On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

I try to see the computer in front of me as a tool to reach other people, and to motivate them to think or act differently. I know that readers of On Tyranny took action on the streets and in parliaments. On the basis of my notes, the CEOs quickly drafted a statement about respecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election that became a model for others and that made it harder for Trump to stage his coup. That said, I would not have had to resort to the internet for these defensive maneuvers if Trump had not been elected, and had democracy around the world not crashed—developments enabled by social media. I might be able to turn the machine to my purposes, and I know that others do. I fear, though, that overall the machine creates a special kind of entropy (Havel) or gravity (Weil). Because portable networked microprocessors—our ever-present phones, tablets, and laptops—can seem to do everything, they draw us into a messy mental world where we are not sure what we are doing. We leave behind the gifts of the Leib as we retreat toward the more predictable Körper. We lose our quiet, individual why amid the superabundance of how. And then the world shifts. Who is serving whom? Or what? The purpose of most tools is self-evident. As Martin Burckhardt points out, the networked microprocessor has no clear purpose; it is less a tool for us than an invitation to us, or a seduction of us. It can be a pan-tool, capable of everything; but also an anti-tool, making its users less ...