Archive:A culture of freedom

The internet and digital technology can be tools of liberation. They have the potential to put tremendous power into the hands of the average person, if they are not perverted into a means of control. However, with great power comes great responsibility. To a large extent, free culture is about building a healthy, robust culture of freedom, where the people understand how freedom works and are comfortable with their liberty.

As we know from history, it is difficult for democracy to take root in a country where there is not a tradition of personal freedom and responsibility. Democracy is still struggling in the former member states of the USSR, because the people are used to the Soviet regime taking care of things for them. It may be futile to hand over control of a country to the populace if the populace does not understand democracy. This of course results in a chicken and egg problem: how can we build a healthy democracy if it is impossible without a populace that understands democracy, but the only way the people can learn democracy is by living in a democracy?

The only way to accomplish the shift in such a case is to build an alternative, as the American colonists did when they founded the United States. The experimental people can work out the kinks of the new system and figure out how it works, and then everyone can join in once it is production quality ;-)

We are building that alternative. We intend to lead by example, and develop a culture of freedom which can scale to the world at large -- once it works well enough, a draconian "intellectual property" regime becomes unnecessary, insofar as it ever was necessary.