Freedom is relative

However, even imagination has to be anchored somewhere. Humans alive one hundred years ago could not have imagined the digital world—if they could, they certainly would have liked to process information in it too, otherwise they would not have considered themselves free. Practically, therefore, any one person’s freedom is relative to another person’s freedom. An individual only imagines oneself to be more or less free than another individual, and even then freedom is in the eye of the beholder (because one can only imagine another’s actual freedom). Consequently, because comparison is natural to humans, a human is free or unfree in relation to, or compared with, an (imagined) other.

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