Spanish government orders GitHub to take down Tsunami Democràtic repository
Governments† burn libraries.<p>Don&#x27;t create central points of vulnerability to coercion. That multiplies the effectiveness of coercive force.  Create decentralized systems. Git, not GitHub. Bitcoin, not Citibank. Email, not Gmail — although we still need to free email from DNS.<p>Never forget how the Spanish Inquisition — the origin, in the West, of these sorts of degraded &quot;laws&quot; against &quot;criminal content&quot; — treated the Jewish people and the keepers of the quipu.  Reaching back further, remember how Qin Shi Huang treated the Mohists, infinitely his superiors in every respect.<p>People will say it&#x27;s justified because the Catalan separatists are fascists, terrorists, pedophiles, or whatever.  It&#x27;s not justified.  The rulers of al-Andalus were no angels either, but their abuses were nothing compared to the genocidal nightmares the Inquisition concealed with its censorship.<p>Today we are building the systems we will live in tomorrow. Do you want a future of a thousand Inquisitions or a thousand Miltons and a thousand Humboldts? Do you want Jefferson&#x27;s future or Stalin&#x27;s? A new Dark Age or a new Enlightenment? Will a thousand schools of thought contend, or will the people of the world suffer a sanitized environment devoid of &quot;degenerate art&quot; and &quot;bourgeois ideals&quot;?  Will they remember what really happened, teasing the truth out of biased accounts written from many points of view, or will they only be able to read history as written by the victors, the version whose &quot;correct ideology&quot; earns it the censor&#x27;s <i>imprimatur</i>?<p>It depends on how vulnerable our systems make human rights, and in particular the right to knowledge.<p>As a hacker, you decide what tomorrow&#x27;s books are made of.  Will they be printed on celluloid, which goes up like gunpowder with a spark?  Or will they be etched in bright sheets of stainless steel?<p>Because governments burn libraries.<p>But cypherpunks write code.<p>† That&#x27;s &quot;states&quot; to you Brits.<p>[edited extensively]