The Dangerous Politicization of Freedom, Privacy, and Censorship-resistant technologies

Below is a sample of my article on nostr...

*A dangerous trend has emerged in the United States where terms like free speech, censorship- resistant, privacy, and more have been co-opted by those on the political right, and tools enabling these principles argued or fought against by those on the political left. The truth is, freedom, privacy, and censorship resistant technologies are important for everyone regardless of political leanings and should not be politicized, lest we head down the path toward a dystopian future with no privacy or free speech guarantees, and only centralized institutions controlled by people with the ability to censor, revoke and remove important guarantees of freedom promoted in the spirit and language of the constitution. Just as bitcoin has falsely become politicized as a more right wing/libertarian thing, having no value, or a tool for criminals and those who disregard the dangers of climate change, open and decentralized protocols like nostr could enter the same cycle and become politicized or fought against unless we share more reasons why it is important for humanity and is not a political position to take. The fate of our ability to freely and openly communicate and have guarantees of privacy and property may rest on citizens of the world understanding the importance of open, censorship resistance protocols, and private end-to-end encrypted communication tools. *

One specific example I will focus on is Nostr. So, what is nostr?

Nostr was first conceptualized by pseudonymous bitcoin coder, Fiatjaf and “bitcoin tinkerer” Ben Arc. As described on nostr.how, run by JeffG:

“Nostr stands for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”. Like HTTP or TCP-IP, Nostr is a protocol; an open standard upon which anyone can build. Nostr itself is not an app or service that you sign up for. Nostr is designed for simplicity and enables censorship-resistant and globally decentralized publishing on the web.”

The way in which we see the nostr protocol used and popularized today is via clients (i.e. apps/websites), like my personal favorite Damus, or Primal, Snort and dozens of others being built out by developers passionate about this protocol. Each user then adds relays (many are defaulted on most clients today), which is the way these messages get sent around in a decentralized way, and users can add free or even paid relays (by paying for relays, in bitcoin which is the money/medium of exchange used on nostr, users can eliminate the amount of spam or bots accessing relays/feeds and have a faster experience). Users can also sort their global feed based on relays, and more. The beauty of this system is that most traditional social media–twitter, facebook, instagram, linkedin, etc, is completely centralized. Twitter, for instance, manages the content and has its own server (or pays third parties to do so)–one central relay, in a way. So you can easily be censored or removed from using twitter for criticizing Elon Musk, posting a political statement that is unfavorable to decision makers within the company or a nation-state asking twitter to censor these types of messages, in the recent case of Turkey and its recent election, and more. With nostr, if you are censored on one relay, you still have endless amounts of other relays to write/post to. Nor is your nostr account tied to one specific relay or client. When each user signs up on nostr, an “npub” (think username) is created and an nsec (think password) that can be used to sign up for any client. Imagine if you had your twitter username and password, but you could also use that to sign into every other social media platform and it carried with it every post and connection you ever had on twitter. Pretty cool, right? But with this comes the responsibility of keeping your nsec (again, think password) written down in a safe place in the event you are logged out of a particular client, because there is no backup or password reset ability on most clients. There are browser extensions that save this information for you, but with any internet backup comes certain privacy risks as well.

So practically, nostr is a cool and easy way to use social media across multiple clients, leaving you with ultimate control and preference! Ideologically, it is so much more.

As I stated earlier, nostr is an open protocol, where anyone can post and build with it, leaving it to be censorship resistant and with you in control. As is the case with bitcoin, if you can access the internet, you can access nostr. I know many progressive friends of mine have been very frustrated with twitter/x’s/Elon’s selective control of who gets to practice “free speech” and who doesn’t on the platform. Many other self-described “free speech” platforms have been created, such as Trump’s Truth Social, Rumble, and more. But these platforms are FSINO, “Free Speech in Name Only.” They are still companies run by people with centralized control. When we say nostr promotes free speech and the user is in control, it isn’t because nostr is run by a self-described “free speech maximalist,” or because nostr has any specific political ideology. It is because the protocol is inherently open and free to use by anyone, and decentralized in a way where an infinite number of communities, ideologies, people, and movements can flourish and utilize the protocol however they wish. I believe it is technology and an internet enabled protocol as the cypherpunk movement intended: promoting freedom, censorship resistance, and the ability to be private and promote anonymity when needed (no KYC, government checks to use).