I sat down with Nita Farahany, Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University, author of The Battle for Your Brain and writer of the Substack Thinking Freely, to talk about cognitive liberty: your right to control your own thoughts, mental experiences, and inner life.
What she laid out was clarifying in the best and worst possible way. We are not approaching a dangerous future: we are living inside one that was built slowly around us, without us noticing.
"Mental privacy is something we've traded for convenience, something that we need to claw back."
Here’s some of what we got into:
What cognitive liberty actually means and why the rights we have now weren’t built for a world that can read your face, track your eyes, and decode your intentions before you act on them
The technology that’s already here. Meta’s neural wristband at Best Buy. Apple’s $1.5 billion acquisition of software that reads silent speech from micro-movements of your jaw. Cameras layered with emotional recognition software.
How we got here. Not through force, but through convenience. Decade by decade, hundreds of terms of service we didn’t read.
Who gets experimented on first. Refugee populations, low-income communities, people who can’t say no, and how that data then scales to everyone else.
These companies want read/write access to your brain. The same technology that tracks your mood, attention, and emotional state can be used to steer your behavior, modulate what you feel, and manipulate what you do next.
What it would actually take to protect our mental privacy — the laws we'd need and the design choices that should be illegal.
Where the hope is. Because Nita brought some, and we need it.
Watch it! Then sound off in the comments: where have you felt this slow creep? And where in your life can you better protect yourself?
A huge thank you to Nita! Don’t forget to follow her at Thinking Freely for the kind of clear-eyed, rigorous thinking your brain deserves.
And make sure you’re subscribed to us here at Life With Machines, where we explore how humans can live well with tech, not just endure it!
Stay free,
Baratunde
Thanks to producers Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support and to my executive assistant Mae Abellanosa.
