Why We Can't Have Nice Things: The Cost of Safety Over Freedom in Innovation.
New liver, same eagles.
Disclaimer: This isn't a rant, nor an explainer on current events. It's a reflection from my unique perspective, captured here for posterity. Whether or not this is read doesn't concern me; my aim is to record these thoughts on the internet.
This morning, a Telegram notification woke me up. A friend messaged me with unexpected news: Pavel Durov has been arrested in France, accused of complicity in drug trafficking and other serious crimes.
Though surprising, this news didn't shock me. It fits into a recurring pattern I've noticed even at my young age. Since childhood, I've seen individuals who developed privacy-preserving communications, far from state control, eventually face prosecution and imprisonment.
And I believe we are responsible.
My personal journey as a Telegram user
I’m a 20-year-old programmer, active in the crypto space since 2021. Before that, I had been tinkering with computers and delving into philosophy for as long as I can remember. Actually, my programming journey began in 2015. That year, Telegram released its bots API. I immediately wanted to build one and started to experiment with already open-sourced bots on GitHub by running them on VPSs. I knew nothing about programming, but I was sure as hell that this felt great, and every day I wanted to go deeper into it. So, I began to learn Lua and then PHP, and I could write my own bots after a while on my little not-so-performant Lenovo tablet. It was a pain, but I was too excited to care for the difficulties.
From then on, it was me learning new things and going deeper into the rabbit hole of computer science. From learning how to design and build websites to joining my high school’s computer science and mathematics olympiad teams and working on different projects. To me, computers were the first priority of my life, at least until I gradually started to get into philosophy.
The descent into philosophy happened simultaneously with me getting more into cinema and literature, and on the side still coding. I learned about how the history of philosophy and science had been shaped by once socially rejected, prosecuted, tortured thinkers and innovators.
Consider the historical figures who challenged societal norms: Socrates, who chose death over compromising his principles; Spinoza, ostracized for his radical thoughts; and Schopenhauer, who embraced solitude over societal acceptance. Just as Socrates was punished for questioning the status quo, innovators like Durov face modern-day ostracism for challenging digital norms.
I was torn between my interest in philosophy, cinema, and technology. Surely, there must be an exciting intersection between these interests that helps innovation. It's not just about balancing these elements; it's about leveraging them to foster a society that values innovation over control. There must be a way to do this…
I found out that way was decentralized protocols with open-source cultures. I could work on a solution that allowed anyone from anywhere to own assets and participate in a free economy. This can be huge, I thought to myself. Decentralized finance could pave the way for decentralized governance in the future. This would mean, unapologetic and free participants from different parts of society participating in governance matters. The right to own is a fundamental right that enables free speech.
But why am I even telling you this stuff? They don’t seem to be related to today’s news at all. Am I comparing Pavel Durov to Socrates and Spinoza? It’s the spirit of innovation and liberty to exercise new ideas that are being targeted. Think of it like Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, historically we haven’t been very kind to our Prometheus.
Let me explain.
On social inertia in favor of safety and its consequences
All of those years of reading, coding, and learning seemed to guide me toward a very obvious and certain principle: we screw up the best of us, and that’s because we fear innovation and freedom because we prioritize safety over freedom.
Telegram, while still far away from the perfect decentralized and free messaging app, is the most mainstream and popular “free” and “private” solution that we have. (let’s not get into the E2E encryption and other edge cases as they are out of scope and a distraction to this post)
And Telegram is under attack for the same reasons Silkroad and TornadoCash were under attack before. Some “bad” actors took advantage of the freedom these services provide to facilitate illegal acts like drug trade (Silkroad), money laundering (TornadoCash), and everything in between (Telegram). To centralized authorities, this sounded like a good enough reason to take action against these platforms and censor them.
Sounds reasonable, right? After all, you can’t sit around and do nothing when stuff like that is happening right under your nose! You must take action, and surely our governments are filled with great men of decisive action!
Well, there is some truth to that. Clashes like these are admirable as they show there are some humane values to care about (like the fight against pedophilia). The goal is justified, but the method of getting there is not.
For further explanation, I present two trends that we have witnessed in human history:
Fact: Human history shows a trend of moving from highly centralized forms of power to more decentralized ones with greater entropy.
Explanation: We have observed a non-linear trend where power shifts from authoritarian, centralized forms—often based on kinship in kingdoms—to more decentralized forms, like fragmented representation in parliaments. I say non-linear, as many times in history we went back and forth between this, but only with greater impact (the negative and positive effects were greater each time than the last). The Roman Republic chose Caesar, a dictator, freely for three years to take rein and deliver stability for the people. Caesar never gave the power back, and that was the end of the Roman Republic. During the time of the Roman Empire, even though the idea of the Republic was seen as distant, certain people always had it in the back of their mind, including some of the emperors themselves. Eventually, the Roman Empire collapsed and new forms of power rose, not dissimilar to the empire itself.
Fast-forward to later centuries, we see that we had many new revolutions, coups, and attempts to regain what was once lost. Finally, we arrive at the present time in which Europe is generally led by elected representatives of the people with more restricted power compared to before. Highly supervised forms of power rule over Europe currently, on behalf of the people who elected them. There has been a general shift from highly centralized to less centralized, with ups and downs of failed revolutions and periods of growth and regression (the post-French-revolution era is a good example of this until the restless year of 1848).
Fact: People have an inertia towards safety rather than freedom. Whenever this inertia was fought, leaps of greater darkness and enlightenment followed.
Explanation: Examples of this could be the French Revolution or the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Very clearly, both of these historical events posed new threats to the societies of the time by opting for newer and less-known methods of governance. If societies go along with new ideas and approaches, rather than fighting them, greater leaps can be achieved in shorter times with less suffering. The French Revolution did not necessarily need to happen when people were suffering like that, it should rather never get to that stage to begin with, hence the inertia that postponed such an event until then, even though the philosophical writing was on the wall. We should not make Rousseau flee France, again.
The two points above clash at times and at certain critical moments in history, different societies had to make a decision of choosing between greater security or greater self-autonomy and freedom. Almost always when the former was chosen, a temporary era of stability followed, and then the greater era of diminishing autonomy and individual rights. This is because change is inherently an act of announcing dissatisfaction with the current system and wishing to introduce new opportunities, and with that new risks to it. A society that doesn't tolerate risks of new innovations simply cannot progress. Innovation, entrepreneurship, or any other act of “creating” would be meaningless without posing new challenges and risks. This has been a great trait of the Western world in the past few centuries and it should not be forgotten, but rather kept and learned from.
Uniformity equals undisputed and effective decision-making, and that is a trade-off for safety against freedom. High entropy societies are enablers of greater and faster technological advances that themselves result in life improvements.
Attacks on any sort of experimentation like this should not exist. If they do occur, they should not target the individuals behind these systems—the innovators. This ultimately results in a lower-entropy society that does not produce or incentivize new innovators.
We should act as a global society that admires and incentivizes experimentation and new advancements, not the kind of people who would prosecute Carl Benz because his cars could be used as gateway cars of a bank robbery.
With this kind of prosecution, we cannot expect much from the future as any could-be-innovator would be too scared to try anything as it may offend someone or result in some unexpected outcome, and god-forbid if a thing that was new had unexpected outcomes!
saw that is cutting innovators and creators down today, should be reversed towards these centralized forms of power, and fortunately, that’s something we can take care of. In the face of unjustified prosecution from unjustified sources of power, innovation should never yield.
From your unapologetic lifetime Telegram user :)