Most people voluntarily exchange their freedom and rights in exchange for someone else telling them what to do.
For most of our history they choose religion. These days corporations are taking that place.
What matters is being able to opt out without being effectively reduced to second class citizens. We haven't lost that option yet, but it is true that that is under threat.
Being able to consume content without advertising (which is corporate propaganda, i.e. the new "religion") is one of those things. That content is not just someone's private property (no matter what the manipulative copyright laws say), it is the end product on generations of collective knowledge and creativity.
If the minority ever gets excluded from it because they're not members of the Church of our Corporate Overlords, then our freedom would truly suffer.
The fact that the majority so easily surrenders their freedom for convenience and a false sense of security is not a measure of our freedom.
Yes, I agree. It is a difficult topic to reason about, but I would say that freedom can only be reasoned about relatively, and only by exercising it can its limits be discussed. And then those limits themselves must be exercised for the notion of freedom to exist in the first place.
I wonder if there is some kind of idealized equilibrium, as both freedom and control try to fully realize themselves in society.
For most of our history they choose religion. These days corporations are taking that place.
What matters is being able to opt out without being effectively reduced to second class citizens. We haven't lost that option yet, but it is true that that is under threat.
Being able to consume content without advertising (which is corporate propaganda, i.e. the new "religion") is one of those things. That content is not just someone's private property (no matter what the manipulative copyright laws say), it is the end product on generations of collective knowledge and creativity.
If the minority ever gets excluded from it because they're not members of the Church of our Corporate Overlords, then our freedom would truly suffer.
The fact that the majority so easily surrenders their freedom for convenience and a false sense of security is not a measure of our freedom.