SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Freedom, in America, has been successfully repackaged as a consumer product. You are free to choose your streaming service.

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Freedom, in America, has been successfully repackaged as a consumer product.

You are free to choose your streaming service.

You are free to choose your phone plan.

You are free to choose between two candidates, both of whom were selected before you arrived, both of whom are funded by the same industries, both of whom will maintain the same foreign policy, the same military budget, the same basic architecture of whose interests the government actually serves.

You are free to express any opinion on the internet.

Provided it doesn't cost anyone with power anything.

Provided it stays on the internet.

Provided it doesn't become organization, doesn't become bodies in the street, doesn't become the kind of friction that actually changes material conditions.

Opinion is free. Disruption is criminal.

Speech is protected. Strikes are complicated.

Dissent is tolerated. Resistance is terrorism.

This is not freedom.

This is freedom's aesthetic, mass-produced and distributed cheaply enough that everyone can afford to feel like they have it.

The founders whose portraits hang in the schools would not recognize it as the thing they were describing.

Though several of them, being wealthy men who feared genuine democracy as much as they feared the British, might recognize the function perfectly.