Liberty

What I most value are personal freedoms. Freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom of association, freedom of speech. These are fundamental to who I am and to how I see the world working at its best. They are not slogans for me; they are the working conditions under which I can think, relate, and live without the constant static of someone else telling me what I should want.

That makes me sound like a libertarian, and the first few times I heard the word I wondered whether I should just accept the label and move on. But the word has picked up baggage I am not fully comfortable with, and the more I looked at the actual positions held by people who use it about themselves, the more I found myself agreeing and disagreeing in roughly equal measure. Some of the principles fit me well. Others take a good starting point and push it into places I wouldn’t follow.

Where I do land firmly: I believe in basic human rights, and I try not to judge others. People do not choose their initial circumstances. We are all shaped by genetics, upbringing, and environment long before we have any say in the matter, and starting to judge before acknowledging that is starting in the wrong place. I support diversity and the self-organisation of communities, physical and virtual alike. Different groups should be able to create their own rules and ways of living, as long as they do not harm others. Cultural diversity does for a society what biological diversity does for an ecosystem — it provides the raw material from which adaptation and survival become possible. Monocultures are fragile. Diverse systems absorb shocks.

I find myself particularly drawn to decentralisation, especially in digital spaces where tools like Web3 are making new forms of organisation practical. The internet, for all its failings, demonstrated that large groups of people can coordinate without a single controlling authority. Web3 sketches what a next round of that might look like: protocols rather than platforms, ownership rather than tenancy, communities rather than customer bases. I don’t yet know how much of that promise will survive contact with reality. I find it worth paying attention to.

My actual position, if it needs a name, is a balanced one. Provide basic legal protections in public spaces so the shared infrastructure of society remains trustworthy. Allow communities to self-govern in private spaces, with wide latitude to make their own rules and their own mistakes. Respect individual choices, even when those choices limit the chooser’s own future freedoms — because the alternative is deciding in advance which freedoms people are allowed to use. The internet and virtual spaces strike me as ideal platforms for exactly this: diverse, self-organising communities where people can find others who share their values and preferred ways of living, without having to agree with the person on the other side of town.

The underlying principle is individual liberty balanced with mutual respect. That allows for a great diversity of ways of organising social life while protecting the fundamental dignities that shouldn’t be up for negotiation. Libertarian? Close enough, if you squint. But the question mark in the title is the important part — it is the posture I actually hold.

This post is from an earlier moment in the walk (09/12/2024). For where the decentralisation thread went, see mutualism in the positioning area.

This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

Photo: itsnath_jpeg / Unsplash