Why I Focus on Censorship-Resistant Tech

Most people don’t care about privacy, decentralization, or censorship resistance. It took me a while to realize this. I care a great deal about these things, and I think the natural human impulse is to assume everyone else is like you. But I am consistently reminded that people don’t care about these things. So why do I?

If you’re reading this on Nostr, you probably care about censorship resistant technology too. Why do you care? Maybe because you have a past trauma like I do.

Childhood

The short version of the story is that I was forced to attend a conservative, christian school as a child, from kindergarten to 10th grade. I distinctly remember, around 6th grade, starting to suspect that the adults in power over me might be mentally unstable. By 9th grade, I knew that most of them were full of shit.

There was never any doubt that these adults with power over me (teachers, principals, pastors, etc) had good intentions. But as the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It took the majority of my 20’s for me to unfuck my head from the psychological damage caused by these misguided adults. I was suicidal during my late teens because I was dealing with the tension between the potential bliss of heaven and the emotional torture of puberty. For this reason, I view all religious influcence on children as a form of child abuse.

Adulthood

When Napster and BitTorrent came around, I was intrigued. When Bitcoin came along, I was fascinated. Here is a system that seemed perfectly designed to circumvent the force of authorities. It was a neutral, rendezvous place where data could be stored and no one could modify it, delete it, or prevent one from accessing it. It was love at first sight.

A hobby of mine over the years is the study of World War Two. I’ve been to Auschwitz. I’ve seen the warehouses of shoes and human hair, taken from the Jews and turned into industrial products right before they were sent to gas chamber. I’ve listened to first-hand accounts of how the governments (on both sides) had iron-fist control of all communication: radio, newspaper, books. Everything was state controlled during the war. If people had been able to communicate freely, the war would have gone down very differently.

Putting it Together

Over the course of my life, I’ve realized parallels between my personal trauma and the dark history of WW2. The different between the abuse I experienced at the hands of well-intentioned, but misguided adults, and the genocide of WW2 is simply a matter of scale. They have the same root cause: central planners with good intentions.

This is why censorship resistance is so important to me. By fighting the State’s ability to censor content, I am also fighting against those adults who abused me as a child. I work towards a world where no one gets to tell another person what they can say or think, or prevent them from expressing themselves.