Freedom to Think

The space inside my head is the place where I can practise being human, apply my reason and morality (or lack of it) to problems, work through the bad ideas and let off steam without any consequences for anyone but myself. I can think unspeakable things so long as they remain unspoken. It is not about my rights against the world; it is about the individual finding their place in society. Freedom of thought and freedom of opinion give us the space to decide whether to shut up or speak out. And this inner freedom of thought and opinion can never be restricted or interfered with for any reason.

If people are distracted or amused, they are less likely to notice the urgent realities of their situation. Distraction is not necessarily sinister – wartime entertainers like Dame Vera Lynn were flown around the world to raise troop morale by giving soldiers a chance to briefly forget their dreadful daily experience. But Huxley identified ‘man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions’ – or, as professor of law Tim Wu puts it, our ‘incredible, magnificent power to ignore’²⁵ – as one of the biggest threats to human freedom. Propagandists and politicians are astute at harnessing that power to their own ends. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell identifies ‘prolefeed’ as the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. And in Brave New World, Huxley uses the ever-present sensory distractions of the feelies’, ‘orgy-porgy’ and ‘centrifugal bumble-puppy’ as political tools to stop people thinking too much about their social or political realities.

Advertising not only manipulates how we think; it changes how we live, and how long we (and our planet) may live for. It uses our desire for freedom to steal that freedom from us, whether the addiction it is peddling is tobacco, online gambling or shopping. Advertising has become the driver of our technological future. We may worry about disinformation and the rise of demagogues who also use the language of freedom to destroy our human rights, but the fuel that drives these phenomena in the modern world is the cold, hard cash of consumer advertising. If we want to take control of building a human future, we need to talk about advertising. It is the thread that runs through all our online interactions. And it is the fuel that drives surveillance capitalism and modern political influence and propaganda. Scratch the surface of any ‘big tech’ company and you will find an advertising business lurking below. Do we really want publicists like Edward Bernays [an Austrian-American advertising guru, nephew of Sigmund Freud] defining what freedom means for us? As with any threat to our rights and freedoms, we need human rights law and regulation to make sure that the peddlers of persuasion, whether political or commercial, are kept strictly out of our heads.