It’s not so much that the “founding fathers” didn’t have a conception of modernity as that it wasn’t particularly salient in this context. We can (and usually do) think of their Enlightenment values as examples of early modernism. But, poor sloganeering aside, this would have been an unlikely Revolutionary refrain. Instead, our historical imagination suggests that the impulse was to build a republic upon divinely-granted human qualities rather than break totally with tradition (well, not all humans, as we know).

Modernity, on the other hand, describes a new mythology. A century after the American Revolution, Rimbaud writes “one must be absolutely modern.” The line is well-known and becomes an ambiguous signal of the modern. Rimbaud views the modern as a world demanding a new sensorium and aesthetic. I suppose he sides more with Flaubert than with Balzac or Zola. It’s not really my field, but there’s this division between realism and modernism that extends into the 20th century. Part of Rimbaud’s line is (or becomes) the poetic “make it new” of literary Modernism. That line does command a radical break with tradition. But for Rimbaud there is also the oppressive demands of the modern as a command. This is the aspect Kundera takes up in Immortality when he writes “to be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one’s gravediggers.” And I shouldn’t forget Futurism. For Marinetti though the better slogan might be “Give me modernity and give me death (of others).”

At present, liberty and modernity are interwoven. The limited liberty provided 250 years ago required modernization to become the limited liberty of the present. How does freedom function when every individual action contributes to our collective carbon footprint? None of us are free from the externalities of others’ actions. And liberty is relational. While we value our protections from the state, what protects our liberty from the algorithmic marketplace?

Modernity is second-order myth making where we authorize ourselves to author myths about our origins and destinies rather than relying on gods to co-sign them. Liberty is subsumed within modernity, which is the infrastructure and operational life that mythologizes a destiny of freedom and realizing the “American experiment.” But this isn’t Rimbaud’s existential modernity. It is the mythological modernity of the killing jar. It is the techno-capitalist realist modernity of industrialization.

As Kundera observes, the relation of that modernity to liberty is more complicated, to say the least. We (in the industrialized West) have been liberated from many of the depredations of early industrialization (e.g., slavery). But at what cost? And Rimbaud’s existential question remains. Perhaps the question should continue to be how modernity can fuel liberty. It’s not a bad question necessarily.

That said, from a non modern and posthuman perspective however, we could revisit this second-order myth making (e.g., what if we have never been modern?). We’ve covered this, and the perspective of 1000 years of nonlinear history. Broadly from an ANT or assemblage theory perspective, we’d have to ask what actors, machines, flows, material relations, institutions, pragmatics, discourses, etc. make the world legible as being on a “modern” trajectory? Modernity is jagged in this sense, unevenly distributed as the arriving future.

Then we’d ask what kinds of liberties become legible in the modernizing world? “Labor-saving” devices? “Time-saving” habits? “Optimizing” techniques? “Self-improvement” strategies? What are the components of modern life in which we express our liberties? Social media? Curating our streaming services? Exceeding KPIs? We can always express our freedom by choosing to do more than appears to be required… I suppose.

However I don’t mean to suggest that we have no liberty or freedom. To the extent that we are us, we have some agency. That said, I would be more inclined to argue that liberty is a condition with which modernity contends rather than liberty being a product of modernism. The “problem” is that things never work out exactly as planned. The problem is an encounter with liberty, with a condition where the machine cannot force its outcome. To be clear, this “liberty” is quite different from Paine’s version. To the extent it exists, agency is a naturalcultural phenomenon; every particle is an expression.

In the end squaring modernity with liberty becomes a continual matter of concern where conventional political positions switch sides from one topic to another. For example, think about the different ways current political views side with or against modernity with issues like healthcare, surveillance, worker safety, climate change, education, defense spending, and so on. Not that modernity can’t be on all sides of an issue either. One person’s modernity is another person’s grift.

Artificial intelligence already has a significant role in the current conversation of modernity and liberty. Setting aside paper-clip maximizers, how does gen AI participate in shaping the conditions in which we express our liberty, by which I do not only mean saying “I’m free!” but also taking actions that demonstrate my liberty. What would those actions be? Choosing my own words to enter into a prompt? Selecting among AI generated recommendations? Determining whether or not to trust the output?

Yay liberty! There has to be and there is more to it than that. After I am done taking liberties with my AI agent/bot, either the output takes an action or I can take an action with the output. Either way, now I am able to do something more/other than I would otherwise be able to do… if I do it right. That’s the human-AI centaur relationship, where the AI does the hard work for the human. The “reverse centaur” situation does not increase liberty, so we just need to avoid that and consider how being a centaur gives us liberty.

What is liberty such that it is gained/lost in a way that there can always be more to have? Delaying death might arguably give us more liberty in a quantitative sense. This is the story of biopower. We can learn to love the bomb or attempt the contortionist act of “apocaloptimism.” In that way our affective relationship with technology alters our own understanding of what our liberty should be and/or how we might express it. In some respects this is an always already historical process. Or we can argue that when modernity industrializes liberty it also alienates and commodifies it. As a result, we can culturally produce a near infinite reserve of potential liberty in the same way that Big Tech sells its potential for infinite growth hiding behind the curtain of its next innovation. Indeed, growth and liberty have been looking for elbow room since our Manifest Destiny (hmmm). This becomes the small gains of optimization of an asymptotic death march toward absolute liberty.

“Now he’s out in space, fixing all the problems.”