By Mark Keenan
December 30, 2025
Freedom is not usually lost all at once through force. It is more often weakened first through forgetting.
As one year ends and another begins, many people sense that something essential has been lost in the way modern life is organized - not through catastrophe or coercion, but through gradual forgetting.
This essay argues that the greatest threat posed by automation is not overt control, but the quiet erosion of judgment-and that freedom survives only where judgment is actively exercised.