Today marks the 15^th anniversary of the launch of the Technology Liberation Front. This blog has evolved through the years and served as a home for more than 50 writers who have shared their thoughts about the intersection of technological innovation and public policy.

Many TLF contributors have moved on to start other blogs or write for other publications. Others have gone into other professions where they simply can’t blog anymore. Still others now just publish their daily musings on Twitter, which has had a massive substitution effect on long-form blogging more generally. In any event, I’m pleased that so many of them had a home here at some point over the past 15 years.

What has unified everyone who has written for the TLF is (1) a strong belief in technological innovation as a method of improving the human condition and (2) a corresponding concern about impediments to technological change. Our contributors might best be labeled “rational optimists,” to borrow Matt Ridley’s phrase, or “dynamists,” to use Virginia Postrel’s term. In a recent essay, I sketched out the core tenets of a dynamist, rational optimist worldview, arguing that we:

• believe there is a symbiotic relationship between innovation, economic growth, pluralism, and human betterment, but also acknowledge the various challenges sometimes associated with technological change;
• look forward to a better future and reject overly nostalgic accounts of some supposed “good ‘ol days” or bygone better eras;
• base our optimism on facts and historical analysis, not on blind faith in any particular viewpoint, ideology, or gut feeling;
• support practical, bottom-up solutions to hard problems through ongoing trial-and-error experimentation, but are not wedded to any one process to get the job done;
• appreciate entrepreneurs for their willingness to take risks and try new things, but do not engage in hero worship of any particular individual, organization, or particular technology.

Applying that vision, the contributors here through the years have unabashedly defended a pro-growth, pro-progress, pro-freedom vision, but they have also rejected techno-utopianism or gadget-worship of any sort. Rational optimists are anti-utopians, in fact, because they understand that hard problems can only be solved through ongoing trial and error, not wishful thinking or top-down central planning.

Wisdom and progress are directly correlated with society’s willingness to experiment with new ideas, tolerate change, and learn from failures. Writing in 1960, Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wisely observed that many intellectuals, “ignore the importance of the freedom of doing things” and that “[f]reedom of action, even in humble things, is as important as freedom of thought.”  The two are inextricably linked, in fact. Technology is simply a means to an end and that end is material progress and human flourishing. The goal is to expand the range of life-enriching innovations available to people while also empowering them pursue lives of their own choosing. But experimentation and freedom of action are absolutely crucial if we hope to achieve that end.

When thinking about public policy, “freedom of doing things” can be reconceptualized as “permissionless innovation.” Generally speaking, innovation and innovators should be treated as innocent until proven guilty. When forces—governmental or otherwise—conspire to constrain the general freedom to innovate, they are, in reality, constraining human creativity and learning, thus limiting our efforts to improve the world around us.

There can be no greater revolution than the revolution to liberate the human mind. It is peaceful, collaborative revolution aimed at breaking the chains that bind our ingenuity and which curtail our ability to pursue happiness however each of us define it. Accordingly, removing barriers to people building more and better tools to improve their lot in life has been a priority of much of the writing here on the TLF.

When searching for a quote to end my next book, I settled on one from Samuel C. Florman, an engineer who throughout his life rose to the challenge of defending technological innovation with remarkable gusto. Commenting on the swelling ranks of “antitechnologists” he saw around him a generation ago, Florman perfectly identified the profound danger of giving up on finding new and better ways of doing things. “By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease, and privation,” he argued. “Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business.”

Defending that “human adventure” has been the goal of all those contributing to the Tech Liberation Front over the past 15 years because experimentation and change are the key to our very survival as a species.  I’m looking forward to seeing what the next 15 years of this adventure brings and hope to work with others here and elsewhere to make sure that all citizens of the world get to enjoy the fruits of human ingenuity and technological creativity.  

Five years ago today the Technology Liberation Front (the “TLF”) got underway with this post.  The idea for the TLF came about after I asked some tech policy wonks whether it was worth put together a blog dedicated to covering Internet-related issues from a cyber-libertarian perspective.  The model I had in mind was a “Volokh Conspiracy for Tech Issues,” if you will. I wanted to bring together a collection of sharp, liberty-loving wonks (most of whom worked in the think tank world) to talk about their research on this front and to give them a place to post their views on breaking tech policy developments.  It was to be a sort of central clearinghouse for libertarian-oriented tech policy analysis and advocacy.

At first, Tim Lee and I debated whether it even made sense to have that sort of narrow focus, but I think the passage of time and the rise of plenty of competition on this front shows that it was worthwhile.  And I’ve been very pleased with the tag-team effort of all our TLF contributors and the way—without anyone planning it, in true libertarian fashion—we’ve sort of developed a nice division of labor on various tech policy issues.

Perhaps a few stats are in order on this occasion to mark our progress 5 years in. The best indication of our success is the fact that our Pagerank (Google’s logarithmic scale of website importance based on links to that site) has reached 7/10—the same score shared by the Volokh Conspiracy (our model), as well as Techmeme (the leading tech news aggregator), the Cato Institute, CDT, etc. (For comparison: ArsTechnica and EFF are 8s.) Unfortunately, we’ve only been using Google Analytics for three of the past five years, so it’s impossible to get a authoritative accounting of traffic growth since Day 1. But here are few markers:

• 4,450+ posts
• 29,000+ comments
• 2,698 RSS subscribers
• 15,763 unique visitors per month
• 1,000,000 pageviews since Nov. 2006 when we started using Google Analytics
• Besides organic search and direct links, we get the bulk of our traffic from other tech-oriented sites (in order of hits) TechDirt, Freedom to Tinker, Ars Technica, GamePolitics.com, TechMeme, Slate, etc., and aggregators such as reddit, Fark, and StumbleUpon

So, what’s our #1 post of all-time? That would be Jim Harper’s “Where to Get Your Fake ID,” proving that if you play Google search terms wisely, you can build a link goldmine!  18,200+ pageviews and counting!  (Harper… You finally have something to list on your resume that lots of people have read!)  Sometimes silly posts like that can net a lot of traffic. For example, another top 5 TLF post was my piece on “The Most Powerful Computer Ever,” which has netted over 7,700 pageviews.  It was just an old magazine ad that Wayne Crews had found years ago and sent me a copy of.

In case you’re interested, some of our other most popular TLF posts include:

• My post “Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists” (6,631 views)
• Jim Harper’s “Social Hack on Gmail Users” (3,756 views)
• My rant on “Video Games & Moral Panic” (3,408 views)
• Berin Szoka’s look at “The Right Way to Allow Cell Phone Jammers” (3,322 views)
• Tim Lee’s piece on the tech community & civil liberties: “Pissing on Their Graves” (2,828 views)
• Harper’s “ID Checks are About Control, Not Security” (2,870) and his look at “Border Biometrics” (2,402 views)
• Cord Blomquist’s “Sirius XM Bankruptcy: Thank Washington for the Delay” (2,069 views)
• Alex Harris’s look at the “Best and Worst Supreme Court Decisions” (1,714 views)
• My book review of  “Zittrain’s Future of the Internet” (1,689 views)

I want to thank all my TLF blogging colleagues for their contributions over the past 5 years. As I noted in that very first post here back in 2004, “this blog is not a one-man show.”  Almost all of us here have our own personal or organizational blogs, but when we come together here on the TLF, it helps us show the world that there is another vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace beside the command-and-control, hands-all-over-the-Net mentality that dominates today: real Internet freedom!

There are a couple of people who deserve special thanks for what they have done for the TLF:

PJ Doland has not only generously hosted our site all these years and donated endless hours of his time to keeping it running through waves of spam attacks, but he also designed our unique TLF banner. His use of Soviet-style art for libertarian purposes is the perfect compliment to our “Liberation Front” theme.  PJ also provided that awesome TLF tagline: “The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.” (It’s a B.F. Skinner quote, incidentally).

Jerry Brito has also been enormously helpful with the back office stuff, including getting our podcast off the ground. He is also is responsible for the wonderful site redesign and improvements that were just rolled out recently. And Jerry has been extremely patient with all the TLF bloggers through the years as he taught us the basics about how to be more effective bloggers.

Tim Lee has been the TLF’s most prolific and popular blogger and, as I noted recently when he announced his departure from the TLF, it is not an overstatement to say that for many of the TLF’s five years the rest of us here have simply been riding on his coat tails. We were just lucky to be along for the ride as he made the TLF more visible to the tech policy world. He brought us a significant portion of the audience and respect that we have to today and I cannot thank him enough for that.

Berin Szoka, my colleague at PFF, came on board just over a year ago but since then has become a prolific force on the TLF and helped spawn several new “ongoing series” features such as the Privacy Solutions Series, “Googlephobia,” and Cutting the Video Cord.  Berin is also helping with the back-office stuff and trying to help me get the podcast going again regularly.

Our Readers! Seriously, we thank each and every one of you who has taken the time to visit our site, read our rants, and leave comments (even the shitty ones!)  We really appreciate it. We know there are countless other blogs out there to occupy your time and we’re honored that you’d give ours even a few minutes of your day. If you’re in D.C. today, we hope you’ll join us for our celebratory happy hour tonight!

Here’s to another 5 great years of technology freedom!  If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to our blog feed, podcast feed (iTunes), Twitter and Facebook page.

Cheers,

Adam Thierer

P.S. I’m feeling a bit sentimental as I think back and realize all the things that didn’t exist even just 5 years ago: Twitter, the iPhone, FiOS, Facebook, Pandora, Chrome, the PS3 + Wii + 360, YouTube, Hulu, etc…   Just imagine how exciting the next 5 years will be!

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty turns 150 this year. Published in 1859, this slender manifesto for human liberty went on to become a classic of modern philosophy and political science.  It remains a beautiful articulation of the core principles of human liberty and a just society.

Anyone familiar with the book recognizes the importance of the opening chapter and Mill’s “one very simple principle” for “the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion”:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Mill went on to outline “the appropriate region of human liberty,” and divided it into:

1. “liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it.”
2. “liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong”
3. “freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others”

Bringing it altogether, he argued:

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

To this day, I do not believe there has been a more eloquent or concise summation of the central principles of libertarianism than those passages from Chapter 1 of the book. But what many fail to remember or appreciate is the equally powerful second chapter of Mill’s treatise, “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.” It was a bold defense of freedom of speech and expression that was many decades ahead of its time. And it still has lessons and warnings worth heeding in our modern Information Age.

Mill opened that chapter by noting that:

The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear.

Alas, Mill knew that we weren’t quite there yet in 1859. Efforts to suppress speech and expression were alive and well. And so he marshaled all his intellectual forces to construct a powerful critique of censorship in all its forms:

The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. … We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

Mill went on to show how, at root, censorship is based on arrogance and elitism:

Those who desire to suppress [an opinion], of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common.

More profoundly, Mill taught us that the right to freedom of thought and expression was a core right upon which almost all our other rights depended:

Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

In other words, if you care about any other rights and wish to exercise them to their fullest, you must first have the right to express opinions and, importantly, have them subjected to the opinions of others. This is how truth is discovered.

[Man] is capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.

And Mill taught us that it is essential we be vigilant in defending our rights of speech and expression because, sadly, “the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution,” he correctly noted.

Mill’s words are every bit as relevant in 2009 as they were 1859. While we enjoy significant speech and press freedoms here in the United States today, censorial threats persist.  Just a few years ago, the House of Representatives passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which proposed a ban on all social networking sites in public schools and libraries.  DOPA passed the House of Representatives shortly thereafter by a remarkably lopsided 410-15 vote, but luckily failed to get through the Senate. However, Congress did pass several other online censorship measures in the 1990s, including the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998, which luckily were both struck down by the courts.

Of course, we have it pretty good here in the States thanks the existence of the First Amendment to our Constitution. Most speech-restricting enactments get struck down today because they cannot withstand strict scrutiny under the First Amendment. But think about all those less fortunate in other countries who struggle on a regular basis to express themselves and learn the truth about the world and culture around them without interference from above.

Anyway, go give On Liberty another read if you haven’t done so in some time. It’s a timeless statement of the principles that should guide a just society. I’ll close with this apt warning from Mill about how history will remember those who fail to appreciate the importance of openness to new ideas:

And so far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.

Update: A colleague of mine just brought to my attention this essay of “150 Years of On Liberty” by Jonathan M. Riley that appeared in this month’s edition of TPM: The Philosopher’s Magazine.