The famous French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot is quoted as saying, “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Diderot was a major figure of the Enlightenment, and his words reflect that movement’s opposition to absolute monarchies and the strict religious dogma of the Catholic Church.
Now, more than two centuries later, although autocrats and religious absolutists are still plaguing humanity, modern societies face threats of an entirely different sort. Many of these contemporary problems are caused by the unintended consequences of technologies, particularly those that make use of the internet, that are brought into the market by high tech tycoons with little forethought other than immediate profit. For example, ubiquitous information technologies allow companies to snoop into almost every aspect of our lives, and the increasing use of social media manifests itself in pathologies ranging from personal addiction to Facebook to Russian interference in U.S. elections.
Perhaps Diderot’s quote should be updated to something like, “People will never be free until the last high tech entrepreneur is strangled with the entrails of the last venture capitalist.”