There’s been a lot of debate on the limits of free speech in recent years. The current PC culture, that has grown from a plea for a more polite society to a war on offensive Halloween costumes, seems to make people forget why liberal democracies have free speech in the first place. Why it matters, why it is the most important value a society can hold. Why Evelyn Beatrice Hall (often misquoted as Voltaire) said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. Free speech is important because of the fact that humans only have two ways to settle disputes. One is through violence and the other is through conversation. Cripple one and get more of the other. Free speech is not merely one’s right to say what’s on one’s mind, but also one’s right to hear ideas that would otherwise have been suppressed.
Sadly, the lion’s share of the internet’s population seems to have forgotten this. We keep using YouTube and Facebook even though we know they censor content that mentions whatever some mob seems sensitive about for the moment. We (they) tailor our feeds to our own preferences and we (and they) can leave out information we (or they) find offensive in one way or another. The saddest part is that we choose these our individual Orwellian safe spaces voluntarily. Like moths with delicate wings we aim towards the comfortable light of conformity that eventually will burn us all.
Luckily, there’s one linguistic frontier that is still mostly untouched by offense taking identity politics zombies or the thought police:
Code
Neither the neo-commies nor the neo-nazies seem to care about code. Infact, very few politicians seem to care about code. Very few journalists too. So what can we express with code that we can’t express with words? The answer is everything. Everything we can say can be translated into code. Everything we say can be encrypted and decrypted. Above all, for nine years in a row today, we’ve been able to express value through numbers and code only. Un-censorable, peer-to-peer and mostly incomprehensible to those too ignorant to realize their own enslavement. But we, the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. We can now illuminate the path to freedom for those less fortunate and emancipate our brethren.
Bitcoin can be hiding in plain sight anywhere. It can be embedded it in pictures, videos and sounds. A twelve word seed is all you need to memorize to be able to carry any amount of money anywhere in the world. You don’t even need a computer if you know what you’re doing. You could start a revolution using a multi-signature wallet combined with a seed or two. The impact this is going to have on the world in the next twenty years is hard to grasp but something big is on it’s way, make no mistake about it. So, wherever you happen to live, stand up for free speech or miss this once in a lifetime opportunity. In other words — live the dream or endure the nightmare.
Hmm, maybe I should copyright this article?