The Liberate Manifesto

Knowledge is power.

Technology, by definition, increases human capacity.

When knowledge and technology intersect, power compounds.

But to whom does that power accrue? We once naively believed that technological advancement would necessarily empower the individual at the expense of systems of control. Sad experience has proven otherwise. Information systems in the platform age have too often been used to censor, manipulate, and control rather than to empower, expand, and liberate.

But that does not mean the original promise of the information revolution is dead. Liberate Information Technologies exists to liberate human knowledge and empower the individual to consume, create, and distribute information without asking permission from publishers or platforms.

A Brief History of Information

The first society-shaping information revolution was the invention of writing, around 3,200 BC in Southern Mesopotamia. For the first time, knowledge could be reliably stored, shared, and retrieved across much greater spans of time and space.

For nearly 4,000 years, texts were produced by hand by castes of specially trained scribes. Text production had become possible, but remained prohibitively expensive, only accessible to wealthy power structures who, therefore, enjoyed a near-total monopoly on the creation and distribution of information.

All that changed when movable type printing was invented, first in China by Bi Sheng around 1040 AD, and then independently in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Both presses facilitated an explosion of mass-scale text production, but Gutenberg's press was especially effective in making knowledge production and consumption economical for the common man. For the first time in human history, an independent scholar, thinker, or dissident could create and distribute ideas without the permission of powerful legacy institutions. And, for the first time, the common man could afford to access it.

Almost overnight, literacy spread, making it easier for individuals to participate in culture and form their own independent judgments. The following centuries experienced an explosion of new ideas. Theology, science, philosophy, literature, and political thought could spread faster than systems of control could move to contain it. The old gatekeepers fought back, but would ultimately succumb to the unstoppable force of the printing revolution. The renaissance, the reformation, the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment would eventually pave the way for the discovery of natural rights and the establishment of modern democratic republics.

In the 1930s, British mathematician Alan Turing envisioned a machine that could read, store, and execute algorithmic instructions, an information machine. During the Second World War, Turing was instrumental in breaking Nazi encryption and winning the war by building early versions of this machine. Between 1945 and 1977, computers revolutionized information processing for government, military, and business applications. But it was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who put the power of computing into the hands of the common man. The Apple II was the first commercially successful, mass-market personal computer that could be used without an engineering degree. Word processors, spreadsheets, databases, desktop publishing, and educational software gave individuals capabilities that had previously required clerical departments, specialized institutions, or expensive equipment. All of these innovations served to extend the capabilities of human intelligence. But the real magic of the computer revolution was a computer's ability to communicate with other computers.

In 1969, the US Department of Defense built ARPANET, a computer network which relied on packet switching to enable more reliable communication signals across long distances. Other large-scale networks were also being constructed throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The TCP/IP protocol was developed to give these networks a common language that could be used to send messages between networks, or "inter-net." On January 1, 1983, the nodes on ARPANET switched to TCP/IP, and the internet was born.

In 1989, CERN created the World Wide Web, a system for sending and receiving rich, interconnected hypertext documents over the internet. It was released to the public in 1993. We often use the terms "internet" and "world wide web" interchangeably, but more properly, the Web is the largest application running on the internet. The Web made it even easier for common people to leverage the power of interconnected personal communication. Websites, forums, and chat rooms made it possible for ordinary people to interact and transact instantly all over the world. Search engines began indexing the web, helping users more easily retrieve the information they were looking for, but also introducing an intermediary layer of access between the user and the creator. The most successful of these search engines was Google, which continues to dominate search to the present day.

Once more, the information revolution promised to degrade the control of censors and empower the individual to publish without permission. It had become possible to exchange ideas without the blessing of a network executive, publishing house, or newspaper editor. Anyone with a modem and something to say could reach a global audience. The distributed information architecture of the early web made it nearly impossible for powerful gatekeepers to control the flow of information. For those of us who lived through this early era of online communication, a new renaissance of free expression felt inevitable. The advance of information technology would unavoidably weaken the power of legacy gatekeepers and empower the people to speak more freely than ever before.

But almost imperceptibly, the dream began to die.

In 2007, Steve Jobs released the first-generation iPhone, a device which combined the functions of a cell phone and a microcomputer. Similar "smart phones" existed previously, but it was once again Jobs who was able to create a mass market by making the technology accessible to the everyman. Around that time, an explosion of social media platforms launched, including YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram. The intersection of social media with smartphones created mass-market appeal for social media. Online discourse was no longer distributed across independently-owned communication infrastructure, but was instead centralized across a small number of web-based platforms. The shift from distributed ownership to centralized, user-generated, platform-based architecture is commonly known as Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 was successful because users were promised improved functionality and greater reach at zero cost. It became apparent, though, that the cost was not in dollars but in data. Web 2.0 facilitated the age of surveillance capitalism in which platforms harvest vast amounts of private data and sell it to data brokers and advertisers. Meanwhile, the centralization of content ownership meant that viewpoint censorship was once again technologically feasible. As social media became a vector of the spread of populist sentiment on both sides of the political aisle, institutionalists on both sides began pressuring search engines and social media platforms to suppress lawful political viewpoints. Leaked internal documents from Twitter and other platforms showed definitively that many of these platforms were censoring disfavored viewpoints at the behest of government and law enforcement, effectively making these platforms into deputized agents of the state in order to do an end-run around the First Amendment. Leaked internal research from Facebook and Instagram suggested that these organizations knowingly created algorithms that would addict younger users and exacerbate tendencies towards anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health conditions.

Without knowing it, we traded our privacy, our liberty, and our sanity for convenience. The creators whose content built the value of these platforms were at the mercy of those same platforms. Creators could reach an audience, but they could never own the communities they built. They could participate in culture and discourse only insofar as the new internet aristocracy would deign to permit. Community knowledge accumulated inside systems that could restrict it, manipulate it, bury it, or delete it.

We opened a new chapter in the information revolution in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, a large language model which generated human-sounding text in response to user prompts. Other generative artificial intelligence models followed, ushering in an AI arms race. It is probably too early to judge whether the net effect of the AI revolution will be positive or negative in the struggle between the individual and entrenched power structures. On the one hand, generative AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for use cases such as software development. On the other hand, it is now possible for nearly anyone to mass-produce low-quality content, ushering in the "sloppocalypse," rendering much of our information infrastructure borderline unusable. There are also unresolved questions about the effect of AI on employment. We do not yet know how generative works and model training data will interact with intellectual property law. And the specter of surveillance capitalism applies no less to LLMs than to social media platforms. It is not yet clear whether artificial intelligence systems will be a stronger force for individual empowerment or systemic control. The answer may turn on how we, the people, choose to utilize these systems.

History demonstrates conclusively that technological advances can empower the individual, but they can also empower institutions of control at the expense of the individual. Knowledge is power, and that power will flow to whoever owns the infrastructure of information. In order to distribute power to the individual, information systems must be deliberately structured such that infrastructural ownership is retained by the producers and consumers of human knowledge, not by publishers, platforms, gatekeepers, or state censors. We intend to build these kinds of information systems and maybe, just maybe, recover the promise of the information revolution.

Our Mission

Liberate IT exists to liberate human knowledge and empower the individual to consume, create, and distribute information without asking permission from publishers or platforms.

We do this by pursuing our core values:

1. Liberate Information

We believe that information is most powerful when it is easy to access, share, synthesize, and utilize. Information is not freely available just because it has been archived. A public library is still functionally closed if no one can find the books. So much existing knowledge is locked behind opaque formats, unnavigable archives, or proprietary algorithms. By making that information accessible, searchable, and usable, we can reduce the friction between creators and consumers and facilitate a freer exchange of human knowledge. We aim to create information systems that leverage the power of creators' knowledge, and deploy those systems within creators' existing ecosystems so that they own both the information and the infrastructure.

2. Increase Individual Agency

Technology is an excellent servant but a terrible master. Bad systems use features such as information opacity, user friction, and dark patterns to manipulate or control users, binding them into proprietary ecosystems, or making them dependent on the benevolence of an entity with no incentive to be benevolent. We intend to design and deploy systems that expand, rather than diminish the scope of user agency.

3. Demolish Gatekeepers

Human expression should not be at the mercy of a tiny technological oligarchy. Tools of creation, distribution, and discovery should be in the hands of the people who use them, not subject to the whims of petty tyrants with their thumb on the scales. We must return control of the information architecture to the people who create the value. Our systems will bypass institutional gatekeepers, reduce dependence on centralized intermediaries, and reduce the distance and friction between creators and their audiences.

4. Fight for the Users

Technology should be an extension of, not a replacement for, the human soul. Knowledge must begin and end in the human mind. Information systems must remain subordinate and accountable to human judgment. There is no algorithm for responsibility, wisdom, or conscience. Technological tools can help facilitate access to knowledge, organize it, synthesize it, and even augment the creation of it, but they can never and should never be the sole producer of it. Artificial intelligence systems can be tools in creators' hands but cannot produce a creative vision themselves, only the cheap imitation of it. Where users expect to interface with another human, they should interface with another human, not a machine imitating a human.

5. Build the Future Deliberately

A freer future will not arrive by mere virtue of the forward march of time. The arc of history bends nowhere of its own accord, it must be intentionally shaped into the future we desire. We desire a future where technology expands the liberty and prosperity of the people, not merely a distant elite. We desire a future where information is free to maximize its social good. We desire a future where individuals can expand their minds without asking permission from institutional gatekeepers. This future will not arrive of its own accord, it must be built.

Conclusion

The printing press did not transform the world in a day. It took generations of brilliant writers, readers, thinkers, artists, rebels, and dissidents. But their efforts over centuries gradually expanded what ordinary people could know, say, and become.

We intend to build in that same spirit. We aim to reshape the architecture of information, lower barriers between knowledge and its users, and give communities greater access to their own intellectual inheritance.

Powerful information systems should not belong only to governments, platforms, and major corporations, they should belong to individuals, creators, and communities.

Knowledge is power. And power belongs to the people.