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:the sorcerer's

Prichard stalLman's quest

to save us from a web of
spyware and from ourselves:by:matthew/hutson
: ilLustrations/by^nathan/fox

NOVEIIBER/DECEMBER/EDlb/PSYCHOLOGY/TODAY/?^

ri chard

s t aILma n i

a free software ad
v o c a te a ffilia te d
w ith MIT, d o esn t
really wear hats, but
hes been known to
don tinfoil. In 2005, while attendinga U.N. technology summit in Tunisia, he received
a photo badge with a radio-frequency identification chip. Disgusted, he purchased a
roll of aluminum foil, covered his badge, and handed sheets out to others. Tunisian
security nearly blocked him from giving his talk. By covering our badges, he later
noted, we could prevent our movements within the summit, and our movements
outside, from being scanned; we could also make a visible protest against the surveil
lance society that many governments are trying to impose. A fellow delegate blogged
that Stallman had a legitimate gripe, handled with Richards usual highly visible,
guileless, and absolutely unsubtle style of nonviolent protest.
Stallman has been concerned about digital privacy since the 1990s, b u t its
just one of th e m any issues (alongside censorship, copyright, and others) th at

motivate his push to shake up the soft

ware landscape. He aims for the world
to use only free software (think free
speech, not free beer) whose source
code can be freely studied, altered, and
shared by its users. Nearly all the soft
ware on our phones and computers, as
well as on other machines, is nonfree or
proprietary software and is riddled
with spyware and back doors installed
by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the
like. In th e 1980s, Stallm an started a
m ovem ent to support free software.
In the process, he and others created a
free operating system, GNU, currently
running on tens of millions of com put
ers, including nearly every web server.
If youve heard of open source (free soft
w ares practice sans its moral stance)
or Linux (really GNU, plus a program
called Linux), you can thank Stallman.
By using p ro p rietary softw are,
Stallm an believes, we are forfeiting
control of our com puters, and thus of
our digital lives. In his denunciation of
all nonfree software as inherently abu
sive and unethical, he has alienated
many possible allies and followers. But
he is not here to make friends. He is here
to save us from a software industry he
considers predatory in ways weve yet
to recognize.
R ichard S tallm an is a h a c k e rs
h a c k e r - in skills, p h ilo so p h y , and
tem p e ra m e n t. For a w hile he lived
in his lab. He doesnt use keycards to
unlock doors for fear of being tracked.

He deploys puns mercilessly. He often

carries a recorder (the musical instru
m ent) in his pocket to play w hen the
m ood strikes him . His em ails begin
with this boilerplate: To any NSA and
FBI agents reading my email... Hes re
ceived a MacArthur genius grant and
15 honorary doctorates.

up to a table outside his third-floor of

fice, which was off limits but revealed
tight shelves packed to the ceiling with
books and CDs.
Talking with Stallman is a little u n
nerving at first. He has piercing olive
eyes that dont look away, even during
long pauses betw een points. To deter
m ine w hen he has finished speaking
and is ready for another question re
quires patience and close attention; be
ware making the wrong call (Please let
me tell the story!). He bites his nails,
picks his teeth, and perpetually fiddles
with and chews on the split ends of his
long, graying hair.
A few m inutes into our conversa
tion, a student returns to his laptop at
the table. Stallman eyes the offending
Mac. Thats a horrible shame, he tells
the young man. Thats a nonfree oper
ating system. It tramples your freedom
just by being there. Stallman explains
th at the operating system he helped
birth can be sw apped in. I hope you
will escape from Apples power.

for a w h i l e he 1 i v e d
in h i s lab- a n d ho
d o G s n ' t use k G y c a r d s
to u n l o c k d o o r s for
f o a r of b o i n g t r a c k o d To ap p reciate S tallm ans m e s
sage, you have to look past his personal
q u irk s-o n e online video shows him
answ ering audience questions while
picking som ething off his bare fo o tbut to u n derstand how som eone has
achieved w hat he has, it helps to look
at th e w hole person. So I visited him
at MIT, where he has worked since the
early 1970s. I reached th e elaborate
Frank Gehry-designed home of MITs
Computer Science and Artificial Intel
ligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Stallm an padded dow nstairs to m eet me
in black dress socks, brow n Dockers,
and a burgundy polo shirt stretched
over his belly, before leading me back

flD/NOVEMBER/DECEIlBER/PSYCHOLOGY/TODAY/BDlb

He began writing this OS in 1984,

calling it GNU, pronounced with a hard
G and recursively short for GNUSNot
Unix. He w anted a free alternative
to Unix, and soon afterw ard founded
the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to
support its collaborative development.
Free softw are adheres to four m ain
principles: Users m ust be able to use it
however they want, to study its source
code, to share it, and to share modified
versions. They can sell copies if they
want, as long as they m eet the other cri
teria. Stallman often calls proprietary
software user-subjugating software.
At GNU.org, Stallman docum ents
the ways in w hich nonfree softw are

: : : / / / . . . . : l o g :o n / D D D l D D l i
installed in phones, laptops, cars, and
elsewhere controls its users. It can spy
on them . Corporations can restrict
which software or hardware is compati
ble with it. Back doors allow companies
to install or modify programs or data.
Corporations can censor content. Soft
ware includes bugs or security holes
that users arent allowed to fix. Nor can
users add new features or remove un
wanted ones. Most poetically, Amazon
once remotely deleted purchased-but
unauthorized-copies of George Or
wells 1984 from customers Kindles
(or, says Stallman, Swindles).
By 1991, m ost of GNUS critical
pieces were finished when a young
programmer in Finland named Linus
Torvalds wrote the last essential part of

the OS, a piece called the kernel. This

kernel became known simply as Linux,
and eventually the whole GNU/Linux
package becam e known as Linux,
even though by a couple of counts
the lines of GNU code outnumbered
those of Linux ten-to-one. To secure
Stallmans participation in this article,
I agreed to call the operating system
GNU/Linux. Stallman insists on this
name, both to give credit to the GNU
programmers and to maintain focus on
the principles of freedom that drove its
development.
At MIT, I asked the Mac-using stu
dent what he knew about Stallman and
free software. He had some familiarity
but made the critical mistake of refer
ring to open source software. (I also

promised to adhere to Stallmans re

quirement to call such software free
instead of open source. ) Calling it
open source, Stallman told him, is
a way that people who disagree with
me try to cause the ethical issues to
be forgotten. In 1998, a faction of the
free software movement split off. This
subgroup liked the idea of sharing and
collaborating on code, but did it for
practical reasons, not principled ones.
They wanted a term other than free,
both because they didnt mean to im
ply that the alternative was unj ust, and
also because free confused people
(free beer), so they settled on open
source.
One of the reasons I dont use
the name free software, Torvalds

 :/
-

configure

told me, is th at that whole freedom

thing comes w ith too m uch emotional
baggage. You cant discuss things ratio
nally. Eric Raymond, who cofounded
th e Open Source In itiative in 1998,
says, The free software crowd sound
like moralists. He argues th at the best
way to change m ost peoples behavior
is not to try to mess w ith their value
premises, b u t to offer practical incen
tives; theyll then self-supply new val
ues to rationalize their new behavior.
But for Stallman, m oralism is the
w hole point. If you w rite or use free
softw are only for practical reasons,
youll stop w hen its inconvenient, and
freedom will disappear.
I first h eard Stallm an speak 15
years ago at MIT. On entering th e lec

1D1D1D1 '//
ture hall, he exchanged heated words
w ith the host, then began yelling and
flailing his arms. He would not let his
talk be w ebcast using RealPlayer, b e
cause that would have imposed the use
of a proprietary program on his home
viewers. Why are you being so obsti
nately obtuse? he dem anded. Why
do you in sist on n o t u n d erstan d in g
w hat Im telling you? Once RealPlayer
was off the table and some people had
left out of discomfort, he gave the lec
tu re on th e Draconian restriction
know n as copyright. A one-tim e use
of RealPlayer seems a harmless conve
nience, but if I dont show that I take
m y principles seriously, he told the
audience, I cant expect anybody else
to take them seriously.

W hen yelling at a lecture host or

in sistin g on th e nam e GNU/Linux,
Stallm an m ay seem like an en titled
child, b u t Richard has very little in
th e way of personal ego, Raym ond
says. What he has is a com m itm ent to
his ideas th at is utterly total. And its
very im portant to him th at people not
only behave in the way he wants them
to behave but think in the way he wants
them to think. He summarizes: Most
of the com m unity respect Richard but
dont buy all of his premises.

S T A L L M A N IS US E D to his premises
going unsold. He grew up in New York
City, interested in m ath, science, and
history. He was reading calculus tex t
books by age 7 and later enjoyed math

11DID

puzzles and model rockets, according

to his biography, Free as in Freedom
w ritten by Sam Williams in 2002 and
revised by Stallman eight years later. In
middle school he used an IBM manual
to write com puter programs on paper.
Others made fun of him, even in the Co
lumbia Science Honors Program that he
attended on Saturdays. It hurt horri
bly w hen I was teased, he says.
While hes since grown a thicker
skin, as a child he found little solace
w ith his p a re n ts. I th o u g h t o f my
parents as tyrants, he says. And I re
sented their power. I asked if that was
simply because of his disregard for au
thority or if other parents might have
been m ore agreeable. He couldnt be
sure. Although Ive seen families that
get along w ith each other, its almost in
comprehensible forme. It wasnt until
he settled into his residential house at
Harvard, as a physics undergraduate,
that he felt as if he had a hom e.
During his freshm an year, he was
searching Cambridge for interesting
computers to study and landed at MITs
AI lab, where he found a second h o m e among its hackers. (Hacking was an
MIT term applied to various kinds of
playful cleverness.) The labs ethos was
form ative. For instance, th ey d id n t
w rite security code for th e labs m a
chines because it could be used against
th em . They decided not to put chains
around their necks and hand them to
the administrators, Stallman says.
There was also an unofficial policy
of not locking your office at night if it
contained a com puter term inal th a t
oth ers m ight need. U nobliging fac
ulty m em bers led Stallman to become
som ething of a cat burglar, by way of
Robin Hood. Upon arrival at the lab, he
was show n a m akeshift battering ram
theyd used to open locked doors. Oth
er hackers som etim es lifted the ceiling
tiles and clim bed over th e w all and
dow n into offices, b u t th e fiberglass
w ould m ake th eir skin itch for days.
Stallm an devised a m ethod of lifting
ju st a couple of tiles and low ering a
loop of tape to lasso and turn the inside
doorknob. The place had a unique free
spirit at th a t tim e, Stallm an recalls.

They subverted rules, but only in the

service of com m unal productivity. I
found that powerfully inspiring.
After graduating from Harvard in
1974, Stallman began a graduate degree
in physics at MIT. But a year later, he
injured his knee and could no longer
participate in regular folk dancing, his
great joy, as well as his one way of m eet
ing women. (He has never married but
currently has a girlfriend.) That took
all thejoy out ofm y life,"he says. I just
collapsed in misery. He lost his m oti
vation to study physics and dropped
out, but he saw ways he could be use
ful w ith programming and continued
to work in the AI lab.
Around 1980, an incident occurred
that has become something of his ori
gin story as a movement leader. Xerox
had given MIT a laser printer, and Stallm an hoped to hack it to prevent paper

professor at Columbia, the FSFs gen

eral counsel, and a collaborator w ith
Stallman for a quarter cen tu ry -w h at
people might not know about him. He
has a w insom e and childlike sense of
humor, he says. Theres th at record
er he carries around, and a button he
m ade in the 1970s and still wears that
says Im peach God. He also som e
tim es carries zero-dollar bills, which
he uses to bribe people, including pass
port agents. As Stallman says, Its le
gally validandanyU.S. agency will give
you zero dollars in gold for it. He gave
one to Barney Frank hoping hed vote
no on the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, w hich bans breaking digital re
strictions m anagement. (Frank voted
yes, and Stallman lost all respect for
him. Plus Frank kept the cash.)
W ordplay e n te rta in s Stallm an
endlessly. W hen I visited MIT he said

his emails begin

with this bo il er p l a t e :
to any NS A and FBI
aqents re ading my
email -
jams. MIT h adnt received the source
code, so Stallman visited a programmer
at Carnegie Mellon who had worked on
them achine. But when he asked for the
code, the m an refused, citing a nondis
closure agreem ent. Stallm an was so
stunned, he left the m ans office w ith
out saying a w ord. I couldnt think of a
thing to say that would do justice to it,
he says. And I didnt want to treat him
w ith the normal courtesy I would for a
decent person. The betrayal provoked
the next step in his ideological evolu
tion. All my experiences at MIT taught
me how nice it was to be in a place with
free software. But the printer incident
helped me to see that nonfree software
was actually an injustice.
Stallman the moralistic freedomfighter often obscures th e rest of his
character. I asked Eben M oglen-a law

hed just come up with the best joke of

his life, about Theresa May, the British
prim e m inister, w ho has a history of
backing surveillance: They put up a
sculpture of Theresa May, and every
one in the area thought it was w atch
ing them . So someone attacked it with
a ham m er and was fined statue Tory
damages. Puns plus politics are Stall
m ans sweet spot. (He then quoted the
Labour politician Aneurin Bevan: The
Tories are lower than vermin. That one
has less of a ring to it.)
Moglen shared a story from 2006,
w hen a large num ber of people in the
free softw are m ovem ent w ere m eet
ing at MIT to discuss the latest version
of the GNU Public License, or GPL. The
GPL, first released in 1989, is the text
that people attach to free software proj ects to keep them free. It basically says

N0VEMBER/DECEMBER/201iki/PSYCH0L0GY/T0DAY/A3

that you cant make the code proprie

tary, and if its used in another project,
then that project cant be m ade propri
etary either. Its a brilliant use of the
copyright system : All code autom ati
cally falls und er copyright, b u t those
who own a copyright can dictate how
their m aterial is used. Typically they
insert term s specifying that the m ate
rial cannot be modified or distributed
w ithout their permission. But in a jiujitsu move, Stallm an inserted term s
specifying th a t such do n o t copy
term s cannot be inserted, thus keeping
the software and its descendants free
forever. The GPL is perhaps the great
est hack of Stallmans life. Others have
since applied similar copyright term s
to books, music, and art, a practice now
known as copyleft.
So, Moglen says, this GPL m eet
ing was th e beginning of a carefully

He talked Stallman out of his obstinacy,

but Stallman told me, That is the way
Im likely to react to someone who tries
to censor my jokes.
M oglen recalled a n o th er story,
about a speech Stallm an gave in In
dia. He was on stage before thousands
o f people w ith th e chief m inister of
Kerala, an Indian state of 35 million, as
well as academ ics and dignitaries. At
the end of the day, when it was time for
Stallmans climactic address, he stood
up and said it was too hot and he was
too tired and he would speak the next
morning. I thought, in a sense, we were
in exactly the right part of the world for
him to do this, Moglen says, because
Richard was another holy man who had
his own way of doing things.
And yet Stallm an likes to m ock
that holy man persona with a character
he calls St. IGNUcius of the Church of

" t h e G x p G r i G n c G of
l o s i n g my c o m m u n i t y
c h a n g e d mo-, a n d I ' m
scared that people
will r e j e c t m e - "
plotted process we had spent a year get
ting ready for. Theyd printed several
hundred copies of the discussion draft
and were ready to hand them out and
sim ultaneously release the docum ent
online. But in th e previous version,
Stallman had included in th e support
material a reference to a fictional CEO
n am e d Ty C oon. S om eone ju d g ed
th e nam e p o litically in co rrect and
changed it. Stallman noticed the switch
backstage, and said he would have to
denounce th e license. And so w ere
standing there, everybody absolutely
dum bfounded and terrified, Moglen
says. I thought to myself, How could
it be com plete, after all these years of
w ork and careful p rep aratio n , how
could it be m ore appropriately com
plete th an by Richard Stallm an com
ing in and denouncing his own work?

Emacs. (Emacs is a text editor he wrote

th ats earned devotion from its users.)
At the end of many of his talks, he dons
a robe and a halo made of a large com
puter disc and recites a litany of free
softw are jokes bridging technology
and theology.
For another perspective on Stall
m ans character, his friend and fellow
hacker Michele Metts says, Hes one
of the few people I know who does the
right thing. He is not fearful of being
an outsider. Hes also the kindest,
gentlest hum an being. I had tried to
picture him as a parent and asked him
about kids. He never w anted them ,
b u t he said, I som etim es have more
maternal than paternal feelings toward
a child. How so? I think of paternal
as being harsh-p e rh a p s because his
father drank and verbally abused his

flM/NOVEUBER/DECEMBER/PSYCHOLOGY/TODAY/EOlb

s te p m o th e r-and th ese feelings are

just a m atter of kindness and concern.
I wouldnt express them by saying, No,
no, no. (He clarifies that his frequent
adm onishm ents to others are m atters
of concerned advisory, not force.)
For a thorough look at Stallmans
way of life, you might skim his lecture
rider, which makes Van Halens request
for no brown M&Ms look inattentive
to detail. This 9,000-word docum ent,
drawing from past m ishaps, specifies
everything from the topic and length
of the talk, to the tem perature he pre
fers w hen sleeping, to the foods and
m usic he dislikes (egg yolk, rock), to
w hat w ords to avoid saying, to how
to screen reporters for interview s, to
the m ethod in which to book his hotel
(dont use his name, and in any case he
prefers som eones couch as its more
fun). He specifies that he likes parrots,
but please dont buy one for him, and
(to avoid a third such incident) cer
tainly dont buy a captured wild par
rot: Meeting that sad animal is not an
agreeable surprise. He also makes it
clear th at you should not offer help
all the time, especially w hen it comes
to breakfast (Please just do not bring it
up) or crossing the street (Please just
leave me alone w hen I cross streets).
I m entioned the rider as we chat
ted, and he explained that people with
rigid politeness program m ing p re
vent things from getting done. You
can see I have a very low opinion of po
liteness, he says, betw een split ends.
It has little in com m on w ith consid
eration.

DESPITE THE DISLIKES listed

on his rider, Stallman is an adventur
ous eater and a connoisseur of Chinese
food. At MIT, Metts picked us up and
drove us to C hinatow n for dinner.
M etts is ab o u t Stallm ans age (h es
63), African-Am erican w ith greying
dreadlocks, and a 28-year veteran of
punk and m etal bands. She wore hot
pink sunglasses, and they exchanged
im prom ptu puns as we crossed th e
bridge into Boston. Stallman, on users
of the mobile game Pokemon Go, which
tracks players: Theyve been put in the

u s b ' k e r n a l / p r i n t
pokey. He notes that all cellphone us
ers can be tracked, however, which is
one reason he doesnt carry one.
And more puns at dinner, before
digging into a plate of baby leeks, Stallman says, We should honor Snowden
w hen we eat th is d ish. Edward
Snowden has already honored Stallman. On a trip to London, Stallman
was invited for a social chat by Julian
Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, to the
Ecuadorian embassy, where hes taking
refuge. During the visit, Assange read
aloud an appreciative greeting from the
whistleblower.
Stallman used to come to China
town late at night with his fellow MIT
hackers-until they stopped inviting
him, a snub presaging a bitter rivalry

<x/home:usermane'//

among his colleagues, what he calls

the civil war. In telling the story of
his own life, Stallman points to three
books. The first is the saga of Njal, an
Icelander who became embroiled in
a feud and was burned to death in his
home. The second is the true story of
Ishi, a Native American who became
the last of his tribe when his family was
killed. The third is Floating Worlds, a
science fiction novel about a woman
who defiantly remains on Earth after
its inhabitants are forced to leave. All
evoke a destructive period in his life,
one that led to great creation but still
haunts him. The experience of los
ing my community changed me, he
says over dinner, and Im scared that
people will reject me.

Around 1980, two com panies,

Symbolics and LMI, were spun out of
the AI lab to sell computers called Lisp
machines. Stallman didnt like that
his friends spent less time in the lab.
For a while, the two companies and
MIT shared code, but in 1982 Sym
bolics stopped sharing, hoping to run
the smaller LMI out of business. They
compelled each MIT user to choose a
side; to punish that, Stallman chose
the side against Symbolics. What they
had done was abetrayal that destroyed
the last of my home, he says between
dum plings. Metts pipes in: And I
thought punk rock was treacherous.
In his outrage, Stallman spent
nearly two years single-handedly re
creating (and sometimes besting) every

mDDllDlODIDIDDDDDI

N0VEMBER/DECEMBER/201L/PSYCH0L0GY/T0DAY/flS

!- l o g /

messages::ilogiQDlDl:'/ /

new Symbolics feature in the MIT code,

keeping LMI alive. The feat astounded
his fellow software designers. As Moglen, FSFs attorney, told me, Rich
ard Stallm an, like Isaac Newton, is a
great focused thinker, with a m ind like
a nuclear furnace that can m elt down
anything. Eventually Stallm an saw
there was no future in Lisp m achines
and decided to do something construc
tive rather than vengeful. And th a ts
GNU, he says. But the fact that I had
succeeded in outdoing all of my former
colleagues together gave me the great
strength of confidence that I could do
a very big project.
D O N ' T C O N F U S E S T A L L M A N ' S am bi
tion for optim ism . He never expected
the free software m ovem ent to make
such progress, and he cant nam e an
uplifting book to accompany the tragic

absolute dedication to free software,

expressing anger at those who make
nonfree software and pity or frustra
tion at the fools who use it (you and
me). In various ways I pushed the ar
gum ent that some people have differ
en t values and should be allowed to
trade freedom for convenience if they
choose. Theres no free equivalent of
th e iPhone. He says th e fact th at an
agreem ent is voluntary doesnt mean
its legitim ate-look at feudalism -and
argues that we need inalienable rights
to avoid oppression. Using nonfree
software will eventually hurt you (by
exposing you to manipulation), and it
perpetuates a norm that hurts others.
Users d ont see th e connection b e
tw een w hat theyre doing and the pain
that results, he says, but I do.
Were short-term thinkers, Stallman says. DoyourememberwhenM i-

he s o m e t i m e s c a r r i e s
z e r o - dollar bills
w h i c h he u s e s to b r i b e
people-i i n c l u d i n g
passport agents-'
trio describing his life. The world is
gettin g w orse and w orse, in regard
to freedom in general, he says, and
in regard to how co m p u tin g tre a ts
people, by deleting their books, and
so on. But his stance on pronouns is
instructive. I absolutely will not use
they as singular, he told me. It fills
me with revulsion. I will not stand for
it. Instead he som etim es uses person,
per, and pers, follow ing th e w riter
Marge Piercy. W hen asked if he sees
th ese optio n s catching on, he says,
If you give up on trying to prom ote
som ething because it h asn t already
caught on, youre surren d erin g to a
self-fulfilling prophesy.
So he stan d s nearly alone in his

flt/NOVENBER/DECEMBER/PSYCHOLOGY/TODAY/BOlt,

crosoft said, Where do you want to go

today? I said, How do you want to live
in five or 10 years?Thats our question.
I expressed pessimism that a free soft
ware community could ever match the
rich softw are ecosystem powered by
capitalism. He shared my pessimism,
but says, So what? That rich ecosys
tem is no substitute for freedom.
Stallman is unforgiving in his rhet
oric, but he is also a m an who under
stands th at there are complexities of
hum an motivations, Moglen says. So
let us assume that Richards language
may be blunt, but I would not necessar
ily conclude that the idea lying behind
it is quite so un-nuanced. He adds, It
is still, however, judgmental. As I paid

for dinner with a credit card, Stallman

thanked me but encouraged me to use
cash. I cited skepticism th at a record
of the meal would be used against me,
plus the convenience and flier miles
th at com e w ith plastic. To w hich he
switched from politeness to (I guess)
consideration and asked me, How eas
ily can you be bought?
Stallman cares about surveillance
because he sees it as a threat to democ
racy. Heres the logic: The state holds se
crets. To control the state, citizens need
those secrets. To obtain them, we need
whistleblowers. But surveillance lets
the state identify and im prison w his
tleblowers. Thus, he says: Democracy
depends on reducing the level of gen
eral surveillance to the point where the
state cannot identify the whistleblow
ers. In that statement, he says, I claim
to have presented a theorem about the
maximum level of surveillance that is
compatible with democracy.
Puns and a fake halo may not sup
ply enough honey to draw the masses
to Stallmans cause, given the general
acridity of his sermonizing. But he trav
els most of the year, giving talks around
the world. (His position at MIT carries
no responsibilities. He doesnt even
program anym ore-because, he says, I
have been involuntarily self-promoted
into m anagement. Thats m eant to be
a joke.) Hes still in d em and, and,
w h eth er you find him charm ing or
shrill, his ideas remain vital.
As M oglen told m e, h e s m ade
som e great softw are, w ritten som e
great licenses, and created a sm all
foundation. But the idea of copyleft
and th e proposition th a t social and
political freedom cant happen in a so
ciety w ithout technological freedom those are his long-term meanings. And
hum anity will be aware of those m ean
ings for centuries, w hatever it does
about them.
MATTHEW HUTSON is a science writer
and author o /T h e 7 Laws of Magical
Thinking.

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