Evan Bertschy’s Reviews > On Freedom > Status Update

“Eternity politics comes down to the idea that some single person should rule forever, usually to preserve wealth and avoid responsibility for crimes” (157)

“In real life, we tend to accept what people around us say; on the internet, the algorithms nestle us in an environment where we seem to be with like-minded people. Of course, some of the apparent people are bots, and others are pseudonymous fakes.”

“We are being tamed by the machine, dulled to one another. The American university class is yielding to the screen, to the cave, to the death principle. Let us all pretend that something is happening while another hour passes, do that for four years, get the piece of paper, and move on to a world of further fakery. The university should enliven, and at its best it still does”

“Like the Czechoslovak communists, the Silicon Valley libertarians first promised a brave new world, then told us that there were no alternatives, then invited us to live inside a screen. Like the communists, they passed from great certainty about utopia to total nihilism about everything, to a world in which
‘everything is shit.’”

“‘Everything is shit.’ Cynicism about the system slips into nihilism that serves the system”

“Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.”