Freedom Technology
“Freedom technology” can be understood as any technology whose primary effect is to expand the set of actions an individual can take without permission from an institution they did not choose.
When I was 14 & 15, I was in a deep “politics and economics” phase: particularly interested in ideologies at the fringe. I spent most of my days arguing with people online that took radical positions like rothbardian-capitalism, anarchism, and marxism.
The horseshoe theory, the idea that ideologies at the fringes are closer to one another than they are to more moderate ideologies, has some truth from my experience.
When it comes to the matter of freedom, both the economic far-left, marxism, and the economic far-right, anarcho-capitalism, are ultimately working towards maximizing freedom.
The difference comes down to how each side defines freedom. Freedom is not a single, self-evident concept. The distinction between negative and positive liberty from Isaiah Berlin and extended by individuals like Amartya Sen, is useful here: negative liberty means freedom from interference, while positive liberty means having the real means, capacity, or conditions necessary to act freely.
Karl Marx worked from the perspective of positive freedom, specifically in the belief that class represented a gradient of positive freedom, with the proletariat lacking positive freedom because of poor material security and the need to do alienated labor to survive, while the bourgeoisie lives in the opposite way: little need for real labor, strong material security. To Marx, freedom was material self-mastery.
To libertarian economists, particularly those like Rothbard, positive freedom is not considered a true type of freedom: to have positive freedom is a breach of freedom fundamentally, as it requires taking resources from others and re-allocating it to establish equality. Libertarians operate from the perspective that negative freedoms, the ability to operate without interference (which extends to markets), is the ultimate freedom.
The better direction is a third position: maximize negative freedom, while expanding positive freedom through technology rather than coercive redistribution.
Marx was right that material conditions shape a person’s freedom. Libertarians were right that freedom cannot be built by violating the freedom of others. Technology offers a better answer: it expands what individuals are capable of doing without requiring the state to forcibly reallocate resources.
Technology is the non-coercive path to positive freedom.
With technology, meaning the internet, AI, software, modern financial tools, etc., the class gradient around information, distribution, and productive tools is far weaker than it was in 1844. The “means of production” are not as gatekept, as individuals from virtually any background now have the ability to produce, distribute, learn, build, and own productive tools at an unprecedented capacity.
Technology has partially democratized the means of production through introducing positive freedom.
Access to consume and disseminate information has also been equalized between classes. Obviously, it’s not perfectly equal, but for the first time in history, the ability to have a strong voice, and the ability to learn, is not primarily class-dependent.
Long Freedom
Good technology is additive to individual freedom. Many of the most important modern technologies are best understood as positive-freedom machines:
- The internet, democratizing access to information.
- Social media, equalizing the ability to distribute information (have a voice).
- Cloud, providing widespread access to hardware with virtually no financial floor.
- Open-source, freedom of contribution to public goods.
- Blockchain, near-universal access to financial instruments and stable currencies.
Good technology is freedom technology.
Technology, importantly, provides freedoms that are largely borderless, and subject to a very shallow class gradient.
A Turkish farmer can hold US dollars, access dollar-denominated yield, produce software, watch Harvard lectures, and write blogs that can be seen by millions with a $100 device.
Our end-goal as a society should be maximal negative freedoms, and maximal positive freedoms through technology.
Information has effectively been democratized: finance is the work of the next decade. Long freedom technology.