One of my hobbies is that I am a libertarian. Not just any libertarian, but a particular brand of libertarian – a free stater, or part of the Free State Project in New Hampshire.
The Free State Project was created by a Yale academic, Jason Sorens, back in 2012 with a simple premise: if one could assemble enough politically active people with a common, minority belief system – in this case, libertarians – and concentrate them in a small area, one could achieve meaningful political change that would be impossible through a traditional, nationwide strategy due to the predominance of the two-party system.
The project selected New Hampshire as its target state. The Project set up a website which allowed people – of which I am one – to pledge that they would move to New Hampshire within five years of 20,000 people signing the pledge. In 2016, the threshold was met and the timer started.
Thousands of people have moved during that time. As to the results, well, it’s been pretty successful:
The Executive Branch is actively seeking to censor the viewpoints of American citizens
Today we learned that the Democrat administration is actively colluding with Facebook and other major technology companies to censor American internet users.
Responses from conservatives, moderates and libertarians alike have mainly consisted of calls to regulate Big Tech so that this sort of interference can’t happen, or some other kind of Beltway-compliant political resolution.
For an ordinary Internet user, taking on Big Government and Big Tech on their own terms, via their institutions and in accordance with their rules means the deck is stacked against you. You will certainly fail.
For example:
- The government is now actively involved in censoring dissident viewpoints in the United States. If you give the government the power to regulate speech online – as many proposals call for – the government will use this power against any viewpoint which challenges the ruling class.
- Facebook and Twitter are private property. Giving the power to the government to force them to host their philosophical opponents’ speech will necessarily involve giving government power to force us to host our philosophical opponents’ speech.
- Even if we could secure passage of a law forcing social media companies to grant minority viewpoints equal access (and to be clear, I don’t think that outcome (a) is possible for at least four years, during which time many elections will be swayed by Big Tech’s influence, or (b) constitutionally permissible thereafter), such a rule would likely be limited in its effect, and enforcement would entail years of expensive litigation. Big Tech can afford legal fees. You cannot.
- Censorship problems are not limited to social media. PayPal, Amazon, Uber, numerous banks, credit card companies and payment processors also engage in politically motivated censorship and/or denial of service which is not connected with terms of service violations. We need to address this, too.
Your arms are not long enough to box with God. You cannot beat the regime at its own game.
But what if we stopped playing the game entirely?
“There’s nothing more blue-pilled than thinking there is a path to liberty that isn’t physical concentration or a form of exit”
That line is from Jeremy Kauffman, of the LPNH and the Free State Project. The Free Staters have met with a considerable amount of political success using this formula. We may wish to try it ourselves.
The Free State Project recognizes that in order to achieve political change at scale as a minority, the effectiveness of one’s resources must be maximized to the fullest possible extent. This is achieved by removing your members from regions where their votes are and will always be ineffective and placing them in localities where their votes have an effect.
So it is online. The issue is that at the moment there is not a definite, pro-freedom ecosystem in place – a group of businesses which pledge their fealty to libertarian ideas much as corporate America seems to lately pledge its fealty to post-Marxist ones – where freedom-loving people can go and know, as a matter of certainty, that as long as they don’t break the law, their access to a full range of financial and network infrastructure is guaranteed, regardless of their political viewpoints.
An equally significant problem is that there is no coordination. Because Big Tech essentially controls the entire information space unchallenged, it is in a good position to prevent competitors from proliferating (app store bans) and keeping existing influencers reliant on its ecosystem for the engagement which is responsible for their income. Big Tech has scale; its users do not.
The problem is one which requires scale. Even if we could “fix” Twitter and Facebook, political censorship affects far more than just these two companies.
What is required in order to fully defeat the merger of state and corporate power represented by today’s announcement by the Biden Administration is a root-and-branch replacement of practically every business essential to American life.
A central aim of the project is to attract censorship resistant service providers. It will do this by verifying businesses’ ideological alignment to the aims of the Project, and directing Project members to those businesses. As the number of Project signatories increases, this will demonstrate to potential first-movers in each of these fields (to the extent that these businesses do not currently exist) that, if they pledge their loyalty to political neutrality and refuse to engage in state-suggested, but not legally mandated (thanks, First Amendment!) censorship, they will acquire millions of users overnight.
The Project should identify businesses in key sectors as targets for the migration and provide information about these businesses to prospective movers. Strategic categories of business should include:
- Retail banking.
- Acquiring banks for merchant credit card accounts.
- Credit card rails.
- Payment gateways and apps.
- Cryptocurrency exchanges and fiat on/offramps.
- Online video.
- ISPs.
- Mobile telephony.
- Microblogging.
- Social audio.
- E-mail.
- Hosting and DNS hosting.
- Ridesharing.
- Etc.
For each of these categories we will not need the entire marketplace to be pro-freedom to circumvent informal censorship. We just need a handful of companies in each category, who Project members could turn into instant category leaders.
The Free Net Project registry and pledge
The Free Net Project would look a lot like the Free State Project, but with a difference: instead of a mass migration across lines on a map, this would be a mass migration away from Big Tech. People would sign a pledge that upon a predetermined number of signatures being obtained, say 10 million, signatories of the pledge would, on or around the same date and time, delete their Big Tech accounts and solely do business with pro-freedom businesses.
The pledge would be modeled after that of the Free State Project and would read something like this:
- I pledge my solemn intent to only use the services of pro-freedom businesses with the Free Net Project.
- I pledge my solemn intent to cease using the services of companies which are complicit in the systematic censorship of law abiding people.
- I will work towards the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of the individual rights to life, liberty, and property.
The project would maintain a registry of pro-freedom businesses and decentralized protocol systems, and links to their signup pages or download portals.
The principal objective of this exercise is to prove the naysayers wrong and show that a withdrawal from Big Tech is feasible:
- Any business signing the pledge would be able to see how big their potential pool of customers would be. As that pool grew larger, so would there be a greater incentive for businesses to make the pledge, including existing businesses which may not have a pro-freedom ethos but want to get their hands on libertarian dollars.
- For online influencers, as the number of signatories rises, they will acquire greater certainty that their influence will also survive the move. Applications could be built which could show Twitter and Facebook users how many of their followers have decided to make the pledge.
- As numbers approach the 10 million target, naysayers who say it is impossible to make the move, and those calling for government regulation, will be silenced as it becomes apparent that a legal but non-legislative and non-litigious solution is the more viable approach.
And that’s that. Beating “Big Tech” doesn’t require us to get every person in the world, or even in the United States, to quit. It only requires a critical mass of the most interesting people and of ordinary users.
The Internet gives us all the ability to, at the click of a button, withdraw our business and our money from any business we choose. It also gives us the ability to advertise to entrepreneurs who would provide services on a nonpartisan basis that there are millions of us willing to bring about their success with our wallets. There is no law which says we cannot coordinate our activities to only give our business to businesses which share our politics. All we need is for that coordination to take place.
We’re never going to get Big Tech to change. Its value system, derived from the West Coast liberals who created it, is too entrenched. It’s high time that we stopped begging the government to save us and saved ourselves instead.
To that end, to quote FSP founder Jason Sorens, “I’m hoping this project really becomes a decentralized affair – I don’t want to be a dictator of my own little club, and I don’t want your money.” If you’re the right person to run with this proposal, then by all means, run with it.
Postscript:
Where do I sign up sir?
Great proposal. Where do I sign?
Where is the pledge?