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Articles

Digital Freedom

Roberta Fischli & Thomas Beschorner argue that our digital future is not preprogrammed: it’s about time we start thinking about what it should look like.

Did you watch the dystopian TV series Black Mirror? The episode Nosedive paints a picture of a future society where people rate each other’s behaviour according to a credit system. ‘Good’ behavior is rewarded with points; ‘bad’ behavior reduces your score. This form of social control is flanked by all kinds of state surveillance: facial recognition technologies are used to track peoples’ every move, for example. When the episode first aired in 2016 it was already an allusion to and criticism of the emerging Social Credit System in China. But we don’t have to look that far.

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