Daniela Tafani has made her contribution, accepted for the Kant-Congress 2024, “The sole palladium of the people’s rights”. Freedom of the pen as a counterpower in Kant and his contemporaries, available on Zenodo.
For Kant’s contemporaries, his claim that the “freedom of the pen” is “the only palladium of the people’s rights” represented a clear political stance that favoured the thesis of the people’s sovereignty and the inalienable individual right to judge the actions of the constituted power. This phrase echoed almost a century of political claims and bloody battles for freedom of expression and the press, from England to the overseas colonies and France.
A constellation of terms such as “bulwark”, “palladium”, “guardian”, “sentinel” or “safeguard” had in fact been used to attribute to the freedom of expression and the press the role of a sui generis right, capable of protecting all other rights and, thanks to the collective vigilance that it was able to ensure, of protecting against opposing abuses of power and unjust laws, qualifying itself as a countervailing power with respect to the political powers, closely linked to the right of resistance.
For Kant, too, the question of freedom of thought coincided with the philosophical question of the very nature of human knowledge and, at the same time, with the political claim to a power of the people, permanently opposed to that of the State and able to monitor it, judge it and, ultimately, overturn it.
So-called ‘AI’ is a derivative of a surveillance business model that allows Big Tech to provide extrajudicial surveillance services for both civil and military purposes. In countries where such generalised and pervasive surveillance is banned, Big Tech has spread a family of narratives – including the myths of technological exceptionalism and legal vacuum – to evade the law and continue to distribute outlawed products. Now, through regulatory capture, Big Tech has produced the AI Act, under which fundamental rights can be violated with impunity as long as there is no foreseeable harm. So Big Tech’s next target is any norm that still protects fundamental rights. Thus, the narrative of an alleged legal vacuum is now replaced by a narrative that, under the pretext of ‘regulatory certainty’ and vague appeals to competitiveness and so-called ‘innovation’, aims to wipe out those regulations that, like the GDPR, still stand in defence of fundamental rights. It is therefore no coincidence that an open letter from major tech companies and Mario Draghi’s report, The future of European competitiveness, almost simultaneously call for the removal of those parts of regulation – such as certain provisions of the GDPR – on whose systematic violation Big Tech’s business model relies. The attacks on the GDPR are sneaky attacks on the fundamental rights that the GDPR protects, not attacks on the alleged obstacles that stifle innovation.
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