uxsam.eth

Stop passing the buck. Protecting free speech is your job now. Not the government's. Software, The 21st Century Alchemist You've heard that 'software is eating the world.' It's not Pac-Man chomping through a city, though. It's more like a magician turning lead into gold, transforming atoms into bits. Your banker? As @BackTheBunny suggests, a good JavaScript code can do their job. Office buildings? Replaced by Zoom & Slack. Movie theaters? Netflix has the front row. Bits are just speech. Info. Zeros and ones. Governments: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place Democracies find this tricky. Traditionally, governments held power through physical resources, but still treated freedom of speech as sacred. But now, as the atomic powers evaporate into bits - bits that are literally speech, governments are left grappling. This isn't a new predicament. Remember when Adam Back printed the RSA source code on a tee in '95, protesting against its classification as a weapon by the US? I feel for governments, but the choices aren't easy. Should they uphold their values of free speech as their powers dissolve? Or should they morph and regulate speech while they still can? The path they seem to have chosen is hypocrisy (or schizophrenia, depending on your perspective). Governments are getting aggressive in regulating speech, while maintaining the facade of freedom, just like how Roman emperors submitted to the senate - but only on paper. Redefining Free Speech They narrow the definition of protected speech and start classifying other speech forms as something else. This isn't speech, it's a weapon. This isn't speech, it's malinformation or incitement. This isn't speech, it's a financial transaction. Even though, essentially, it's all info. Bits. Patterns of zeros and ones. From Tradition to Transformation But here's the thing. Free speech is a privilege that few value enough to defend. Yet, miraculously, a tradition started in Europe in the 1600s of governments letting people speak their minds. This tradition was then adopted and honed by the US. We are the beneficiaries of this tradition. This tradition put in our hands everything we need to protect and disseminate our speech globally. PCs. The Internet. Encryption. Crypto. And as more atoms transform into bits, we're getting more power in our hands. Stepping into Our Own Power We've been gifted technology that our ancestors could only dream of. Technologies that we can use to create new stuff, new connections, new communities, new dreams. So yes, government protection of speech is dwindling. But that's not the end of free speech. Free speech has existed for as long as humans have, regardless of censorship attempts, which have been the default operating mode of civilisations throughout history. We're lucky to have powerful tech to amplify and protect our speech that our forefathers could only dream of. Less whinge. More buidl. The upshot is that it's time to adult, folks. We're on our own now. Much like Bambi, we've been left in the wild. It's time to mourn the loss, then wipe your tears and stand tall. We have at our disposal the most powerful tools - PCs, the Internet, Encryption, Crypto. These are our defenses, our shields, our loudspeakers. They have the potential to protect our speech and give it wings to reach every corner of the world. The language of zeros and ones is our legacy. And it's not just about preserving the freedom to speak, it's about the future we'll build with this speech - the products, the connections, the dreams and the communities we'll bring to life. We owe it to future generations to pass on this legacy of free speech and digital creation. Less whinge. More buidl.