Number Go Up Hides Freedom Go Up: Alex Gladstein on Bitcoin, Dictators, and Human Rights

Lex Fridman opens with a basic question: which rights should every person have? Alex Gladstein lists free speech, assembly, belief, a say in government, privacy, and property, and he groups them as negative rights. The phrase is easy to mishear. Negative rights are liberties, the freedom from interference. Positive rights are entitlements, the things a government is supposed to provide. After World War II, he says, the UN Declaration of Human Rights was largely a compromise between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The American side put liberties on the page: speech, association, assembly. The Soviets wanted the right to work, housing, water, a vacation. Read the declaration end to end and you are reading a bargain, not a treatise. In the 1970s another document appeared, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and that is the lodestar the Human Rights Foundation uses, because it is an agreement on the negative rights. Authoritarian regimes, Gladstein argues, can commit fraud on the entitlement side while stripping every liberty, precisely because there is no free speech or press left to call the bluff.

Take the liberties away and a Potemkin village is easy to stage. Cuba, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union played that game for decades. Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim once told him a joke: in my country we have freedom of speech; we do not have freedom after speech. They can manipulate any slogan they want. Socioeconomic data from the 95 countries Gladstein classifies as authoritarian, covering 53 percent of the world, is shot through with that fraud on literacy, life expectancy, growth. For him the liberties in a document like the U.S. Bill of Rights are the table. Entitlements can be built on top. Norway has both. North Korea only claims the entitlements, and has none of the liberties. That gap is the whole argument.

In the digital age, Fridman asks, what does free speech even mean when the venues are private networks that can remove a president? Gladstein reaches for Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident, and the town-square test: can you walk into a public space near where you live and loudly criticize your ruler without fear of retribution? In Havana, Moscow, and Beijing you cannot. In Austin, Boston, London, Santiago, and Tokyo you can. Content, even conspiracy, is not the state’s business. Censorship, for him, is the government with guns. Deplatforming is a company writing house rules. They are not the same thing.

Fridman is uneasy anyway. He has had dinner with Alex Jones, understands why people recoil, and still dislikes the universality of the purge; worse people remain on the platforms. Gladstein’s counter is scale. In North Korea, Cuba, Russia, or China, Jones would be in prison or dead. Here he meets resistance in the marketplace of ideas. Fridman pushes closer to the metal: Amazon Web Services taking Parler offline starts to look like infrastructure, and infrastructure starts to look like the state, especially in China and Russia. Gladstein grants the discomfort. The gray zone is interesting. It does not make the black and white disappear.

Since 2007 Gladstein has worked at the Human Rights Foundation, a New York nonprofit whose mission is individual rights in authoritarian societies. He counts about 95 countries: one-party states, outlawed opposition, no free press, no independent judiciary, even a human-rights group or environmental club would be illegal. That is 4.3 billion people, 53 percent of humanity. Line up refugees, natural disasters, extreme poverty, and people without clean water, and authoritarianism still dwarfs them. The reason it is not the center of conversation, he says, is mercantilism. Powers that be will trade freedom and privacy for money. Look at the sponsor list for the Beijing Olympics while the CCP commits genocide against Uyghurs, or at the famous investors invited to Saudi Arabia’s Davos in the Desert while the government tortured a woman who wanted to drive and had murdered Jamal Khashoggi.

Is the blindness to dictators a flaw in capitalism? Gladstein splits the answer. Free trade is good. France and Germany slaughtered large shares of each other’s men in three wars in a hundred years; war between them is now unthinkable, largely because of trade. Two capitalist actors tend not to fight. Introduce an authoritarian actor and the bets are off. At the geopolitical level, profit is not enough. Someone has to stand for principles, or athletes, businesses, and governments will cheerfully do business with the Chinese Communist Party.

How do you know a state is authoritarian? One litmus test is whether you can hold a gay pride parade without getting beaten. It lines up with surprising accuracy, across religions. Fascist regimes need an other to scapegoat; LGBT people and religious minorities are convenient. Uganda, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba. Denial is the strongest form of demonization: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia claiming there were no gays in Iran. Another test is comedy. Can you get paid to mock your government on television? Colleagues who live under dictatorships find it unbelievable that American comedians do it safely and get rich. That is a hallmark of a free society, not a proof that the government is good.

The United States, he says, has a disastrous prison system, a failed war on drugs, and committed a grievous crime by invading Iraq. Its architecture is still an open society. The people who criticize it most usually live in it; move them to Cuba and try the same rhetoric on Cuban rulers and it would not last. Citizens can push for reform. Rulers rotate. The pyramid, for him, starts with free speech, then civil society, then separation of powers, and only then elections. Elections without the layers below mean nothing. Kim Jong-un is elected; he is the only name on the ballot. Hitler and Hugo Chávez were elected. In Egypt the ladder came up after Mubarak: Morsi, then the military, then Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, worse than what the Arab Spring removed.

Living under totalitarianism, some people have told him, is like a political desert. What grows in a desert? Scorpions and cacti. The dictator’s best method of control is to crush the moderates so that the only opposition left is extremists. Then, in talks with Washington, he can hold up the terrorists and say it is us or them, and American realists pick the dictator. That is one structural reason the United States has backed so many of them. Autocracy is the historical default. Democracy, the idea that we should be ruled by rules rather than rulers, is recent, invented in more than one place, including West Africa and ancient Greece, and long restricted by property, sex, and race. Gladstein draws a straight line from those personal freedoms to scientific inquiry and prosperity. The glass is half full: almost half the world lives under democracy, billions of people, a staggering achievement. Around 2015 the acceleration stalled. The Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Turkey went backward, about half a billion people. Armenia and Malaysia moved forward. The stalemate that worries him most is what digitization will do to open societies.

Fridman expects technology to empower individuals against governments. Gladstein has seen both. Early in his HRF work he packed backpacks of foreign films, *V for Vendetta* dubbed into Spanish, for Cuba’s underground libraries, in a country where owning a book required permission. Later came Flash Drives for Freedom: more than a hundred thousand drives into North Korea, a country of 25 million, millions of hours of films and books on something the size of a thumbnail. The information blockade that once required crates of books can now be broken in a pocket. He is still, in 2021, terrified of big-data analysis in the hands of states. It is very hard, he says, to make the case that AI will be good for civil liberties. Health, the planet, science, perhaps. Liberty, no.

Fridman disagrees on the record. He wants AI that people own, personal assistants with complete control over what is learnable about a life, a market for products that put data back in the user’s hands. Gladstein hears encryption: digital keys over property, the same force that animates Bitcoin. He will not stop at the possible. The Chinese Communist Party already runs hundreds of millions of cameras that can tell a Uyghur from a Han, with supercomputers in Ürümqi built for the sorting. A *New Yorker* essay, “Ghost Walls,” follows a woman sucked into a camp in 2017. Every home in Xinjiang has a QR code the police can scan; every car has a code; every person’s DNA is taken and sifted by algorithm. He calls it digital Leninism, a laboratory of automated oppression, one of the biggest risks in the world and not discussed enough.

Fridman still bets that governments are clumsy, that citizens could flood them with fake data. Gladstein does not deny the engineering. He denies the luxury of waiting. Street-level Chinese surveillance has already been bought from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe; Britain has had scandals over the purchases. Belt and Road is, in part, a plan to install telecom and surveillance infrastructure across dozens of countries with a back door. Chinese national-security law requires companies abroad to send data to Beijing. Big Brother, Gladstein says, can only grow if it feeds on your data. Refuse the cloud and you can starve the monster. In free societies the trade of privacy for convenience has been a free lunch. Snowden’s two lessons: the Patriot Act, the war on terror, and mass surveillance were a false choice, hundreds of millions of dollars for bureaucratic waste and eroded liberty; and people should practice privacy. Put conversations on Signal. Metadata may leak. The contents need not.

Why should citizens have to work that hard? Because, Gladstein says, you can keep the map simple: politics, information, and money. Someone invented democracy, the idea of being ruled by rules. Information used to live in libraries next to kings; now billions carry it in a pocket and can publish. Encrypted messaging is a corollary of that second decentralization. Money is the piece still held by a small group, and that is why he spends so much time on Bitcoin.

In more than a decade of human-rights work, Gladstein watched currency take a back seat. Who issues money, who sets the rules, who sets interest rates: none of it is on the activist menu, and schools barely teach where money comes from. Only Bitcoin made him study it. Oslo Freedom Forums put him in rooms with hundreds of dissidents. They almost never volunteered stories about bank accounts or cross-border transfers. When he started asking, everyone had one.

Evan Mawarire, who started the This Flag movement that helped topple Robert Mugabe, had never been asked to talk about hyperinflation. In San Francisco he opened his shirt and showed a necklace with a 1980 Zimbabwean dollar. Activists wear it as a symbol of what the country used to be, when that coin was worth two British pounds. Two and a half decades of mismanagement and corruption inflated the currency out of existence. If you actually talk to human-rights activists about money, Gladstein says, they know a lot. Nobody asks them. Bitcoin, in that light, is the people’s money: no special rules for a billionaire versus a refugee, a minting schedule everyone can see.

Only 13 percent of humans live in a liberal democracy with property rights and a reserve currency, the kind other central banks will hold: the dollar, sterling, the Australian and Canadian dollars, the Swiss franc, the euro. Everyone else, 87 percent, nearly seven billion people, lives under weaker money or an authoritarian regime. Hyperinflation is not two exotic case studies. Gladstein counts about 1.3 billion people under double- or triple-digit inflation: Nigeria, 200 million people at 15 percent; Turkey, 100 million at 15 percent; Argentina, 45 million at 40 percent; some 35 countries where wages disappear against the dollar, gold, or real estate in weeks or months. Your time and energy stolen in front of you is, for him, a human-rights violation. Bitcoin is a low-cost, permissionless savings account the government cannot debase on demand.

The second mechanism is an unstoppable payments network. Broad U.S. sanctions, unlike Magnitsky-style targeting of rulers, shut off whole countries and leave ordinary people in Cuba, Iran, and Palestine to suffer; people in all three now use Bitcoin for commerce. Remittances are extortionate: high fees, days of delay, Western Union pauses, customer-service hell. If the recipient has a phone, send it. By the end of 2022, he says, five or six billion people will have smartphones. That is a majority of humans who can hold a sovereign wallet. Two percent of the world, perhaps 200 million people, own Bitcoin today. The jump from 2 percent to 50 is the adoption problem. The two jobs, savings and rails, are already in use in Sudan, Syria, Venezuela.

Most users still hold Bitcoin the way they hold a bank deposit: a claim at Coinbase. Non-custodial use is closer to cash from an ATM, a bearer instrument unlocked by 12 to 24 English words on paper. Not your keys, not your coins. Gladstein is impatient with the story that Bitcoin is too hard. The *New York Times* Silicon Valley user who lost everything had forgotten a password on coins that were barely worth anything a decade ago. Someone waiting on a remittance will not forget. Do not think so little of your fellow man. People living with very little money, Fridman adds from a Soviet childhood of bureaucracy and inflation, get savvy because they have to. The capital of Bitcoin-the-tool could be Lagos, not San Francisco.

Adoption, Gladstein thinks, will look like the mobile phone: huge, clunky, elite, then smaller, cheaper, and universal. Wallets are already slick. Muun, from a team in Argentina, exists because the peso was devalued three times in twenty years and moving money across borders was hell. Fridman offers the Internet Explorer analogy: the dominant browser lost to Chrome and Firefox; why won’t some future coin, even one not yet born, overtake Bitcoin on users? Gladstein’s answer is the mint. The innovation is a decentralized issuance schedule no one can change. Twenty-one million, never a twenty-one-million-and-first. Everything else is downstream.

Every other coin, he says, is either inflationary or has a policy a small group can rewrite. Ethereum makes the point vivid. Senior engineers could not tell him what the monetary policy would be after the shift to proof of stake; estimates for 2022 and 2023 ranged from 100,000 new ETH to two million. That is trusting a committee, which is what Bitcoin was built to escape. Of some 4,500 coins on CoinMarketCap, almost all are scams; even the noble ones will not add much. The second most useful crypto asset, by his lights, is probably Tether: centralized, with blacklists, a eurodollar minted by private actors and still pegged to the dollar. Stablecoins do not leave the system. Bitcoin does. It has its own store of value, medium of exchange, and, eventually, unit of account. The rest will be tied to it.

Twelve years on, governments have tried to stop Bitcoin and failed. Gladstein’s Quillette essay argues that a mix of technical, social, economic, and political incentives makes a ban harder than a purchase. The myth he wants in the reader’s head is Virgil’s Trojan horse. The Greeks could not take Troy’s walls for a decade. They left a gift so handsome that Cassandra and Laocoön were ignored, the Trojans hauled it in themselves, and at midnight the soldiers climbed out. Bitcoin’s shell is what the industry nicknames NGU, number go up. Inside is FGU, freedom go up.

Dictators, rogue regimes, and corporations will buy, mine, tax, and accumulate the best-performing financial asset in the world. What they will not admit, or will have to ignore, is that they are aiding a technology that lets individuals be sovereign and eventually erodes their power. North Korean or Venezuelan cronies told to steal or stack coins to dodge sanctions will notice, Gladstein says, that this is money the government does not control, and that knowledge spreads like a virus. Tesla stacking Bitcoin as an inflation hedge does not have to care about Belarus. The price rises, more people look, more developers arrive, wallets improve, privacy tools multiply, hash rate rises. Human-rights NGOs beg for empathy a thousand miles away and lose to the next profit. Bitcoin lets people be as greedy as they want and still strengthen the individual. He has never seen incentive alignment like it.

The same engine shows up on the second layer. Exchanges are adopting Lightning, an off-chain, onion-routed network Gladstein likens to Tor, not because they love privacy but because it is cheaper and faster. A future change, cross-input signature aggregation, could flip CoinJoin from a privacy premium into a cost savings: the more parties in a transaction, the cheaper per person. Eric Weinstein’s worry that a blockchain is a centralized record of everything does not move him. The main chain is a settlement layer, like Fedwire; in twenty or thirty years ordinary people will use Lightning or custodians, and on-chain fees will be hundreds of dollars. The ledger is kept by thousands of people. He runs a full node on a Raspberry Pi for under $150. There is no AWS kill switch. “They can’t turn off Bitcoin because it doesn’t live on AWS. It lives with us. We are Bitcoin.”

Anyone who says “the blockchain,” he adds, is waving a red flag. Satoshi’s white paper did not use the word; it was a later marketing term that peaked around 2015 in the “blockchain, not Bitcoin” campaign, a corporate attempt to lift a ledger out of a radical project and make it safe. Satoshi wrote of a time chain. The interesting part is proof of work: real energy, real expenditure, not a committee’s reputation. Ethereum leaving proof of work for proof of stake is, from a political-science chair, the existing system, a small group deciding policy. Freedom versus dictatorship.

If he is wrong about Bitcoin, Gladstein says, the human-rights fight continues, but it would be a massive failure. The project is one of the only things that gives him hope against creeping centralized control, especially the Chinese model of hoarding data. He cannot really see how it fails: it is easier for big actors to buy than to ban. Fridman, raised in the Soviet Union, is allergic to communities that are very sure of an idea, any idea. Certainty is part of how network effects work, and it is also the tell of a scam. Humanitarian buyers have already been fooled by centralized “blockchain for refugees” projects that collapsed.

Fake Lex Fridman accounts now pitch Bitcoin in DMs; optimistic people click. In Zimbabwe, a reporter who covers foreign exchange told Gladstein the main reason locals will not touch Bitcoin is that MLMs, pyramids, and Ponzis burned them first. Ease up on the certainty, Fridman tells maximalists, because cultish excitement is his signal to walk away. Gladstein scores in the 99th percentile on skepticism. He heard about Bitcoin in 2013, shrugged, and did not get excited until 2017. Be cautious, he says. Also believe in some things: democracy over tyranny, a connected internet, Bitcoin as a similar progressive force.

Patriotism, Fridman adds, is another powerful drug, a feeling of belonging that history has taught us to paint black. Saying “I love America” as an immigrant now lands as a partisan slogan. Gladstein draws a line. Patriotism is one thing; jingoism is another. Stay on the patriotic side. He loves the Bill of Rights and the fact that the system was flexible enough to extend rights the founders did not originally grant. He is not proud of invasions, bombing campaigns, or the prison system. You can love a country and criticize it. Watch the jingoistic edge.

Asked what occupies him at HRF, Gladstein points again to “Ghost Walls.” Genocide is happening now, as it did to Armenians and to Jews, and “never again” is not true. Airbnb is an Olympic sponsor. How does one person, or Elon Musk with ten thousand employees, push back? The blueprint is the fight against South African apartheid: Sullivan Principles, corporate protest, the IOC saying no, musicians and athletes withholding legitimacy. North Korea should not have been allowed near the Pyeongchang Games while gulags remain visible from space. Yesterday’s press release, he says, had Akon whitewashing Uganda’s dictator and planning a future city with him. In the 1980s that energy went into fighting apartheid. Tibet was a dorm-room cause in the 1990s, Radiohead on stage for it; the country has been colonized and the flags came down. He is jaded. He does not believe a boycott of the Beijing Olympics will work. They failed in 2008, and the host is more repressive now.

That is why Bitcoin still excites him. It does not require a famous singer to sacrifice. Self-interest thickens a human-rights tool. On China he hopes to avoid a hot war, money on both sides is too large, but someone will have to stand up for Taiwan after Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, for moral reasons and because TSMC cannot fall into Beijing’s hands. No empire lasts forever. Nobody predicted the Soviet collapse or that Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation would become the Arab Spring. The Chinese regime will fall; no one knows when. He still prefers American leadership, warts and all, to a world whose most prominent pole is Russia or China, even as dollar weaponization fades in a more multipolar system.

Social platforms worry him too. The late 1990s and 2000s felt like a golden age of uncensored sharing; digitization seems to demonize opinions in the room, and he is not sure there is a button to fix it. There are technical exits. Adam Curry and others are experimenting with podcasts that live across platforms and get paid over Lightning in streaming sats, a direct relationship with listeners and no advertiser in the middle. Elizabeth Stark’s Lightning Labs is animated by that peer-to-peer bet. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky vision is a federated protocol, instances with different rules, the base layer as unstoppable as the internet. Gladstein has used Mastodon: each instance a benevolent dictator you choose, and the UX nowhere near Twitter. Convenience versus freedom, again. Sphinx, a Lightning-native “decentralized Slack” with encrypted chat and open-source video, feels to him like the 1990s internet, rough and magical, a WeChat built on freedom principles instead of a feed to the state. Signal’s surge after an Elon tweet and a WhatsApp policy scare showed tens of millions will move when the shiny reason appears.

Garry Kasparov, chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, matters to Fridman as a Russian. The previous chair was Václav Havel, who died in 2011; filling those shoes looked impossible, and if anyone could, Gladstein says, it was Kasparov. He could have retired, hung around Putin, kept a yacht. He chose a path that does not include going home. Masha Gessen followed his presidential campaign in *The Man Without a Face*; he risked a great deal. This is not a figurehead chair. A journalist at HRF events likes to say that when Kasparov walks in, the average IQ of the room jumps. Fridman admits he studies Putin as if from a hundred years on, as a historical figure, while activists still think the direction of Russia can be changed. Vladimir Kara-Murza, twice poisoned, tells foreigners that Russians will bring democracy on their own terms. What he asks is that outsiders stop legitimizing Putin. Gladstein finds that fair.

Fridman hates the charge of “platforming.” Knowledge is power if you shine the light well; conversations save people. Gladstein separates that from advocacy. Interview everyone. Do not confuse a hard interview with PR. Washington firms take dictator money to whitewash, put lipstick on a pig, astroturf fake popularity. Vogue’s “rose in the desert” profile of Asma al-Assad was propaganda. Christiane Amanpour asking Uganda’s Museveni why he is rigging another election is the other thing, a record worth keeping on YouTube. If there is a question you are afraid to ask, you are already self-censoring. That is Sharansky’s test applied to the interviewer.

Gladstein’s reading list is pointed. Peter Godwin’s *The Fear* is the systematic dismantling of Zimbabwe under Mugabe, family history mixed with interviews, a way to feel authoritarianism and hyperinflation at once: a 1980s country pushed back toward 1920s infrastructure, literacy, and health. Masha Gessen’s *The Man Without a Face* is, for him, the best book on modern Russia and Putin, fearless, with a Putin interview at the end. Lionel Shriver’s novel *The Mandibles* is a dark, witty gift book: a populist American president defaults, the world switches to a new currency, the dollar dies overnight, and an economist character ends up a refugee in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park still saying inflation will be fine. It is also a book about surveillance and concentrated power.

His portal into Bitcoin was Andreas Antonopoulos’s *The Internet of Money*, absorbed as an audiobook, a collection of talks, approachable rather than a history-and-philosophy text like *The Bitcoin Standard*. Some of it is dated, 2015 and 2016, and maximalists now attack Antonopoulos over later work. Gladstein calls him the GOAT, the reason he is in Bitcoin, and thinks there is room for nuance. For newcomers he also points to *The Little Bitcoin Book*, a hundred pages he wrote in a four-day house sprint with co-authors from Nigeria, Venezuela, the Philippines, and the former Soviet Union, plus a five-minute Reason video and the Quillette essay on why governments have not banned the thing.

That essay walks the attacks. A 51 percent attack still has to find the machines in a semiconductor shortage. A 6102-style seizure, named for Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 order against private gold, is what Proof of Keys Day on January 3 rehearses: withdraw from exchanges, practice being a sovereign user. China and India, the two largest populations, tried to stop citizens exchanging fiat for Bitcoin and produced a Streisand effect. The existential scare already happened in the block-size war, which he discussed with Nick Carter and which Jonathan Bier documented. Chinese billionaires, Silicon Valley firms, and people who controlled 83 percent of the hash rate still did not get the Bitcoin they wanted, when the network was much more fragile than it is now. Gladstein is glad the freedom-tool vision won over the retail-payments vision. It almost did not.

Asked about civilizational risk and a multi-planetary species, Gladstein grants that Earth is a single point of failure and then refuses the romance of Mars. Space fiction or not, who wants to live in a desert? Earth is spectacular against any exoplanet; save this one. Fridman invokes Columbus: a small insane fraction will take the first step, and Mars is that step toward the galaxy. Gladstein was born the day before Challenger, an accident that bent the arc of exploration, and he respects the people who push outward. He still wants the uniqueness of Earth recognized. He also ducks the clean “will we destroy ourselves” question by pointing at Xinjiang, North Korea, and Eritrea. That is destroying ourselves, and it is already running. If power sits entirely with one person, life as we know it is destroyed. Suffering next door is enough; you do not need the whole species to vanish.

Advice to the young starts in a public school that never taught money, not even personal finance. Get to the point where you can answer what money is, who creates it, where it comes from. American power in this era is inseparable from the petrodollar, forcing oil producers to sell in dollars, and that fact is rarely taught. He was going to be an engineer until the 2003 Iraq invasion; 9/11 and that war made him a political-science student and, eventually, an HRF employee. The WMD rationale was a lie, Democrats and Republicans alike wanted the invasion, and Ian McEwan’s *Saturday* is a way to revisit how media can be captured into selling a war. Only Bitcoin, later, made the reserve-currency motive obvious to him: Saddam Hussein wanted to sell oil in euros; Gaddafi is the same story. A nation has protected its reserve currency very hard. He wants to know whether Americans can be patriotic without the petrodollar, without propping up the Saudis or threatening countries that price oil differently. In a Bitcoin world, he thinks, the infrastructure and wealth Americans already have would still make the country powerful, without those externalities.

Permissionless money is also for people the banking system treats as children. HRF funded a 17-year-old developer who got into Bitcoin at 14 because he wanted control of his money; plenty of scientific work historically happened before 15, and those people cannot open a bank account. Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech CEO, in 2013 started the country’s first all-female software firm and paid employees in Bitcoin. The women were not allowed bank accounts; cash carried home was taken by husbands, uncles, brothers. They had phones. No one else had to know. Fridman remembers hating financial dependence before 18. Gladstein’s own concern for suffering traces to those post-9/11 years. The hard problem of the moment, as he frames it, is blocking China’s surveillance state without feeding the American military-industrial complex. He does not have the answer.

On meaning he does not zoom out much; the day job is enough. Biologically the species spreads itself. Beyond that, the pursuit is knowledge, science, innovation, and, most of all, freedom. Freedom has to guide, or the destination is prison camps. Scientific adventure and the stars, without slavery. Arbitrary power, torture, and executions, he says, we know are wrong without a book; people can still be brainwashed, as in North Korea, if they have never seen another world. The internet and Bitcoin at least offer a choice on your own terms. Do not pre-program everything. The people who tried to shut down inquiry five hundred years ago, who insisted the Earth was the center, were wrong the whole time. Laziness is refusing the internet you have; North Koreans are not lazy, they have no option. Practical steps: get on Signal, look at Bitcoin, do not use WeChat, learn what is happening to Uyghurs, and build so that kind of concentrated power cannot happen again. Each person can do something.