Thinking about the future... (Part III)

Recently I read the book “Digitalismus” by Daniel Rebhorn which describes a modern utopia of a post-capitalistic society in the digital age. As it takes a holistic approach including all aspects of life, I will only tackle the ones I found most influential. My last article dealt with educational topics and how our school system needs a digital transformation in order to prepare children for the future. However, in this final text I will focus on different aspects of freedom.

For decades (if not centuries) up until today the pursuit of “individual freedom” remains the main driver for people to go to work, work hard and earn money. I set quotation marks here, because this really refers to a very capitalistic and narrow sense of freedom, meaning that money equals a higher social status and allows us to consume more. It enables us to eat meat, fly around the globe or travel by car rather than by bus. But do we mix-up freedom and consumption here? In fact, does this desire to consume and differentiate us through consumption patters not effectively make us slaves of our own ideals? Admittedly, I cannot fully exclude myself from this way of thinking, but I see the urge to re-think a social definition of freedom.

Here the book shares some really interesting points on that topic. As mentioned before, there are different aspects of mundane freedom, e.g. the freedom to travel, to choose hobbies and job, to drive a car, to build a house, etc. However, the capitalistic perception would be for each individual to try and accumulate as much freedom as possible. But here we need to ask ourselves if freedom can be seen as an unlimited good. Instead I believe that we have to (whether we like it or not) start thinking about freedom more as a natural resource. Imagine an extreme example: What would happen if some people take the freedom to walk with guns or violently drive cars around? This would cause other people to loose the freedom to walk safely in the streets. And now a more present example: What would happen if rich countries take the freedom to not change their consumption patterns, still use too many resources and keep on producing CO2 emissions? We will rob the livelihood, living places and natural resources like food and water of the poorer countries. Our earth is a closed system, unlimited things can simply not exist!

Consequently, the book stresses three, tightly connected points, which need to be faced. Firstly, the overall freedom of humanity must be favoured over individual freedom. Otherwise we will run into the dilemma I tried to explain using the two examples above. Secondly and in contrary to the current situation, no aspect of freedom should be buyable with money, freedom cannot be unboundedly accumulated and must not lead to pointless consumption à la “just because we can”. These demands ask to neglect key elements of capitalism. Finally, the third point offers a possible solution. In a scenario where we handle freedom as a limited resource, people must pick which aspects of freedom mean the most to them and choose accordingly. Some people might not feel the need to own a private car, but rather want to travel by plane. Others choose a larger house over eating meat.

This way some aspects of freedom will appear more valuable to us and according to the book we should be investing more than just money, but time to gain access to these resources. So instead of dollars being the measure for freedom, a social-credit system can be implemented and used to keep track of each individual balance between freedom used for selfish purposes versus time invested in charitable activities. If people do not want to socially engage than they can still use up there budget e.g. for a flight but would be fined for any more extensive travelling activities for the rest of the year. Although this reminds on the chinese social-scoring system* in the first place, I think that with the help of the described AI-driven government such a system would not be discriminating but fairer as it takes more individual circumstances into account. What do you think? To what extend is freedom a private matter or connects to individual responsibility and to what extend should it be managed and distributed by a governmental system in order to protect the inhabitants and achieve a more equally spread freedom across the whole society?

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* In Germany we have similar judgements, e.g. SCHUFA for credit ranking.