"How many people made New Year’s resolutions to spend less time on the Internet? Yet another friend recently recommended that I try Freedom, the popular program that “locks” you off the Internet. The ubiquitousness of this program, which calls itself “a simple productivity application,” feels ominous to me. It somehow brings to mind the Ionesco play, Rhinoceros, where one by one the townspeople turn into rhinoceroses.
I don’t in any way question why anyone would want Freedom. The addictive, mindless thrill of the Internet is clear: Why work when you can go on email or check the weather? We are, in Eliot’s words, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” With this program, the longest you can be barred from the Internet is eight hours, so the particular freedom it is offering is not crazy or excessive. You do not, in the reassuring world of Freedom, spend, say, an entire day offline.
The name of the program has to be part of its success; it plays on our hidden desires, the better self we are hoping for, links the program in our heads to revolutions, Arab springs, Thomas Jefferson. And yet the name also pleasantly and politely hints at another word: enslavement. What is frightening is the lack of control implied by this program, the total insufficiency of will when it comes to the Internet. Its generally upbeat vibe gestures toward a certain underlying desperation.
I particularly like the comically Orwellian phrase on its website: “freedom enforces freedom.”"
By Katie Roiphe/ Slate Magazine / more
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