Take the time

Just finished a really rather good and insightful book about the freedom to think and how that, despite taking a bit more investment of the mind and its abilities, has broad and meaningful effects on the individual and wider society.

It’s full of really good, quotable passages, so here are a few to maybe help convince you that the book Freedom to Think, by Susie Alegre, is well worth your reading and thinking time. Here’s the first quotable passage...

While the idea of privacy feels closed, introspective and exclusive, designed to constrain and obscure the self, keeping others out, the idea of freedom of thought is expansive, exploratory and open. It is the space to discover new ideas, try on new viewpoints, be scurrilous, irreverent and naughty, profound and pompous, in order to understand our place in the world around us. Freedom of thought is a voyage of discovery and privacy is the tollbooth.

...the second...

Distraction, advertising and entertainment may seem harmless, but they are a part of our information ecosystem that dictates how we feel and what we look at. In the digital age, they guide not only our personal habits, but also our political inclinations and engagement, our relationships with each other and our future opportunities. Huxley said that ‘only the vigilant can maintain their liberties’. In the era of clickbait and endless cat videos, we need to be more vigilant than ever.

...the third...

If you never buy your groceries with a bank card or online and you have no loyalty cards, that in itself says something about your personality when it comes to Judgement Day. And the tracking and data gathering is not only online. Increasingly, it is in the streets and in our shops, a constant assessment of our worth, our mood and our risk in real time.

[...]

The line between shopper and suspect is a fine one, and it is not only the police who are interested in detecting crime. In the digital age, security is not solely in the hands of the state. Our shopping experience is increasingly about ‘optimisation’, but it is the access to our minds that is being optimised, to promote sales and prevent business losses, rather than our personal experience.

...and the fourth and final one...

Outsourcing the development of our children’s emotional, cognitive and social capacity to a robot, however clever and empathetic, is a dangerous path to take if we believe in a future for human society. The idea of ren – that elusive Chinese philosophical concept that has been variously translated as ‘conscience’, ‘humaneness’ and ‘love’ – is one of the foundational qualities that is recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as making us human. It is the space in which our thoughts, feelings and opinions reach out across the void to understand and engage with others. If we delegate our empathy and love for our children to a robot, how will the next generation know what it means to be human?

Thanks so much to Susie Alegre for her many years of work and experience in human rights law and more that have allowed and compelled her to clearly and honestly write a lot of common sense that really needs to be taken on board by many, if not all.

Approaches like the book suggests can help us to genuinely learn, better adapt, challenge, refine, and even proactively change how many of the institutions and systems around us work and purport to benefit society, as these things shouldn’t be made, run and supported just to make monetary profit!