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All of this ties to Markets for Loyalties, a concept that helps bring together notions of strategic infrastructures and strategic narratives and the valuable insights from the contributors to this volume. Those who yearn for communications rights do so in countless contested markets for loyalties where struggles to define who can affect the information field and how are battled out. Markets for loyalties exist where large-scale entities compete for power. These include states, religions, movements, ideologies, political parties, “all those for whom myths and dreams and history can be converted into power and wealth.” In their ongoing shuffle for allegiances, these “sellers” use technologies – in conjunction with other tools I have mentioned – strategic narratives and infrastructures to expand their sway. They use force, law, subsidy, and negotiation to intensify their reach or to facilitate or limit entry for others. The operation of such markets can help us understand the relationship between technology and freedom.

The 2019 IAMCR meeting where I was introduced to this volume occurred in Spain, and I will conclude with two examples of the working of markets for loyalties from there. The long struggle between “the center” and Catalonia is a case study in how a market for loyalties works, and how vying “sellers” use a repertoire of tools to alter the passions of audiences in the market. The “center,” we can call it “Madrid,” at many points used law, force, subsidy, and technology to drive home the idea of a more unified Spain, seeking to limit the capacity of the Catalan movement to expand and entrench. And when and where a pro independence or Catalan party was in control, it used its authority and leverage similarly, deploying technology, such as control of public television and other mechanisms to reshape political allegiances. Control of narratives and influence on infrastructure were dramatic factors.

The Catalan example underscores this question: in the next decades, if information warfare and propaganda expand, what control will the home state demand in terms of management of the information space? We may, in fact, be in for a period of information mercantilism. In a period of populism, some political leaders emphasize control of immigration as a necessary element of statehood. And, similarly there is a populist turn in control of the export and import of goods. States, asserting sovereignty, will use borders to restrict, even more than now, the flow of ideas. States, particularly authoritarian states, act to immunize their populations from what they consider destabilizing ideas and advocacy.

The confluence of these issues is explored in the contributions gathered by the editors to this volume. That is as it should be: we seek general and universal meanings for “freedom,” but realize it also has a specific meaning in each specific market. Yoani Sánchez turned simple flash drives into technologies of freedom to enable thousands of Cubans to read or watch what would otherwise be unavailable. In this volume, Ignacio Bel Mallén examines the different meanings of such freedom, and in its different aspects, also contributing a chapter on the relationship with communication rights and messages. Joan Barata and Lorenzo Cotino Hueso examine expression not only as a freedom, but as a right that includes duties and obligations. One more example of the relation of law and technology to freedom that is extensively discussed. Many “sellers” or advocates in these markets rely on the important principles in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Rodrigo Cetina Presuel, Erik Ugland, and Leopoldo Abad Alcalá, examine what the universality of such a right means today, particularly in the context of current technological developments, while others like Chris Demaske, analyze what common ground exists for the justifications for its limitations, particularly in relation to hate speech, while others like German Teruel Lozano analyze limits related to historical denialism. José Martínez Soria, in turn, explores limitations related to data protection while Krystie Byrum explores the tensions between the right to be forgotten and collective memory online.

The right to receive and impart information is applicable explicitly, regardless of frontiers, i.e., state boundaries. This aspect of communication rights, along with the importance of its universality, is examined by Loreto Corredoira in the opening chapters of this work, and that serves as the framework from which academics from various continents examine more specific topics around flows on information and the rights that enable them. Javier Gomá Lanzón, in turn, analyzes their relationship to human dignity and Rolando Guevara-Martínez approaches communication rights, and these concepts, through the lens of the most important Latin American authors.

I cannot finish this preface without also mentioning the contributions made by other authors in this volume to explore all of these questions, and others related to communication rights: emerging online threats and emerging international standards to face them and the evolving landscape of communication law in relation to journalism, media regulation, or elections. Justino Sinova explores objectivity and truth, while Isabel Serrano Maíllo concerns herself with the rights of minors and Divina Frau-Meigs analyzes the implications of disinformation for ethics and Fernando Gutiérrez Atala explores the professional realities of journalism in our rapidly changing, ever-evolving world. Other authors like Muira Nicolette McCammon and Pedro Anguita R. explore emerging online threats and explore them from points of view at the intersection of law and ethics while Maria José Canel uses the same framework to explore public communication and sustainability within the context of post-truth. Jane Johnston and Anne Wallace contribute a study on WikiLeaks and what these and other media disorders, mean for the future of journalism while Mariza Zapata Vásquez analyzes journalism driven by online metrics. Grace Leung and Richard Wu describe current challenges in media regulation and media freedom in Hong Kong and Rafael Rubio explores the emerging international standards for regulating political communication and electoral campaigns. Finally, Marisa Aguirre Nieto and Ignacio Bel Mallén provide an epilogue in which they highlight the important and complementary connection between Communication Law and Ethics and why they should be studied together.

I conclude here, as I did in a keynote in Madrid, by drawing on Picasso’s monumental Guernica, perhaps the most famous and powerful paintings of the twentieth century: It was painted by the artist in response to the bombing and near annihilation in 1937 of a small Spanish town in the Basque country. The bombing, by the Nazis, was authorized by Franco for a testing of German technology for aerial warfare. This painting as a meditation on anxiety in the face of the brutal technologies being unleashed. But it is also about strategic narratives and creative modes of affecting the range of influences in a market for loyalties. For me, the painting captures the desperate unease with onrushing technology and its potential to crush the human spirit. It is about the power of creativity in resistance. The durability of the image is a reflection on the artist’s contribution to strategic narrative.

We are at a different moment of a different onrushing technology in a differently uncertain world. Guernica could be a metaphor for our efforts as scholars and citizens, or citizen scholars: sounding an alarm, reaching beyond the ordinary, absorbing and reflecting the perils of dangerously collapsing norms. In the search for technologies of freedom, there is a need to help a wounded society cope with dramatic and bewildering change.