The freedom of will is the existential bone structure that carries the moral flesh of every promise, and my insistence on its integrity is not an indulgence in nostalgia or a random privileging of the pre-digital human story as somehow more truly human. This is the only kind of freedom that we can guarantee ourselves, no matter the weight of entropy or inertia, and irrespective of the forces and fears that attempt to collapse time into an eternity of shadowboxing now, and now, and now. These bones are the necessary condition for the possibility of civilization as a “moral milieu” that favors the dignity of the individual and respects the distinctly human capacities for dialogue and problem solving. Any person, idea, or practice that breaks these bones and tears this flesh robs us of a self-authored and we-authored future.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1041