Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully

John Stuart Mill was a brilliant Victorian advocate of intellectual freedom, but he participated in, and defended, the colonial administration of India. Yet that trend, too, had its limits and its hypocrisies. But a countervailing movement of liberal thought and debate, carried along by technological and social change, proved more powerful. After the shock of the American and French revolutions, and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, Britain’s establishment became severely repressive in the early 19th century. But great bursts of freedom also prove finite.įor example, the intellectual energy unleashed by the printing press and the Protestant Reformation was dissipated in waves of sectarian wars and mutual persecution. Accordingly, stringent repression of thought and speech becomes self-defeating and stimulates brave opponents.

More distinctive is his determination to show the ebb and flow of liberty as a dynamic process, under way at least since the era of ancient Greece. His view that freedom of speech is under threat from many directions-and, politically, from both right and left-is not original. His conclusions, presented in a crisp and confident march through Western history, are sobering. And the gigantic power wielded by a few tech companies was troubling, regardless of how they used it.Īll this led Mr Mchangama (whose paternal forebears came from the Comoro Islands) to apply his legal mind to supporting intellectual liberty: by podcasting and founding a think-tank, and by studying free expression’s fluctuating fortunes over the past 25 centuries. Western governments were often heavy-handed in their regulation of extremist discourse. Authoritarian regimes proved adept at exploiting and policing social media for their own malign ends. Even then, though, digital freedom was already in retreat. The victory in 2008 of Barack Obama, an erstwhile outsider, marked a high point of those expectations. In the late 1990s, when he was a student, the internet presaged a glorious era of liberty for people who otherwise lacked money or power to speak and organise. This was not what Mr Mchangama, the product of a confidently secular Nordic democracy, had expected.Īs his new book recalls, free expression was suffering setbacks on other fronts, too. Respectable people across the Western world blamed the cartoonist and his editors, not the repressive forces that drove the newspaper staff into hiding. He found the response elsewhere even more alarming.

Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully