Sovereignty in the Digital Age
APRIL 2, 2019
In the coming weeks, Russia may temporarily cut itself off from the global internet. The test comes as part of a “sovereign internet” law, which the Kremlin hopes will help guard against cyber attacks from abroad. And while there are many reasons to view this test as a restriction of liberty for the Russian people, the exorbitant measures required to carry it out raise interesting questions about what freedom might mean in a world of technological dependency.
Early discussions of the information age highlighted the extraordinary promise of web-based technologies for individual freedom. In 1997’s The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg wrote that “the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before,” shepherding in a new era of economic and political freedom. This vision of individual sovereignty continues to animate many technologists, and was instrumental to the rise of cryptocurrency.
But twenty years later, the relationship between technology and freedom feels decidedly more mixed. As we discussed with Catherine Price in our last newsletter, for many of us, even temporarily disconnecting from technology requires herculean effort. And yet an increasing number of people are undertaking that effort, precisely because the ceaseless torrent of information feels so oppressive and paralyzing. Digital technology seems to have resuscitated the age old debate about positive and negative freedom: the freedom to access the world’s information and communicate with anyone has given way to demands for a freedom from dependency on our devices.
As Adam Alter discusses in our interview with him, technology has forced us to reconsider what words like “freedom” and “autonomy” might appropriately mean. Abundant information may free us from Orwellian totalitarianism (or may not), but it will do us little good if it brings about a Brave New World of distraction and stupefaction. Even if we are not directly coerced into scrolling down a newsfeed for hours, such behavior can scarcely be called “free” if it reliably diverts us from our best interests.
Many scholars and thinkers have begun responding to this paradox. The legal scholar Cass Sunstein, for example, suggests that we expand the conversation on freedom to account for navigability, which he defines as the capacity of people “to get to their own preferred destination.” Impediments to navigability include not only authoritarian strictures, but also choice architectures and addictive properties that undermine self-control. The evolutionary theorist David Krakauer, following cognitive scientist Donald Norman, proposes that we distinguish between complementary and competitive cognitive artifacts; that is, those technologies that leave us stronger in their absence, and those that leave us weaker. And the philosopher and former Google designer James Williams has issued a call for “freedom of attention,” the capacity to pay attention to things that really matter without being thwarted by technology.
Such conversations are just beginning, but they are growing more pressing by the day. What do you think freedom and sovereignty mean in the digital age?