All the more so when dictators rediscover the time-honored technique of weaponizing the people against each other by punishing those who don’t denounce or punish others. In contrast, technologically advanced societies have long had the means to install Internet-connected, government-monitored surveillance cameras in every bar and bedroom. Yet that has not happened, because democratic governments (even the current American administration, with its flagrantly antidemocratic impulses) lack the will and the means to enforce such surveillance on an obstreperous people accustomed to saying what they want. Occasionally, warnings of nuclear, biological, or cyberterrorism goad government security agencies into measures such as hoovering up mobile phone metadata, but these ineffectual measures, more theater than oppression, have had no significant effect on either security or freedom. Ironically, tech prophecy plays a role in encouraging these measures. By sowing panic about supposed existential threats such as suitcase nuclear bombs and bioweapons assembled in teenagers’ bedrooms, they put pressure on governments to prove they’re doing something, anything, to protect the American people. It’s not that political freedom takes care of itself. It’s that the biggest threats lie in the networks of ideas, norms, and institutions that allow information to feed back (or not) on collective decisions and understanding. As opposed to the chimerical technological threats, one real threat today is oppressive political correctness, which has choked the range of publicly expressible hypotheses, terrified many intelligent people against entering the intellectual arena, and triggered a reactionary backlash. Another real threat is the combination of prosecutorial discretion with an expansive lawbook filled with vague statutes. The result is that every American unwittingly commits “three felonies a day” (as the title of a book by civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate puts it) and is in jeopar