(Originally published on the Harvard Kennedy School website)
To mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School has published Self-Evident Truths: The 250-Year Pursuit of Human Rights in the United States of America, a collection of short reflections released on 4 July 2026. As a Technology and Human Rights Fellow (2025-26) at the Center, I contributed an op-ed, reproduced in full below.
The volume, directed by Mathias Risse, brings together more than fifty Harvard faculty members, fellows, and visiting professors, from economics, public health, law, political science, and technology. The Center sent them all the same open invitation: what does this anniversary mean to you, through the lens of your own expertise? The request was for a short reflection, not an exhaustive treatise. The result is a wide-ranging, sometimes convergent, sometimes sharply divergent assessment of the American human rights project, from the founding moment to race and citizenship, economic opportunity, digital technologies, and America’s role in the world.
The Declaration of Independence was never a description of a society that had been achieved. It was a wager.
That is how Mathias Risse sums up, in his introduction, what the essays insist on from every angle and in every discipline.
My contribution, on page 86, starts from the three rights named in the Declaration, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and asks what they mean when a decisive part of their protection now depends on technology companies that exercise quasi-governmental power without constitutional obligations. It argues that rights conceived for the public square struggle to reach the server room, and makes the case for epistemic rights: the right to know who knows us, what is known about us, for what purposes, and with what possibilities of control, contestation, and refusal.
The full text follows.
The United States Declaration of Independence affirms three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It also states that governments are instituted to secure these rights and derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Two and a half centuries later, this promise remains both powerful and unfinished. But a decisive part of that project no longer unfolds only within public institutions. It now unfolds in cyberspace.
Technology giants are not governments in the classical sense. They do not levy taxes or derive their authority from a democratic constitution. Yet they exercise quasi-governmental power, deciding what is visible or invisible, what circulates or disappears, what shapes our opinions and captures our attention. Unlike the federal government, however, they bear no constitutional obligation to protect the rights of those over whom they exercise that power. The question is this: Do they protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or do they contribute to their silent erosion?
The right to life means that every human being has inherent worth and that institutions must protect each person’s existence, safety, and integrity. In a connected world, this duty extends to harms that digital architectures enable. When a platform optimizes attention without sufficient regard for safety, through recommendation systems designed to maximize engagement at the expense of mental health, it makes a choice. And that choice has victims.
The right to liberty cannot be reduced to the absence of external constraint. It also requires the ability to make choices for oneself and participate in public life according to the principle of consent of the governed. But what does consent mean when our information environments are saturated with disinformation, algorithmic bubbles, and artificial intelligence agents capable of steering our decisions? Liberty demands an epistemic capacity: to understand the world, form one’s own judgment, and choose without opaque manipulation. Liberty without lucidity is only a gilded cage.
Liberty without lucidity is only a gilded cage.
As for the pursuit of happiness, it presupposes a chosen, dignified, and flourishing life. The attention economy has turned it into a resource to be extracted. Every click, every hesitation, every emotion becomes data, fed back into profiles documented in the internal research of the platforms themselves, meant to know us better than we know ourselves. This is not the pursuit of happiness; it is its simulation, designed to retain rather than to help us flourish. When a company reduces a human being to market value, it betrays 1776’s deepest intuition: every individual is an end in themselves, never merely a means.
Classical rights were designed against a visible enemy: a state that imprisons, a law that discriminates, a power that coerces. Surveillance capitalism operates differently, through opacity, inference, and the soft architecture of nudges. Rights conceived for the public square struggle to reach the server room. This is why human rights must be rethought without being abandoned, extended by epistemic rights: the right to know who knows us, what is known about us, for what purposes, and with what possibilities of control, contestation, and refusal. A health insurer, employer, or political campaign may hold an inferred profile of us, built not from what we disclosed but from what an algorithm concluded. Data protection law can regulate parts of this system, but not the deeper imbalance it creates. Epistemic rights would.
At 250, the American project cannot only look back to Philadelphia and its founding promises. It must also look toward the invisible infrastructures that now organize collective life. The next frontier of human rights exercise is digital, and it begins with the right to remain fully human in a world that claims to know us better than we know ourselves.
Original publication: Self-Evident Truths: The 250-Year Pursuit of Human Rights in the United States of America, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School, 4 July 2026 (Issue 2026-10), p. 86