Exit Is the Ultimate Free Speech
- The Economic Reality
- The Illusion of Free Speech
- When They Can’t Silence You, They Freeze You
- Exit as the Thesis
- The Uncomfortable Truth
- Sources
It is no secret that the freedoms recognised by formal authority and the practical application of freedoms we the people possess have diverged in recent decades. I must stress from the outset that this is a bipartisan issue; although manifested in different ways, the strategies of both sides of the political aisle aim to increase our de jure freedoms, whilst simultaneously reducing our de facto freedoms. In the same way nominal growth has no yardstick to reference, liberté de jure appears to be at an all-time high.
So why do we feel more subservient than ever before?
The Economic Reality
Most people feel their freedom to be economic rather than philosophical, and here is where the first worrying divergence begins. The material buffer between servitude and independence has been stripped away by the increased gap between productivity and compensation; in the US between 1973-2016, productivity has grown 75%, whereas median compensation has grown 11%. For some perspective, there were boots on the ground in Vietnam until 1975-this has been going on for a very long time. The ability to make an honest living, and freely choose to spend your money has been deteriorating for over 50 years, creating generations of people who never knew what true monetary autonomy even looked like.
Pair this with the crisis-level housing affordability, where no major market surveyed in the English-speaking world was rated “affordable” (3.0 or under). In the US, Pittsburgh was the most affordable at 3.1x income, and you have a populace who have had their labour and time taken for pennies on the dollar, cannot freely choose how to spend their money because of the economic constraints, and cannot freely choose where to live because of housing affordability.
As a result of these two factors, the necessity for household debt has skyrocketed. This began as constructive debt such as mortgages, which currently takes up about 70% of the $18.59 trillion as of Q3 2025, but another number here shows a frightening reality. 4.5% of the debt is in some stage of delinquency, $837 billion in debt where regular people have zero economical “slack” and cannot say no to the bad employer, cannot move cities or states, etc. This is rather alarming-it’s the difference between “Americans carry a lot of debt” and “nearly 1 in 20 dollars owed is already in trouble”.
So we can safely say that economically, fewer and fewer citizens have practical de facto freedom, and this gap between nominal and substantive liberty is most visible in the political world.
According to Pew Research, the percentage of Americans “who say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always/most of the time” has dropped from 73% in 1958 to just 17% in 2025, with substantial peaks and valleys corresponding with major political events such as the Vietnam War, Watergate Scandal, 9/11, and the Iraq War, and since 2007, public trust has not broken 30%. Trust has been broken too many times, and each time it occurs this number fails to reach previous highs. By and large, we no longer trust the institutions we are subservient to.
Economic freedom: No.
Trust in institutions to enforce liberty: No.
So can we find our freedom on the internet via social media?
No.
We live in an age of epistemological inequality. Dependence on centralized platforms who use our data in ways that are not clear to us via murky terms of service and feed us rhetoric based on predictive analytics and algorithms has made us all believe we have real freedom of speech, but under the surface, this is just not the case. A quote comes to mind here from Noam Chomsky:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
The Illusion of Free Speech
We believe we have freedom of speech and thought, evidently we don’t. Instances in the U.K and Canada, 2 countries of which I have lived in, both have alarming breaches of these so called “freedoms” which did not seem to solidify themselves in the public psyche.
In the UK, over 12,000 people were arrested in 2023 under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These numbers have doubled since 2017 and works out to about 30 arrests a day. This is a scary prospect, and is an insidious way of enforcing what the government deems acceptable to think. This very grey area is a huge encroachment on our freedoms, but very few people seem to understand until it happens to them. Important to note here also that this does not only affect British citizens, as seen in the case of Graham Linehan, an Irish citizen, arrested at Heathrow Airport for a tweet he posted… in Arizona.
30 arrests a day for freedom of speech? A statistic we may better link to authoritarian regimes in the developing world, not Britain.
In Canada, freedom of speech was curtailed in a slightly different way, by the implementation and enforcement of compelled speech, Bill C-16. This bill I find arguably more sinister in nature, given it is not punishing you for saying the “wrong” thing, it is compelling you to say the “right” thing. Very nuanced difference, but the former is reactive whilst the latter is proactive.
When They Can’t Silence You, They Freeze You
In both these countries we also saw financial restrictions.
Slightly less stark, but the House of Commons Treasury Committee in the UK found that 8 major banks had closed over 140,000 SME accounts in a single year, with the reasons being:
-
“Risk appetite” — the bank’s own internal comfort level, not evidence of wrongdoing
-
Lack of information sharing — banks didn’t tell customers why
-
Financial crime concerns — but applied broadly, not case-by-case
What this showed was the silent and swift nature of the financial system, little to no notice on account closures that could have crushed a small business.
In Canada, it was black and white. The Trudeau administration, unhappy with the Covid-19 protests happening in Ottawa by the truckers convoy, froze 280 accounts, holding $7.8 million in value. 170 Bitcoin wallets targeted.
This eventually was determined to be a violation of Section 2(b) (freedom of expression) and Section 8 (unreasonable search and seizure) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley, but the damage had been done. This was overreach at the highest of standards. The government froze money, the courts found it to be illegal, and the victims are still waiting for compensation.
Exit as the Thesis
When our voice fails, the system is caught lacking, and we are caught wanting. What remains?
Exit.
Exit in this context is from the systems set up to extract from you.
The financial system that has stolen from you by inflating prices whilst suppressing growth in compensation, that then determines whether you can open a business, or choose to protest, or speak freely. This can be exited by switching to Bitcoin. Granted there is still a lot of integration needed for ease, but the case of keeping your assets outside the existing system is hard to ignore.
The Canadian government explicitly outlined “virtual currency” when they moved to freeze the accounts of protesters, which tends to suggest they acknowledge its potential to exist independently.
My own experience, of moving money from one country to another, and receiving a letter in the mail from my bank, warning me that if I did not act completely transparently with the origins of that money (the death of a family member) they would freeze my account. This woke me up, and it should wake you up too.
BTC held on exchanges is vulnerable, Canada proved this by targeting wallets held on custodial platforms. Self-custody removes the intermediary.
The social media platforms, that feed you rhetoric that polarises you, and prompt you to engage in highly emotional discourse about what they deem appropriate, whilst suppressing dialogue about what is actually important. Switch to Nostr, where no one can quiet your voice, you truly choose what you see, and you sign off on everything you say to verify it is you. I recently switched, because I felt it necessary to take control of my thoughts and data, and felt that if I remained where I was, my voice would fade into the abyss.
It is important to note that individual exit without community is isolation with better tools. The real power is in the community and connectivity of these tools, as they allow small like-minded communities to exist through webs of trust rather than intermediaries.
The Uncomfortable Truth
As we discussed in the beginning of this article, our actual freedoms do not line up with the freedoms prescribed by the laws of the land. This dissonance has led to our current position of owning little, saying what is appropriate, and hating every second of it.
I will end with a quote from Kafka’s The Trial, which I highly recommend reading:
“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” “A melancholy conclusion,” said K. “It turns lying into a universal principle.”
Is it just to freeze the assets of the populace? In any scenario?
Is it just that our ability to exercise economic freedom has been slowly degraded over the last 50 years?
We have been convinced of the necessity of our situation. Because of this, we have forgotten the necessity to validate its truthfulness.
Sources
-
Stansbury & Summers, “Productivity and Pay: Is the Link Broken?“ — NBER Working Paper 24165
-
Demographia, International Housing Affordability (2024)
-
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Household Debt & Credit Report Q3 2025
-
Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2025“
-
The Times (UK) / House of Lords Library, “Select Communications Offences and Concerns Over Free Speech“
-
Parliament of Canada, Bill C-16 — Royal Assent
-
UK Parliament Treasury Committee, “New De-banking Figures“
-
House of Commons of Canada, FINA Committee Report No. 5 — Emergencies Act Review
-
Federal Court of Canada, 2024 FC 42 — Emergencies Act Ruling
-
Federal Court of Appeal, 2026 FCA 6 — Appeal Dismissed
