The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays

Digital platforms now link ordinary individual choices into systems that classify, rank and modulate people, producing a paradox between personal freedom and social control. The IBM Model 650, sold from 1953 to 1962, is presented as an early example, with its first installation at John Hancock in Boston in 1954 calculating sales commissions for about 7,000 insurance agents. Unlike Friedrich Hayek's 1944 warning in The Road to Serfdom that state control would bring tyranny, the danger now may come from platforms that erode the "interstitial liberty" granted by gaps between systems that do not integrate, a road to "selfdom."