I minored in history, maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to it, but I can’t think of a period where we’ve been more free than we are now. Not even 10 years ago

I minored in history, maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to it, but I can’t think of a period where we’ve been more free than we are now. Not even 10 years ago. We live in a time where you can frankly do anything you want if you’re born in the western world. If you want to become a blacksmith who specialises in creating fantasy weapons, you can do that. If you want to disconnect and go live a self-sustainable life in the Swedish forest, you can do that and unlike the hippies of the 60ies you won’t even have to starve if you suck at it. And so on. I think it’s completely possible to live a full life and never realise you had the option to be free though, and, I think it’s fair to blame the way we’ve constructed our society in the wake of new public management. We’ve essentially build a system where every human being is viewed as a Hunan resource. It starts in the daycare institution where the social workers have checklists for normal child development. It picks up in the school system where academic achievement is measured from the first classes and children have to know their path from the 6th grade to make sure they take the specific classes which allow them to advance to the next institution. The once you’re on the job market you’re evaluated on productivity and finally when you retire it’s about keeping you in good health so you cost less. All to make sure people are as efficient to the system as possible. Social media and the massive surveillance state that we’ve build by sharing everything plays right into this. We self-censor and pretend, and everything we share on the “free” tech-platforms is kept and used against us. Which I completely agree is very worrisome. The thing is though, 1984 was right. If anything the current level of surveillance and manufactured information is way worse than Orwell predicted, and yet, you can still go make fantasy swords in the Swedish forests if you wanted to. I just don’t share the authors negative outlook. Maybe I’m naive, but I really don’t think that we’ll turn the west into China. I think things like the European GDPR is a show of this. We don’t want companies or governments to misuse our data, and we’ll punish them if they do. It’s happening slowly, but that’s how a democracy operates, because you have to compromise. It’s happening though, and it’s happening because people wanted it. I also fully expect the younger generation to rebel more than we did. You see it already on climate issues, with children refusing to go to school if they won’t have a future anyway. I suspect they won’t want to keep our surveillance state or our HR centric view on society either.