text: Sartre argued that, far from living under the spell of surveillance society, we are "condemned to be free", and that the thing that we most fear is our own freedom. To illustrate this, he pointed to vertigo: the sickening sensation one has when standing on the edge of a cliff, caused by the knowledge that one could freely choose to jump. People will do almost anything to avoid confronting this freedom, because it is not simply liberating, but profoundly terrifying.