By sheer coincidence, I’m currently (re-)reading Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which I recommended to Luis in a recent post. I thought this passage was interesting:
The importance of our being free to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the question of whether we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise would be to misconceive its function completely. The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.
It might even be said that the less likely the opportunity to make use of freedom to do a particular thing, the more precious it will be for society as a whole. The less likely the opportunity, the more serious will it be to miss it when it arises, for the experience that it offers will be nearly unique. It is also probably true that the majority are not directly interested in most of the important things that any one person should de free to do. It is because we do not know how individuals will use their freedom that it is so important. If it were otherwise, the results of of freedom could also be achieved by the majority’s deciding what should be done by the individuals. But the majority action is, of necessity, confined to the already tried and ascertained, to issues on which agreement has already been reached in that process of discussion that must be preceded by different experiences and actions on the part of different individuals.
The benefits I derive from freedom are thus largely the result of the uses of freedom by others, and mostly of those uses of freedom that I could never avail myself of. It is therefore not necessarily freedom that I can exercise myself that is most important for me. It is certainly more important that anything can be tried by somebody than that all can do the same things… What is important is not the freedom that I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.
This passage immediately brought to mind the freedom for which Ed Felten named his blog, the freedom to tinker. It’s clearly true that the vast majority of people have absolutely no interest in the freedom to tinker. But that does not mean that the freedom is unimportant to the average consumer, or that those who do wish to exercise the freedom to tinker are somehow engaging in special pleading. The best case for the freedom to tinker is that those engaged in tinkering are likely to find new uses for technology that the rest of us would never have thought of (or would not have been able to implement even if we had thought of them). I don’t know what my iPod or my XBox might be capable of doing, which is why I’m especially anxious to let people more talented than me tinker with theirs, so that they can find new uses for those devices and (hopefully) tell me about them.
The problem with legal restrictions on tinkering with a given device is that they confine our use of that devise to uses “already tried and ascertained”–in this case, ascertained by Microsoft or Apple. It’s quite likely that Apple and Microsoft haven’t thought of all the useful ways that an XBox or an iPod might be used, and so it’s worth giving other people a shot at finding new and better uses for those devices. As a society, we all benefit when the freedom to tinker is preserved for the tiny minority who would like to exercise it.
Perhaps that will whet Luis’s appetite to read some Hayek next time he needs a break from reading caselaw.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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