Bookmark: "The digital freedom risk: too fragile an acknowledgment"

2015-01-06

Bookmarked:

The digital freedom risk: too fragile an acknowledgment opendemocracy.net

The late Ulrich Beck (✝2015-01-01), father of the concept of the “risk society”, on digital freedom:

The violation of our freedom does not hurt. We neither feel it, nor do we suffer a disease, a flood, a lack of opportunities to find a job, and so on. Freedom dies without human beings being physically hurt. The power and legitimacy of the state are based on the promise of security. Freedom comes or seems always secondary. Being a sociologist, I am convinced that the freedom risk is the most fragile among the global risks we have experienced so far.

…and delivers a call to action for formulating “digital humanism”:

What should we do? I suggest that we formulate a kind of digital humanism. Let us identify the fundamental right of data protection and digital freedom as a global human right, which must prevail like any other human right, if needs be against all odds.

I'm Sebastian, Sociologist and Interaction Designer. This journal is mostly about bringing together social science and design for inclusive, privacy-focused, and sustainable "human-first" digital strategies. I also tend to a "digital garden" with carefully curated resources.

My occasionally sent email newsletter has all of the above, and there is of course also an RSS feed or my Mastodon/Fediverse profile.

Discussion:

Name

Comment *

Available formatting commands

Use Markdown commands or their HTML equivalents to add simple formatting to your comment:

Text markup

*italic*, **bold**, ~~strikethrough~~, `code` and <mark>marked text</mark>.

Lists

- Unordered item 1
- Unordered list item 2

1. Ordered list item 1
2. Ordered list item 2

Quotations

> Quoted text

Code blocks

```
// A simple code block
```

```php
// Some PHP code
phpinfo();
```

Links

[Link text](https://example.com)

Full URLs are automatically converted into links.