Freedom: Part 8

We’ll be discussing Digital Freedom at 7pm on 8th April 2019. Overall details for the structure are on the About page.

Materials

  1. Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web. Liat Clark, 6 Feb 2014.
  2. There’s more to decentralisation than blockchains and bitcoin. Irina Bolychevsky, 18 Sep 2018.
  3. One Small Step for the Web… Tim Berners-Lee. 23 October 2018.
  4. Where next World Wide Web? BBC Sounds podcast. 21 March 2019.
  5. Federation is the Worst of all Worlds. Sarah Jamie Lewis. 10 July 2018.

Notes on Freedom: Part 2

This week we met to talk about economic freedom, based on the following documents:

  • An essay by Hayek on the use of knowledge in society, and how this determines that decentralized, market-based pricing, rather than a centrally planned economy, is the best economic system
  • The first part of the Trap, a documentary by Adam Curtis on how politicians used post-war economic ideas like game theory to build a more stable world order based on individualism and mutually assured destruction
  • A blog post, also by Adam Curtis, which argues that most think tanks are a right-wing invention to manipulate the public opinion into perpetuating the economic and political status quo, thus stifling the development of alternative systems and ideas

We began the discussion with individual freedom and collective freedom:

Continue reading “Notes on Freedom: Part 2”

Notes on Freedom: Part 1

Last night was our second Darkly event, and it was a great success, with ten people taking part in a lively discussion on freedom. It centred on Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (PDF), which divides the concept into two types: Negative freedom is freedom from coercion, constraints, or interference, whereas positive freedom is freedom to act according to one’s free will, and to self-actualise thereby.

Berlin argues that while these two conceptions of freedom largely overlap, there are points at which they conflict, and that these conflicts can have dire political consequences. While some found this distinction arbitrary, and potentially not the most useful way to divide up the concept, the essay still served as a fruitful starting point for discussion.

Continue reading “Notes on Freedom: Part 1”