Think it: Are you free?

There is so much hue and cry about freedom. Let’s think for a moment what freedom is and how much freedom is really freedom. 

According to wikipedia “Freedom is understood as either having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one's purposes unhindered. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving oneself their own laws", and with having rights and the civil liberties with which to exercise them without undue interference by the state. Frequently discussed kinds of political freedom include freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of choice, and freedom of speech.” 

In a nutshell, it is to act as you want. But that is not always the case. You have to abide by the laws and conventions imposed by the state, religion and society respectively. That means there are restrictions on the wants of the people. For example, you cannot drive through on an opposite side on a one way road or cannot cross a way when the traffic light is red or cannot walk in public naked or cannot utter blasphemy or cannot eat pork being a Muslim or Jew or you cannot deny Holocaust. These are some of the examples which show that nobody is truly free or has freedom as its meaning envisages. 

The Internet was hailed as free media to express one’s thoughts. But is it really free? A report by Freedom House says that 31 of the 70 assessed countries only have partial freedom when it comes to user rights and state control of the internet. The following map shows the grim picture of freedom.

Even the big techs have restricted you to freely exchange your thoughts. Here is what facebook has done. On August 19, 2020, Facebook announced a change to its community standards in moderating content on Facebook for safety reasons. Facebook's community standards already require the removal of content that calls for and advocates violence and the removal of individuals and groups promoting violence. Facebook now will restrict content that doesn't necessarily advocate violence, but is "tied to offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organisations and QAnon."

Now take the case of free speech. Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations. But there are certain restrictions to this human right. As mentioned earlier, there is censorship on denial of holocaust, blasphemy, incitement.

We search through Google Chrome, take help to find location through Google Map, use its Google Sheet to write or save our work on Google Drive and all this free. Is it really free? Shoshana Zuboff points out in Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power that once we searched Google, now Google (and the rest) searches us. They have exploited human experience to collect free raw material for translation into behavioural data. The “behavioural surplus” – our emotions, fears, our voices and our personalities-is then fed into “machine intelligence”, then reconfigured into predictive products. Products designed to anticipate what you will do today, tomorrow, and next week, as well as modify our behaviour through personalised and intrusive targeted advertising.

So, there is no such thing as a free lunch.