Whenever I need to drive somewhere, I use Waze. The app saves me a lot of trouble, because it aggregates information to which I have no access and even plans how to distribute the traffic rationally to avoid clogging the roads. It has a lot of pop-up ads, but I try to ignore them because they seem a minor annoyance.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
ON FREEDOM
By Cass R. Sunstein
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Waze does, however, have some debatable features. First, it doesn't tell me where to go, which is, supposedly, entirely up to me. If my desires are misbegotten, it facilitates their fulfillment as readily as if they weren't. Waze is Jeremy Bentham for the digital-consumer age: The Potbelly Sandwich Shop is as good as the poetry bookstore. Second, Waze does not create infrastructure; by planning its users' routes on roads that already exist, it thereby augments the illusion that what we have is satisfactory for our needs and that we require the state less than we might think we do. Most troubling, Waze entrenches our reliance on automobiles even further and postpones a collective reckoning with its consequences for the climate, including who ought to bear them in our unequal society.
But whatever its drawbacks, Waze marks a triumph for “navigability,” the ungainly term that Cass Sunstein uses in his new book, On Freedom, to describe how easy or difficult it is to get from here to there and, in the metaphorical sense, to achieve a goal once you've set one for yourself. For Sunstein, government ought to be more like Waze, helping people fulfill their desires and dreams, especially when they themselves are blocking that fulfillment. But any inquiry into navigability is inseparable from a much bigger theory of where our desires come from and how society fits them together not just with others' but also into a common scheme of life. For too long, liberals have abstained from inquiring into what people want and have ignored how most obstructions come from neither the state nor the self but from a deregulated market and an unreformed society in which oppression is the rule.
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