performance on a Developmental Screening Test,” JAMA Pediatrics 173, no. 3 (2019): 244–50; Seungyeon Lee et al., “The Effects of Cell Phone Use and Emotion-Regulation Style on College Students’ Learning,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 31, no. 3 (June 2017): 360–66.
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we do not remember: Adrian F. Ward et al., “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” Journal of the Association of Consumer Research 2, no. 2 (2017).
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How do we regain time?: When I was recovering from serious illness in the hospital and unable to sleep, I listened to music that helped me to remember my life.
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gives way to increasing fear: As I wrote these endnotes, a colleague’s lecture was changed into a moderated conversation while he was en route to the site.
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No notion of means-ends rationality: When I speak of rationality in this book, I have in mind either means-ends rationality or the word rationality as it is used in libertarian and other propaganda, in the sense of rationalization. For a list of definitions of rationality, see Susanna Siegel, The Rationality of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 15–16.
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like satellite servers: In Yevgeny Zamiatyn’s novel We, to be “perfect” is to be “machine-equal.” We was an inspiration both for Brave New World and for 1984.
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why creatures into how creatures: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Phillcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), esp. chaps. 1 and 5; originally published in French in 1952.
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therefore as instruments: As my cousin Emma Jane Mitchell’s work reminded me, this is the link between colonial and disability discourses.
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our mechanical colonizers: Compare Massimo Cacciari, Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 114.
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have no agency: Compare Lanier, Ten Arguments, 33: “relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.”
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“capitalism will be succeeded”: Simone Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Henry David Thoreau worried that we had become the tools of our tools. On concentration and attention in his time, see Caleb Smith, Thoreau’s Axe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).
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In “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020).
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rationality means constant monitoring: For a similar line of thought, consult Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 357.
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rationalize the past: In his novel Stiller, Max Frisch presents a Switzerland where people believe that freedom is something that they possess, rather than a problem to be confronted. This leads them to rationalize the present rather than think about the future.
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“utility becomes something”: Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, trans. and ed. Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), ix.
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“calculus of the nervous system”: Cited in Burckhardt, Philosophie der Maschine, 241.
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exploits brain hacks: See Roger McNamee, Zucked (New York: Penguin, 2019), 9 and passim.
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continues every time: Gail B. Peterson, “A Day of Great Illumination: B. F. Skinner’s Discovery of Shaping,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 82, no. 3 (2004): 317–28.
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The first brain hack is experimental isolation: For a brief introduction, see Tristan Harris, “How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind,” Medium, May 18, 2016.
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an artificial loneliness: “If we are alone too long,” says Maupassant, “we populate the world with phantoms.”
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intermittently reinforce others: See Alexandra Rutherford, Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Behaviour from Laboratory to Life, 1950s–1970s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
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what you fear: Lanier, Ten Arguments, 18.
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indifferent to motives: Here and above I am learning from Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 111–20.
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seemed to understand: I learned this from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s delightful Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). See also Ashley Ward, The Social Lives of Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2022); Roger T. Hanlon and John B. Messenger, Cephalopod Behaviour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
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only familiar pyrite baubles: The connecting figure here is Ayn Rand, who was a Bolshevik à rebours.
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“warning to the West”: Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” 35–36.
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Our collective unreasonability: Herman Melville puts it nicely in his story “Bartleby the Scrivener”: “The constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.”
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One form this unreasonability takes: For this and succeeding brain hacks, see Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), 42ff.
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nudges us along: See Roman Bornstein, “Ingérence numérique, mode d’emploi,” Le Débat, no. 208 (2020–21): 42–55.
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“What we need is warm silence”: Simone Weil, La personne et le sacré (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2017), 45. This book was composed in 1942–43.
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some of the apparent people: On this phenomenon in political campaigns, see Onur Varol et al., “Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection,” Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, March 27, 2017; Alessandro Bessit and Emilio Ferrara, “Social Bots Distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Online Discussion,” First Monday 21, no. 11 (November 7, 2016); Marco T. Bastos and Dan Mercea, “The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News,” Social Science Computer Review 37, no. 1 (2017); Selina Wang, “Twitter Is Crawling with Bots,” Bloomberg, October 13, 2017; Severin Carrell, “Russian Cyber-Activists ‘Tried to Discredit Scottish Independence Vote,’ ” Guardian, December 13, 2017; Carole Cadwalladr, “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked,” Guardian, May 7, 2017.
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the biggest Facebook group: Francis Agustin, “Troll Farms Peddling Misinformation,” Business Insider, September 19, 2021.
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our emotions hollow: The debate about “Can machines think?” took a turn with Alan Turing, “Computational Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 236 (1950): 433–66, question at 433. See Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989), 6–7 and passim. In my essay “And We Dream as Electric Sheep,” I argue that the Turing test has to be reconsidered in light of the presence of the Leib.
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must be correct: Eubanks, Automating Inequality, 172. I learned the term mathwashed from Eubanks.
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bodies of other people: Animals are almost as important as people in Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1966; reprint London: Penguin, 2007). Although I do not develop the theme here, this makes sense. Humans can also feel empathy toward nonhuman creatures (although we need not). We can eat as much meat as we do only because we are physically distanced from the animals whose bodies we consume. See also Agamben, The Open.
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begin to harden: They amplify the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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until we feel attacked: Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (London: Pinter & Martin, 2015), 83.
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stole the election: On digital politics in 2016, see Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Tho Pham, and Oleksandr Talavera, “Social Media, Sentiment and Public Opinions: Evidence from #Brexit and #USElection,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 2463 (2018).
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You have exposed your buttons: This includes our racism. See Sofiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 36, 115, 124, and passim.
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without being a thinker: I have the notion of “thinking without a thinker” from Burckhardt, Philosophie der Maschine, 17 and passim.
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without there being a conspiracy theorist: Lanier, Ten Arguments, 108–9.
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claim that Hillary Clinton kidnaps children: I tell the story in Road to Unfreedom. See also Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 6, 2016; Mary Papenfuss, “Russian Trolls Linked Clinton to ‘Satanic Ritual,’ ” HuffPost, December 1, 2017. The director of the Internet Research Agency, Yevgeny Progozhin, was later a major actor in a war that did, in fact, involve kidnapping children.
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Putin says Ukraine does not exist: Putin made these claims for over a decade and continues to make them. Telling for me was Vladimir Putin, “Rossiia: natsional’nyi vopros,” Nezavisimaia Gazeta, January 23, 2012. See also Vladimir Putin, “Novyy integratsionnyy proyekt dlya Yevrazii,” Izvestiia, October 3, 2011.
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Trump says that he won: Jim Rutenberg and Kate Conger, “Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone,” NYT, January 25, 2024.
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As we expose our vulnerabilities: For empirical examples from 2016, see Massimo Calabresi, “Hacking Democracy,” Time, May 29, 2017; Nicholas Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “How Russia Harvested American Rage,” NYT, October 9, 2017; David Pierson, “Russia Tried and Failed to Harvest Social Discord in America. Then It Discovered Social Media,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2018; Rebecca Shabad, “Russian Facebook Ad Showed Black Woman,” CBS, October 3, 2017.
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As we come to feel more lonely: The argument about loneliness goes back to Hannah Arendt and (I think) to Hegel, who defined freedom as being “at home” (bei sich selbst zu sein). See Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 352 and passim. Loneliness makes us less free in other ways: see Vivek Murthy, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, 2023.
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citizens’ beliefs and fears: For example, in 2016, likely Trump voters were exposed to pro-Clinton messages on fake American Muslim sites. Russian pro-Trump propaganda associated refugees with rape.
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calls people “vermin”: Marianne LeVine, “Trump Calls Political Enemies ‘Vermin,’ Echoing Dictators Hitler, Mussolini,” Washington Post, November 13, 2023; Caleb Ecarma, “Detention Camps, ‘Vermin’ Rivals, and a Government Purge,” Vanity Fair, November 13, 2023.
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ready for violence: Robert Pape, “Deep, Divisive, Disturbing and Continuing: New Survey Shows Mainstream Support for Violence to Restore Trump Remains Strong,” Chicago Project on Security and Threats, January 2, 2022.
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storm the Capitol: Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, December 22, 2022.
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not to make love: See Kate Julian, “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?,” Atlantic, December 2018. In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Rachel tells Decker at a tender moment: “Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary.”
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locate our political fantasies: See Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Data & Society Research Institute, 2017; Tamsin Shaw, “Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind,” New York Review of Books, April 20, 2017; Paul Lewis, “Our Minds Can Be Hijacked,” Guardian, October 6, 2017.
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our capacities to see diversity: In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that “to oppose something is to maintain it.”
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Our fear is there: The machine does not have to understand racism to magnify and exploit it. Compare Jennifer Saul, “Dog Whistles, Political Manipulation, and Philosophy of Language,” in Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss, eds., New Work on Speech Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 360–83.
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we become the chatbots: Arundhati Roy, lecture at Swedish Academy, March 22, 2023.
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“he who is deceived”: Mikhail Bakhtin, in his 1943 diary, quoted in Leonidas Donskis, Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 133.
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give our recruiter an alibi: See Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), 42.
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This is cognitive dissonance: An accessible introduction is Tavris and Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, 22 and passim.
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“living automata, which some mysterious hand”: Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible (London: Martin Secker, 1920).
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ancient Greek poems: On classical reflections, see Burckhardt, Philosophie der Maschine, and Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
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George Orwell saw vocabulary: Peter Bieri also warned of “mindless habits of speech” in his Wie wollen wir leben (Salzburg: Rezidenz, 2011).
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in his novel 1984: George Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).
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their bodies are always observed: Michel Schneider might be right, however, that our situation is more one of “Big Mother” than “Big Brother.” Schneider, Big Mother: Psychopathologie de la vie politique (Paris: Jacob, 2005).
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their language is famished: Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2006), 10–17 and passim.
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