Freedom of Speech and Expression

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado for at least as long as i'm allowed to broadcast live from warm sunny colorado it's a pretty crazy time lately it seems like everybody's going to eventually be deep platformed unless they fit into a very narrow band of thought i can't help but think about all that mankind has been through and why we have the rights that we have you see freedom of speech freedom of expression freedom of religion the right to assemble these weren't just nice to have things they're prerequisites to a rational and free society and they carry consequences they give you a lot of good and fun stuff you get extraordinary works of fiction the lord of the rings you get great movies you get great art and they give you a lot of bad stuff you get fake news you get bad ideas you get conspiracy theories you get conspiratorial thinking and you get all kinds of nasty speech that divides people and makes people hate each other and ideas you get bigotry and for every moment of bigotry you get a moment of love and that those are the consequences of freedom when you allow a society to do something you must accept that the things that you allow a society to do carry a cost so we like to believe in the united states that we live in a country with capitalism and free markets in private companies i hear a lot well this company has the right to do something it's a private company this is not truth it's a fiction there's no such thing as a private company once you've reached the threshold of billions of users you're publicly traded you have government contracts and relationships it's almost as laughable as when the united states says well we don't torture but then they outsource torture to a third-party private company or an intelligence service of another nation technically they're right no torture has occurred but they still achieve the same outcome it's almost as laughable as when they say we don't spy on people you have constitutional rights but then they go hire palantir or another private company to go and do that when you look at companies like google and apple and microsoft collectively their platforms are monopolies when you look at the collection of them and what that effectively means is that they own and control in an entire market segment at the dawn of the 20th century we realized a long time ago that it's real bad deal when a small group of companies come together and form monopolies and have total control over a resource so in that case with the sherman antitrust act that resource was oil because they recognized that energy was the key to economic prosperity in the 20th century and if a small group of actors had total control over that public-private partnerships and the ability to price fix then they could unilaterally decide the fate of an entire nation when we look at the oil of the 21st century it's information and data and collectively these massive platforms have control over what you see what you think your expressions or lack thereof who is credible who is not credible who is famous who is not famous who is legitimate who is not legitimate they have exceeded the threshold of a private company can the ceo of these companies say whatever he wants no because they're a regulated entity can't go and say the stock is going to go to the moon or go ahead and do other things to affect the price the sec would step in so we already accept that there's some constraints or controls of their behavior but as a libertarian i firmly believe it's not the government's place to decide what is good speech and what is bad speech so the reality is that these platforms need to become protocols i've always believed that we could not trust the government to have control of monetary policy we cannot trust the federal reserve to have control of monetary policy so what did we do as an industry we built the best money the world had ever seen the cryptocurrency and in just 12 short years it went from nothing to a trillion dollars of value and let me tell you in the next 12 years that sure as hell is going to continue growing because people are starting to wise up and get the idea that when you leave governments and private interests to their own selfish desires with no accountability and oversight and the ability to control the narrative you will end up with governments thinking it's okay to print trillions of dollars out of thin air and so if they cannot constrain themselves and we cannot constrain them through the ballot box the only recourse we have that is non-violent is to opt out and that's what we did with cryptocurrencies and this year and last year especially that truth was learned by millions of people throughout the world we now live in an age where people of a certain ideology who don't like ideas that are contrary to their own will label all things hate speech and their enemies instead of just ignorant bullies now terrorists anything that fits outside of their norm must be platformed must be stopped must be silenced why because they believe that ideas are dangerous totalitarian dictators believe ideas are dangerous religious zealots whose claim they speak for god believe ideas are dangerous free societies do not bad ideas once exposed to the crucible of rationalism and critical thinking always burn out and don't get whole the only time you fear ideas is when you fear people having them so like money cryptocurrencies now must extend into the new economy and the new unit of value just we had the oil companies of the 20th century the new oil data and information and expression must be liberated from the markets that they exist within and from the gatekeepers that they exist within and we now need to create protocols to help us make sure that we cannot be platformed and censored and particular ideologies can co-opt the dialogue and prevent freedom of human expression thought and alternative structures and governance from emerging otherwise we will descend into the dictatorship that billions of people in the 20th century endured and many of which died from this does not mean that we must be tolerant of the hateful this does not mean that there are no consequences for bad ideas or harmful ideas we can always hold people accountable for the thoughts and ideologies that they have that are regressive and destructive we must tolerate a person's freedom to be distasteful but we never have to tolerate the distasteful person and invite them into our lives our businesses and our commercial endeavors or allow them to be elevated in society this is the distinction that is always missed in something that our constitution in the united states got right and those who would truly understand it and adhere to it fight for on a daily basis i do not want to live in an economy where so few have absolute dominion over the thoughts of so many and because this is politically convenient to those in power they are allowed to keep those monopolies and over time those monopolies will become state-sponsored just as we've seen in the financial industry with the use of financial regulation we cannot allow this to happen we will lose our liberties we will lose our freedoms the beautiful thing however is that we live in an age of protocols and because of what we've learned from cryptocurrencies we do have the ability to overcome this we do have an ability to create protocols that carry information and thought and we do have the ability to curate information in new ways years ago when twitter started first fact-checking one of the things i told jack dorsey and one of the things i told many people in the social media world and leadership positions instead of taking it upon themselves to curate information to decide truth and de-platform people instead why don't you allow people to install third-party applications that perform that service issued by providers the new york times or politifact or fox news or cnn and allow the users to curate the information as they desire then you still have a notion of curation you still have a notion of fact checking but you're at the very least allowing people to see things that are curated by the entities they've chosen and if you want to make it fair perhaps you can pair them so if you choose a conservative viewpoint then you pair it with a liberal viewpoint if you choose a socialist viewpoint perhaps you get it with a libertarian viewpoint and then you can create idea flow and diversity of thought but it would not be the platform's place and purpose to de-platform people to censor people or decide who's harmful and who's not harmful we will always when we want to censor and to empower the few focus on the most extreme every single time people talk about encryption usually those who wish to ban it will focus on the pedophiles and the terrorists and say because of their mere existence and because this radical minority is using the technology every single person's privacy must be undone and the very same analogies and arguments are being made right now right here for freedom of speech mass media has killed far more people in the world than any tweet from any president and any rally in dc as distasteful and despicable as the rating of the us capital was i am not young enough to have forgotten what our media did with the beat up to the iraq war many said it was a moral and just thing to do and over a million people died in iraq thousands of our soldiers were maimed some cases permanently missing limbs traumatic brain injuries all built upon a lie those responsible for broadcasting that lie propagating that lie suffered no consequences and in many cases personally were enriched mass media is responsible for broadcasting and propagating that again and again and again no consequences because they seem to have a monopoly on the truth and when they get it right take all the credit when they get it wrong suffer none of the blame yet we the american people must be denied the right to be journalists ourself must be denied the right to have our own thoughts and expressions even if every now and then it causes harm or we get it wrong it's shameful it's what dictatorships do we laughed about this during the communist days when we saw how blatantly insane it was with the commissars and the media control agencies and the ministries of information censoring things deciding arbitrarily who's good and who's bad destroying reputations certain countries disappear their billionaires when they become inconvenient disappear their authors and their scientists when they express things that are inconvenient truths and we are flirting dangerously close to a reality where that can happen but the difference between america the difference between our mindset as a people and the mindset of other countries that have succumbed to this is that when we don't like what our government does and we don't like what the policy has we have the freedom at least still today to rise up and do things differently in my case i'm a technology entrepreneur and so as a consequence with the skills and knowledge i have i do see solutions that can guarantee the freedom of expression association and commerce and in the coming days we'll figure out ways to ensure that for the good of all humanity it doesn't mean we can't curate information it doesn't mean we can't use incredible new tools like ai to give people different viewpoints and different ways of thinking about things it doesn't mean that we don't have to hold people accountable for what they say and it doesn't mean that we have to welcome in toxic or destructive viewpoints or people into our lives but the consequences of restriction of speech is the restriction of thought the stagnation of society and the empowerment of the status quo much the dark ages when religions ruled the world that were regressive and it was so offensive to believe that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around and those who had the audacity to even suggest it were burned at the stake if we don't do something soon we will enter into a modern equivalent of this where we deny our ability to grow and we lack the courage to be offended but still move forward so let's solve it together as an industry let's solve it together as people and let us never respect those who wish to strip us of our rights because bad things happen bad things happen every day life is hard liberty is expensive and dangerous but the alternative is even worse as every single person who's ever been gulag and every single person living in a society without freedom can tell you it's much better to take the risk of freedom then take the safety of a prison thank you