We have lost our grounding. When Katy Perry flew to space with Blue Origin in 2025, the CO2 level in the atmosphere stood at about 425 ppm. In 2008, when "I Kissed a Girl" first hit the radio, it was still about 385 ppm. In pre-industrial times, by contrast, 280 ppm.

The frenetic acceleration of technological development, while global warming advances and other planetary boundaries shift drastically within the span of one pop star’s successful years alone, is commonly called progress. An all-female crew around Katy Perry in the space shuttle of one of the richest men in the world, some advertising mouthpieces call female empowerment. And the feeling in your stomach, when you consider how sharply the ecological crises are escalating while governments of industrialized countries slow down climate and environmental protection measures to protect the freedom of consumption and production, I call nausea. Taken together, all this can also be described as frenetic standstill, for this progress has as little to do with emancipatory and democratic ideals as “I Kissed a Girl” has with ecological collapse.

Blue Origin’s slogan “For the Benefit of Earth” and SpaceX’s “Making Humanity Multi-Planetary” follow the guiding motif of the tech elites: progress and freedom for the good of humanity. Anyone who cares about defending our democracy should be alert at this point and ask critically to what extent our understanding of freedom and progress has long been transfigured by those entrepreneurs of space tourism, AI, and social media platforms, and how much the seemingly endless expansion of our possibilities makes us forget the core of freedom, namely the privilege of leaving possibilities unused. Our idea of liberal freedom and progress has always been systematically tied to material abundance. The extractive use of raw materials such as coal and oil was the condition for actually making good on this promise of freedom, while the costs of environmental destruction were consistently externalized. Instead of grounding our understanding of freedom, externalization is now supposed to take multi-planetary detours. I am by no means among those who demonize progress, for we owe it to our liberation from the hardship of life’s necessities that we can live under conditions of political freedom. But the fixation on progress through the increase of material resources in the mode of acceleration is no sufficient condition for freedom, but the expression of a compulsive glorification of means into the epitome of the good life, so that the relationship between freedom and material abundance is increasingly inverted.

While space opens up for humanity, people are losing more and more habitable space on our Earth. Whoever fixes their gaze on abstract categories such as humanity loses sight of people in their uniqueness and diversity. And whoever speaks in the name of humanity usually conceals their own interests and always denies the political. For the political consists in the plurality of human beings and of all non-human beings that appear in the ecological crises and in the entanglements of humans, nature, and technology. How much our space of freedom threatens to shrink, the ecological crises put right before our eyes. Freedom could once be defined as liberation from the necessities of life, but now the necessities intrude directly into the space of political freedom, for extreme weather events and species extinction compel us to adapt our ways of living and to question the understanding of freedom that splits the world in two, into a world we live in and a world we live off.

The concentration of power in the hands of a few who use their reach to define the good of humanity affects not only the ecological crises but, of course, the crisis of liberalism as well. For liberalism draws its radiance not from the possibility of shooting Katy Perry into space, but from the freedom to ridicule the tech billionaires’ fantasies of omnipotence and thus rob them of their radiance — not despite but because of the seriousness of their authoritarian ambitions. “Wer Menschheit sagt, will betrügen” — whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat — as the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt put it, of whom the supposed freedom visionary and salvation-promiser Peter Thiel, too, is so enamored. Yes, we have lost our grounding. To regain it, we need an understanding of freedom that neither ignores the material conditions of our life together nor denies the plurality of human beings in the name of the progress of humanity.