Freedom Recipes
(A few suggestions)
Use the freedom you’ve got: take action.
We sometimes think of freedom as impulse. You're just doing exactly what you feel like at a given moment, and you're free. I think that freedom is the moral choices that you make. Freedom is also that you know what you have to do because you know who you are.
—Timothy Snyder
Change the internet. Train the algorithm to give you what you want.
Instead of legacy and right-wing media, bots, and social algorithms, determine what you see. Post investigative news stories. Every time you go online. Watch how the algorithm then follows you.
How do we do this?
Subscribe to a newspaper that publishes investigative journalism.
When you go online, share an investigative article with your network.
Recommended Resources:
Books
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Timothy Snyder, On Freedom, Crown, 2024
David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything-A New History of Humanity, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2001
Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, Penguin Random House, 2018
Substacks
Join or Die: https://www.joinordiefilm.com/
This documentary examines social scientist Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" theory of how declining community engagement created an American civic crisis.
“More people bowl in America than vote!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOP_G2eiLo0
Movies & Videos
It’s easy. You know what tastes good to you.
Freedom makes possible everything from the fun of jokes to highways.
What values do you hold close to that are made possible by the freedom you claim?
What’s your recipe for staying calm in this political turbulence? (One distraction we love is swing dance competitions on YouTube.)
Share your recipe!
