Free speech is keeping us alive

Free speech is the only comparative advantage the West has left. Let's return to free speech diplomacy.

Until 2016 America was doing free speech diplomacy and supported various open source and privacy tools that dissidents all around the world could use.

After the twin revolutions of 2016, Brexit and Trump, the Blob reversed the narrative completely into "free speech is killing us" and built a whole industry around global censorship. (See reporting by Jacob Siegel, Mike Benz and Mike Shellenberger)

But in fact, free speech is keeping us alive. It is the only comparative advantage the West has left. Free speech is the core of American dynamism. Not (just) high tech innovations that China can copy fast.

Because a free society is very hard to copy. 

I did my civic duty to report on online censorship efforts in my home country of Slovakia, like decels at Gerulata Technologies who are doing narrative control using AI and advocate against open source AI. And I recently spoke at a free speech event in Prague with Mike Shellenberger.

Jon Stokes had a great observation how the photo of Putin and Kim Jong Un in a car is actually not funny, because the joke's on us for believing anything we have seen on twitter for all those years - like how Russia should have collapsed in 2022. But I think a big part of this sad story is the de/amplification of certain online content by the Blob, with AI censorship on an industrial scale. Luckily, Elon Musk bought the platform and rebranded it X.

Elon Musk thinks that AI should optimize for maximum truth-telling and curiosity. Because a woke AI can be easily reverse-engineered into an anti-woke AI. But one cannot reverse the laws of physics. This is similar to Scott Alexander’s observation how rational argumentation (which is based on free speech) is the only asymmetric tool we have. Because violence, propaganda and censorship can be easily reverse-engineered, scaled and escalated by our adversaries.

Sadly we in the West are copying the Chinese Great Firewall (see the EU's DSA) and their cancel culture. With a big delay.

We need to reverse this ASAP - and extend the classic American view of free speech to the whole West.

The EU has copied the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative with our Global Gateway, which is largely a marketing exercise that is 10 years late. Now the EU copies Great Firewall and is 20 years late doing online censorship.

The core of American dynamism is free speech, free commerce and free computation. Or free and open Social, Crypto and AI technologies. Not STEM and high-tech skills.

I hear people I respect, like Mike Solana at Pirate Wires, proclaiming even today that China can’t innovate. I think that’s cope. Instagram finds it hard to copy TikTok algorithm and China has hypersonic missiles and DJI drones. If Unitree G1 humanoid robot for $16,000 isn’t innovation, than I don’t know what is.

We can take the Peter Thiel view that true innovation is only going from zero to one. Creating the first and dominant Paypal, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir and hopefully once also Anduril.

But China can clearly do 1 to infinity - copying, improving and scaling high-tech faster than the West. They have built 39,000km of high-speed rail in 15 years. They can build rail 50x cheaper and have 200x ship building capacity of the US.

And with WeChat we can argue they can also do zero to one, as Elon Musk tries to copy them, not vice versa.

What’s worse the West nowadays copies China and Russia in order to beat China and Russia, losing its soul and values in the process. But as Vivek Ramaswamy said: "we’re not gonna beat China by being China. We’re going to beat China by being ourselves.’"

The old establishment, that Balaji Srinivasan calls blue America, or the blue tribe, and Mike Benz likes to call the Blob ( a security state establishment at the core of the blue tribe), actually copies China in online censorship - often using their satellites like the EU or Five Eyes partners - like the recent case when Australia tried to ban a video globally, but lost in a court case, when Elon Musk challenged them.

And with the recent presidential debate between Trump and Biden in the US, it is becoming clearer by the day that we copy Russia in what people like Matt Taibbi call a managed democracy. Like keeping a Potemkin president and preventing Democrat voters from selecting a real alternative in regular and open primaries.

“Are we the Soviets” asked Niall Ferguson recently in his recent essay that sees many parallels between the current state of the US empire and the Soviets right before the end of USSR.

In his book The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan, describes how "history is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes". And he provides dozens of examples - like USSR being the senior partner to China back during the Cold War and now China being the senior partner to Russia.  Or Russians suffering from deaths of despair in the 1990s and now Americans suffering from the same.

New censors and totalitarians like Věra Jourová must fail with their efforts, because we are free people and the freedom of speech is the core principle of the West.

If someone breaks the law, police should arrest them. No need to break encryption for everyone and copy China in online censorship.

The US needs to return to pre-2016 free speech diplomacy and extend the First Amendment values to the whole West - and do exactly the opposite to what blue America does today, using EU mandarins to censor the whole world via global harmonization.

The EU should copy American free speech values and laws and stop copying China.

The core of American dynamism is free speech not high-tech. And free speech is the only comparative advantage the West has left. China closes the gap in high-tech rapidly, but they can't copy a free society.