Maybe. We don't know yet. This is what I was saying in 2003 in Die Gedanken Sind Frei, and although I am less confident now, or even than I was in 2010 in Freedom in the Cloud, I still hope so. The political theory I put forth in 2003 I still think is right, but the Chinese experiment in the nullification of these ideas, and the belief that the middle name of the Internet can be party, is the most serious challenge possible---far more serious than the US governments relationship to the Net it helped to gestate, or the human enablers of the parasite with the mind of God.
You substituted Torvalds for Stallman, which was wrong. Linus is an explicitly non-political person, in that sense. He wrote to me once, quite correctly, that "I grew up in Finland in the era of the Soviet Union. Freedom was never an important concept to me, as it was to you and Richard." He is an absolutely brilliant inventor, one of the three finest imaginers of software that I have ever known. But it is Richard who did what you are saying. You are right about "Satoshi Nakimoto," but because you don't know who he was, you can't know why, and even though he is dead I cannot tell you.
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