Great essay!

I think ultimately, this is about freedom - the freedom of choice and the responsibilities that come therein.

Perhaps our collective consciousness is being pushed into a survival mode. Hence all the literalism, reactionism, reductionism — and ultimately survivalism.

The creative human spirit is on the best way to be deminished. Now we put more value into a systematic, cold, efficient and never changing machinery.

As Douglas Haddow once put it:
“These days, the ‘savages’ […] let the machines do their thinking for them. Their god is a primitive and cruel one. Worse yet, it lacks imagination. The future it sees is just an optimized version of the present. Everything that falls within its gaze is predictable, because mathematical sequences are predictable. What remains to be seen is whether or not human beings are as predictable as the machines think we are.”

“The searches we make, the news we read, the dates we go on, the advertisements we see, the products we buy and the music we listen to. The stock market … All informed by this marriage between mathematics and capital, all working together in perfect harmony to achieve a singular goal — equilibrium. But it’s a curious sort of equilibrium. Less to do with the relationship between supply and demand, and more about the man and the market.
All these algorithms we encounter throughout the day, they’re working toward a greater goal: solving problems and learning how to think. Like the advent and rise of high–frequency trading, they’re part of an optimization trend that leads to a strange brand of perfection: automated profit.
And their current day use, no matter how impressive the specs, is still rooted in 7th century code–breaking. Only now it’s about breaking our individual codes. Throughout the day we send out thousands of our own individual abstract signals and the algorithms figure out how best to streamline our existence into the market’s needs. We’re all just cyphers waiting to get cracked.”

We are cyphers waiting to get cracked - and that again is systematic reductionism at its best.

On a side note:
I feel that people in general have become extremely opinionated these days and yet at the same time the majority of us seems to be either a) to afraid to state their mind or b) we comply with the popular opinion — or both of the above. In my mind this should encourage us to be skeptical, if anything.

Information is mistaken for knowledge, knee-jerk reactions are mistaken for opinions, and repetitive copy and paste behaviour has become the new way of thinking for ourselves and making our choices and furthermore imposing those choices on others — choices that are predetermined by the big new algorithm of shameless freedom — brought to you by the corporate mean machine.

So what is freedom of choice really?
I do believe that freedom of choice cannot be handed out to people by a democratic (or whatever) institution. Free people create free societies — institutions do not create freedom. The very fact that we have to earn “rights” from an institutional system should make us question a lot.
We receive, and often even ask for, the “rights” to further deconstruct/polarize/devide ourselves and our abilities that enable us to function as creative human beings.