Born Free, Coded in Chains

What philosophy tells us about decentralisation’s promises and traps.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau was speaking of society, but his words embrace digital debates too. If freedom really means the ability to stand apart and flee into nature, as Rousseau believed; if to step aside from the bonds of others is the answer, then what do today’s much-hyped technologies that promise freedom in the name of decentralisation — blockchains and federated networks — really offer us?

This newsletter draws its name from Thomas Hobbes’s work, "Leviathan." Hobbes viewed nature as perilous, proposing the state, or Leviathan, in which power would be centralized, as the solution. In stark contrast, Rousseau believed that humans were inherently free in nature, and it was society, and it’s rules, enforced by the state, that imposed restrictions on us.

Advocates of blockchain insist it represents a new frontier of freedom. Erik Voorhees declares: “Bitcoin will win because there is now competition in money, and bitcoin is the best money available because it is decentralized and cannot be stopped.” But decentralisation here is a slippery notion. Blockchains do not merely link servers; they fuse them into one network, bound by common code, ledger and consensus. To join is to become part of an indivisible whole. For Rousseau the network is the problem, its edges are chains — and blockchain is all edges.

Federated networks like Mastodon tell a different story. They also interconnect, but loosely. Each server is autonomous, capable of severing ties, rewriting its rules, or withdrawing entirely. What you loose is distribution, and an ability to communicate across the federation. But you can still publish on the internet. You can leave the network and still survive. Here Rousseau’s solitude, his ability to slip away, remains imaginable. Federation offers a purer form of decentralisation than blockchain.

Blockchains, by contrast, tend toward centralisation through its architecture — one ledger. Here the inherent network relationship between scale and usefulness manifests most powerfully. For instance, Stablecoins, the first killer app of the blockchain thus far, gravitate to the largest chains; liquidity pools and token standards reward concentration. Network effects produce the very monopolies decentralisation promised to resist. The architecture may be distributed, but power coagulates. Instead of freedom, we inherit new masters: vast technical fiefdoms disguised as peer-to-peer liberty.

This is not to say we can retreat into Rousseau’s woods with federated services. Even when disconnecting from federated networks we cannot entirely escape connection. Servers still rely on shared protocols, physical infrastructure, and the messy politics of standards. Rogue crawlers will find and index you; vulnerabilities demand constant updates of your software. Online the dream of total solitude, is a mirage, perhaps even more so than Rousseau's fantasy of freedom offline. Society presses in everywhere.

Perhaps Rousseau is the wrong guide. Donna Haraway’s cyborg offers a better compass. “It is not an option,” she wrote in her Cyborg Manifesto, “but a constitution: we had better inhabit this world as movers and shakers, or we will be just victims.” By which she meant, technology is not external to us; it is woven into what we are. We cannot flee it, but we can shape it — through politics, design, and collective struggle.

If blockchain is another chain disguised as freedom, and one that is amassing immense power, then Hobbes’s warning may be worth heeding. To secure peace and a measure of freedom, we may need to entrust power to a sovereign — a Leviathan — tasked with ensuring that these networks serve the public good rather than threaten it.

This logic extends well beyond blockchain. Consider Big Tech platforms that dominate search, social media, and app stores: here too, technical “opt-outs” are rarely enough. Activists seeking relief from pervasive platform influence should rediscover that law, regulation, and collective governance are as essential as code. In practice, freedom online may rely less on escaping chains than on reshaping who forges them, and under what rules.