Digital Autonomism: Personal Autonomy through Technology
At ByFreedom starts from within, once we break through the external controls and take control over our own lives and decisions.
Although avoiding external controls might not sound feasible at the moment, just like avoiding cholera was not feasible a hundred years ago, the history of humanity is full of impossibilities that now just seem stupid to us.
Just like how absurd it sounds that people died from cholera because they didn’t separate sewers from drinking water, our situation will sound absurd a hundred years later—that we didn’t have control over our own lives, our own finances, our own privacy, our own data, our own minds even.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies broke a mental barrier for us, we suddenly realized things can work better without corruption looking over them, but that barrier can be pushed even further. We can control more than our finances, the Internet allows it, cryptography allows it, decentralized systems allow it.
We can have free markets, free media, free finances, free information, free expressions, free privacy, free thoughts and beliefs, all through technology, by controlling the matters ourselves rather than authoritarian entities, by putting the trust into ourselves, and the systems we will build on top of cryptographic methods. We will put our trust in math rather than humans because math won’t get corrupt when given power—math is the power.
We can have markets that people are free to trade on, markets that would be permissionless and trustless in every sense possible.
We can have media that are run by us, the humans—not the algorithms, not the companies profiting off of them. We would profit off of our own content, we would get paid for hosting the content.
We can have freedom of expression, information, and thoughts without censorship. We can have a place where no one’s voice can be suppressed.
We can have free privacy—an Internet where privacy is built into it, not something that would take our conscious effort and time and a lot of sketchy things to get into it.
For now, we have free finances, digital money that would be like gold in your safe, with the difference that crypto is safer. We have loans without banks, we have digital cash like Monero without federal reserves, we have borderless international money worth more than any currency on Earth.
We can eventually replace the Internet we know today with something that is truly decentralized—from the network infrastructure to the protocols, to everything running on it. An Internet where it is a basic right to have control over yourself, your data, and your decisions.
The world will move, the tools will be built, the knowledge will spread, and the barriers will fall. All that will remain will be for us to take back control, to build, to adopt, to be free.