On Freedom

Snyder presents unpredictability as the second form of freedom, emerging from sovereignty and expressed when individuals act from values in ways that authorities and machines cannot forecast. He traces this idea through the work and life of Václav Havel and the Eastern European dissident milieu, then extends it to contemporary media systems and digital manipulation.

Snyder describes how Havel, a Czech poet and playwright who was imprisoned for his activism against the Soviet government of Czechoslovakia and later became the first president of the democratic Czech Republic, used his art to critique Czechoslovakia’s period of “normalization,” when ideology was hollowed out and conformity replaced belief. In Havel’s play Audience, a blacklisted writer employed at a brewery is pressed by his brewmaster, who collaborates with the secret police, to write surveillance reports on himself; he complies. The piece depicts a society in which people accept roles in a predictable machinery and slide from cynicism into nihilism. In 1978, after a clandestine mountaintop meeting with Polish dissidents, Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless, a book-length essay arguing that modern tyranny requires not sincere devotion but predictability, which channels life toward “the most probable states” (81).

Snyder contrasts this with a freedom that involves unpredictability grounded in sovereignty. Drawing on Edith Stein’s account of a “world of values,” he suggests that human choices take place in a dimension distinct from physical space and time. Because people affirm, balance, and recombine values over the course of their lives, their actions become less foreseeable. When many individuals do this together, they become predictable to themselves yet less predictable to rulers and machines.

Snyder aligns Havel’s emphasis on ethical commitments with Simone Weil’s distinction between a “law of necessity” and a “law of freedom” (84), claiming that humans can create passages from what is to what ought to be. He then describes how late-communist television blurs background coercion with entertainment to normalize passivity. He extends the warning to social media, which categorize users, manufacture probability, and increase predictability—what he calls a “death principle.”

Snyder recounts how Havel co-wrote the Charter 77 manifesto with other dissidents after the imprisonment of the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe. Philosopher Jan Patočka, a Charter spokesperson, died shortly after being interrogated by Soviet police. Snyder situates these events in the context of an international legal turn: After the Helsinki Accords of 1975 instituted strict human rights requirements for Warsaw Pact states, dissidents in the Soviet bloc formed groups to document abuses and reclaim “normal” as what should be done rather than what power prescribed. He traces the improbable chains of cultural influence behind the Plastics, from American rhythm and blues to the1970s art rock group the Velvet Underground to the song “Plastic People” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention—to show how accident and cultural transfer generate unforeseen consequences that feed human unpredictability.

Snyder emphasizes the ordinariness of dissidence. Havel’s dissident acts include speaking up about beer quality at work and taking down a propaganda sign—modest acts that instantiate human rights as everyday decency and solidarity. He distinguishes these acts of communal ethics from the “emancipation from” that, in his view, often seeks inclusion within existing structures and can drift into antipolitical individualism. He argues that freedom for coming generations depends on older generations building and protecting the supports that enable sovereignty and unpredictability.

Snyder draws on Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s concept of value pluralism: In order for people with conflicting values to live together, they must make tradeoffs, out of which new virtues can be invented. The combinations people fashion over time produce responsible unpredictability.

Snyder shifts to a discussion of technology and memory. Early in his career, he could set devices aside; later, phones and social media platforms began to absorb more time and diminish his sovereignty. Memory and history counter the pull of technology by anchoring imagined futures to real pasts. He maps how the Velvet Underground influenced the Plastics and the underground rock music scene of Czechoslovakia, highlighting how that scene shaped Havel, and how those links culminated in the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Soviet puppet regime in Czechoslovakia, reinforcing the theme that culture travels through unpredictable chains.

Snyder traces his own paths through Eastern Europe, describing Ukraine’s post-Soviet development, its pro-European turn, and Russia’s invasion by attending both to propaganda and to people on the ground. He describes the Maidan protests—a movement leading to the overthrow, in 2014, of Ukraine’s pro-Russian dictator Viktor Yanukovych and the beginning of Ukrainian democracy—as the assembly of bodies in public space that forms durable bonds, institutions, and habits of cooperation. He recounts organizing a 2014 Kyiv conference on short notice, noting that such convenings require time, language, and institutional help—conditions that enable freedom in practice.

Snyder uses prisons to examine freedom and the body, noting how confinement attacks Leib by alternately severing and overloading contact—solitary isolation and forced overcrowding both damage agency and reason. He contrasts that with classroom encounters inside prison, where reading and discussion occur without screens and attention can be sustained.

He argues that smartphones and social media produce a similar “too much and too little” (106) condition: continuous apparent contact with reduced bodily recognition. He links those changes to hybrid Russian tactics in 2014 and 2016, including targeted social-media campaigns designed to undermine confidence in US elections and sow political discord. He notes that data aggregation enables propaganda tailored to the particular vulnerabilities of individuals and groups, making them easier to steer.

Snyder outlines how social media platforms capture time and fragment attention, undermining sleep, memory, and the formation of a coherent life narrative. He summarizes behaviorist techniques embedded in platform design—“brain hacks” that push users toward predictability: isolation, intermittent reinforcement (occasional rewards that compel repeated checking), confirmation bias (feeds that amplify what we already believe), social conformity (silos that simulate consensus), and cognitive dissonance (after acting on manipulated impulses, users rationalize their actions). These processes, he says, allow leaderless mass manipulation: data-driven politics exploits pre-existing social divisions and anxieties, nudging populations toward violence or antidemocratic moves without a single directing figure visibly in charge.

He describes how the same capacities that underpin freedom—declaring values and accommodating others—are captured by platforms and turned into self-built cages: People declare their values online; algorithms extract, categorize, and weaponize those declarations; and users become predictable. The machine first demobilizes, soaking up time and energy; later, once fears are primed, it mobilizes people into binary, urgent action. Lies authored elsewhere govern predictable responses; people rationalize after the fact, narrowing the realm of freedom.

Snyder proposes countermeasures that rely on embodied attention and traditions. He points to concentrated reading, to teaching and learning without devices, and to the preservation of vocabulary and cultural memory as resources for resisting digital stupefaction. Unpredictability and sovereignty, he maintains, require time, relationships, and practice; while machine-driven predictability threatens these, they can be rebuilt through collective effort, embodied presence, and cultivated habits of judgment.