I was recently debating with someone on the topic of freedoms and how - obviously, at my age - I am very idealistic and somewhat foolish. I was told that running after certain freedoms is a fool’s errand and I am better off just getting into the system and along with the program.

Right. Just lay down your arms. I know it was generation gap, experience of the elders and maybe the facts of life. I am not on a holy quest to free everything and everybody from what is, ultimately, my perception of the evils of society [and it would be foolish not to acknowledge the fact that I make mistakes sometimes.] My struggle focuses around technology that is being used to restrict, oversee and control what we do with our own lives. Others focus around unjust societal barriers, wars, corruption. We are all part of a balance force that has to exist to guarantee that some bits of freedom remain.

The essence here is that without someone fighting, governments and interest groups would slowly take over every freedom many of us take for granted. It’s an ongoing tug-of-war and it has to stay this way. I do not believe in absolute [extreme] freedom because we are not capable of handling it just yet. I know that without hackers hungry for information and technophiles raising awareness we would be blind to a lot of the things that are used to leash us. As I was discussing with a dear friend of mine a while back, we cannot put our trust into any one group out there - hackers or police alike - because they are all susceptible of the same shortcomings. Yet living under a monopoly of security¹ we assign an almost unbearable amount of trust to people that have not necessarily earned it.

As I’ve said before, democracy and freedom do not happen only once every election period. Sure, we all have to deal with everyday bullshit and that, too, is sometimes overwhelming, and it’s easy to forget. That governments should be afraid of people. That censorship does not, ultimately², protect anyone. That privacy and self-governance are not crimes.

But of course, I am young and restless. I will, one day, wake up and forget about all this, caving in to the 9 to 5, the mortgage and the football games. These scribbles might, then, seem ridiculous - but to somebody else they could be inspiration - and maybe they will achieve where I may fail.

1. This happens when our guards are all from the same faction [↩]
2. Hate speech is a gray area. I cannot, in general, agree to it, and the astute analyst can observe subtle differences between hate speech and certain ideas of a less-than-conventional nature being disseminated. In particular, I am rather tired as using children as our reason for censorship. There is such a thing as education that seems to have been taken out of many people’s vocabularies and while that isn’t, either, a catch-all solution, it sure beats blind restrictions that only raise curiosity regarding certain matters. [↩]