No matter how much is taken from me, this inward freedom to create meaning remains my ultimate sanctuary. Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “freedom is nothing but the existence of our will,” and he elaborates: “Actually it is not enough to will; it is necessary to will to will.” This rising up of the will to will is the inner act that secures us as autonomous beings who project choice into the world and exercise the qualities of self-determining moral judgment that are civilization’s necessary and final bulwark. This is the sense behind another of Sartre’s insights: “Without bearings, stirred by a nameless anguish, the words labor.… The voice is born of a risk: either to lose oneself or win the right to speak in the first person.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 905