It’s 4AM on a Monday morning. In a few hours, I’m supposed to be launching a new digital rights organisation at the Cypherpunk Congress, in Mumbai, India. I’m still in my pyjamas in San Francisco.
This part, at least, was somewhat planned. I told Mykola Siusko and Becca Creamer, the organisers, I had an important announcement, which I’d do by a remote video link. Everything else is a little improvised.
For a start, I sort of hate video presentations at conferences. It’s always a challenge to keep the energy up in a live audience when they pull up the giant screen, and someone gives their pre-recorded spiel. This is why, two hours earlier, I had decided to liven things up by announcing Terminal Values as a giant, glowing, disembodied head.
I am dignity incarnate.
A month previously, I 75% quit my job at the Filecoin Foundation. I’d spent the last five years funding and advising organisations who were building a decentralised vision of the Internet and Web. I left because I realised I was antsy to get back in the game. As you may have noticed, things are, in the year of our lord 2026, going down. But after five years of being heads-down in one ecosystem, I didn’t really have a strong grip of the lay of the land, and what needed to be done. I tagged along to the Global Free Speech Summit in Tennessee the day after I left my job to scope things out.
Late at night there, I ask my friend Farzaneh Badii: what is to be done? She’s an Iranian exile and human rights activist, who has spent the last years in the digital trenches, fighting for the open Internet at governance meetings and conferences: at ICANN, the IETF, the W3C, and other mysterious acronyms.
We start writing a list. The list starts at Velvet Taco, moves on to Robert’s Western World honkytonk, and ends at an absinthe bar on the edge of town. At some point, the items stop beginning with “Someone should…” and start reading “We should…”. Domains are bought. Plans are made.
I’ve done this before — launch an org — an inadvisable number of times. The most successful in this domain was plotting with Suw Charman-Anderson to start what became the Open Rights Group in the UK.
(I feel like we don’t convey enough how easy it is to start a thing, and how hard it is to end it once you start. For a procrastinator like me, it’s an excellent gee-up.)
And now I’m a floating head, astrally projected thousands of miles away by the Internet that isn’t just a vehicle for my beliefs, but the proof-of-possibility that forged my beliefs, trying to explain Terminal Values for the first time.
Terminal Values
The name: it comes from an essayTechdirt’sMike Masnick commissioned from me, two years ago. It means that the values we fight for — the old-fashioned Internet idealism of a global network, free of surveillance and censorship, for everyone, by everyone — are ends in themselves. That’s the meaning of terminal values. That’s opposed to “instrumental values” — the values you pick to help you achieve other, nobler ends.
I wrote it because something kept bugging me about my strategy (as Director of Strategy) at EFF in the last decade.
Politics had been polarising over that time. The traditional “undivide and deconquer” tactic of civil libertarians was increasingly unviable. Previously, we would reach out across every political aisle to pull together a ragtag coalition of Internet freedom lovers. I’d cut my activist teeth pulling together a proto-net-neutrality coalition of “strange bedfellows” (as every press release we sent had headlined) which had included progressive gadflies MoveOn and the gunnier-than-the-NRA Gun Owners of America. The idea of an equivalent model campaign in the 2020s, featuring MAGAs and democratic socialists, or just Democrats and Republicans, living together, had become unthinkable.
So instead we started tailoring the arguments to each constituency. To progressives and libertarians, I talked about the dangers of geotracking when it could be used to expose users of Grindr in states with anti-gay laws, or visitors to abortion clinics. To the right and to marginalised communities, we connected their concerns about being silenced in mainstream social media to the importance of supporting alternatives to the social media giants. (To hear many of these arguments from that time, check out the podcast I hosted with Cindy Cohn, How To Fix The Internet.)
I believed then, and believe now, that this is a valid strategy — indeed, I don’t think any of us thought of it as a strategy at all, just as the obvious, only thing to do.
But we spent our time talking about what the Internet did for other causes, and not the principles behind the Internet itself. I believe these ideas are radical and liberatory in themselves, and worthy of consideration whether they improve the chances of other policies or not.
The Internet comes with its own ideas about liberty, just as the printing press did, like the steam engine did, and coinage did, like agriculture and religion before them. Absolute freedom of speech, absolute privacy, without gatekeepers or government surveillance, is a possibility realised by modern technology — but you only grasp its ramifications and its value when you feel its power and possibility thrumming through the machine in front of you. You don’t argue for a free press before you see and touch and use a printing press. Technology changes what we think of as freedom. Everyday politics often lags behind these changes, so a technological revolution explained in the terms of the systems of thought that preceded it will always miss something vital — and risk smothering it in its cradle.
So, somewhere along the way, I stopped arguing for the future the Internet makes possible, and started arguing merely for its present benefits. And the political operators we spoke to, more popular and confident than us, began using and modifying our arguments themselves, for a vision of technology that was biased, just a little bit, toward their political group. Free speech for me, but not for thee. Privacy and encryption — but with backdoors, just in case those other people are up to something.
Once again: I don’t think that was a bad approach at all. But it did have consequences. The most important one being: after ten years of not telling the stories and the dream, people simply forgot them. And a new generation grew up, feeling that there was something good buried in the network, but without history or context to understand what was possible, or that they were not alone in their dreams. They turned to more immediate politics, with bigger stories to tell.
I gently argued this in that 2024 article, but as I watched time move on, I felt it more and more. Farzaneh and other radical voices, still in the trenches, told me it was getting worse. There were either lone voices arguing for the fundamentals, from orgs like EFF and Fight for the Future, or more often no voices at all.
So: Terminal Values, reflecting its name, will go back to these basics: free speech, free software, free knowledge, free association; secure and private personal technology, under the direct control of its users, operable without borders, without censors, and without limitations. And we’ll present them as they should be: for everyone, not for what they do for one camp or another.
(And yes, it’s also a pun on terminal. Someone taught you what a terminal was, right?)
Twenty Minutes Into the Future
It’s hard to tell from 8,400 miles away, but I think my floating head did okay. We got donations and sign-ups, and people talked online. Mainly about the giant floating head, to be honest. The number one thing people said was “Hey, it’s like Max Headroom!”
This is great, because a movement needs an aesthetic, a look-and-feel, and a vibe. Max Headroom appeared in the Eighties, but prefigured a Nineties visual world of VR and neon. A Nineties style is perfect for the dreams of a better Internet. As the years move on, the Nineties has stopped being a weird Gen X side-alley, and started being a place of interest for curious new people to visit and adopt. There was a long while when we all desperately worked to avoid looking like we were stuck in the Nineties. Now, people wear those haircuts with pride. We’re going to lean into that.
The number one thing I want to pluck from the Nineties is its orientation to the future. From our viewpoint a quarter-century on, the Nineties future was imminent, promising, and changeable. Max Headroom lived twenty minutes into the future, because he embodied what people felt was coming in the run-up to the millennium, far too fast to stop.
I feel — against the temporary pessimism of the present age — that we are in such a moment again. We want Terminal Values to argue for causes and actions that sound semi-ridiculous right now, but in six months’ time will seem prescient — or hopelessly dated.
(Also, Terminal Values abbreviates to “TV”, and the number of Nineties-themed TV puns we can make is nearly infinite.)
Let me give you a concrete example, which shows, I think, how TV can complement and extend existing campaigns. The brilliant Thorin Klosowski wrote a piece for EFF this week called “Tech Companies Are Trying to Shift the Entire Concept of Privacy (Again)”. He skewers the new rewriting of norms that tech companies are pursuing whereby one person gets to “consent” to the recording and surveillance of everyone else in a video meeting, or private conversation. I urge you to read it — as if you haven’t already read enough today.
TV’s role in this is to “yes, and” these points — and point to the future conundrum. It’s terrible for one person to consent to hand over everybody’s conversation to a third party. But we have to work out a way for an individual to be able to use their own devices to interpret, translate, absorb or simplify the conversations they are part of, using technology that they fundamentally control.
Commercial AI and hardware that hand all that data off to companies, and thence to hackers and governments, can’t be the answer. But for digital technology to play its starring role in augmenting us, whether by compensating for our disabilities or by extending our temporary limits, we have to work out a way for it to safely and transiently partake or share in what we are doing and thinking. That doesn’t weaken privacy: it reaffirms the personal and private decision-making that privacy is intended to protect (what, in the 2024 article, I termed “cognitive liberty”).
Should that point be crammed into a piece about the rapidly changing mores of conversation recording, and the regulations around it? Probably not without weakening it. But somebody has to make that point — about the devices and tools we should be building, and that will exist, twenty minutes into the future. That’s our job.
“Open” Means Open to Everything — and Everyone
As I’ve talked about before here, there’s a valid strategy for technology-using activists which involves diligently avoiding the use of tech that does not accord with one’s values.
TV’s approach is that nothing technological is alien to us. Our aim is to experiment with technology, in order to see what might happen twenty minutes into the future, and to see what new opportunities and values might emerge from it — and how to mitigate its dangers. If you don’t use it, you can’t understand it, or talk about it.
We’re also determined to talk with any community, including any political community. Every group of thinkers can and should get their policies around the future in order. Some will reject us: I’ve had conversations, for instance, with the representatives of dictatorships, groups of authoritarian communists, and right-wing ethnonationalists. They have rarely gone particularly well. But it’s up to them to reject us, and it’s up to us to make the case for freedom.
If You’re Explaining, You’re Winning
There’s an old slogan in political activism that I first heard from Fred von Lohmann: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
I think this is true for 90% of the work of achieving political goals. But sometimes, you just have to tell the bigger story, complicated and subtle though it may be.
We want to free all of our allies in this fight from having to do all the explaining, so they can go straight to winning.
Policy advocates shouldn’t have to constantly re-explain the history that allowed us to know that DRM is a bad idea, that closed security is no security, that network censorship leads to network fragility, and so on. Freed from the need not to explain, we’ll try to spell out the fundamentals, radical though they may be — and do this not just to the wider public, but to (sometimes shocked) policymakers in the venues where these fundamental points cannot easily be made by those at the negotiating table.
My favourite moments in tech activism — like Cory Doctorow blogging from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group, or anti-software-patent activists paddling into Strasbourg to argue against restricting technological ideas — come from dedicated, knowledgeable technologists walking into venues where their ideas are almost certain to be misunderstood or rejected. There, they clearly, repeatedly, and sincerely articulated a complex, unsexy, technically challenging and radically honest viewpoint. Ultimately, they prevailed. The broadcast flag was rejected; the software patent directive was thrown out. Sometimes you have to explain to win.
So what will Terminal Values do in an average month? Well, as we speak, Farzaneh is en route to the IETF, arguing for the values encoded in the network’s protocols. I’m cutting explainer videos, and trying to get to the bottom of what the hell happened in the UK since I left. I’ve been speaking to human rights activists eager to find private ways to use AI — and connecting with AI startups who are already getting a knock on the door from government agencies, keen to sweep up your conversations. There’s more than that. I doubt any month is going to be average for the next few years.
Where will the money come from? The Open Rights Group was started with a pledge of five pounds a month from its founding members. I’ve always been a fan of monthly, individual donations: you can vote with your money, and you can pay what you can.
That said, Terminal Values is barely two weeks old. I can’t even ask you for that money, because we don’t yet have the business account. (You can give us crypto, though. You guys never worry about that stuff!)
TLDR: Join Me
If you’ve read this far, I hope you already like the cut of Farzaneh’s and my jib. You probably have some objections or concerns about our approach because you’re thoughtful and view every argument critically, plus our core demographic is absolute pains-in-the-arse like you. You’ll also be curious about the nitty-gritty of the positions we’ll be advocating.
Shorter, less personal pieces and more detailed policy analysis are coming. I just couldn’t wait any longer to tell you, reader, because I’m more excited about the future than I have been in a decade.
All I can ask right now is that you keep track of us, and what we’re doing. I’ll continue to post updates here, but what would help the most is if you’d join our Signal announcement list, or our mailing list. We plan to livestream the revolution — having regular check-ins where we don’t just explain our approach, but challenge you to tell us what to think.
Cross-posted from Oblomovka.
It’s 4AM on a Monday morning. In a few hours, I’m supposed to be launching a new digital rights organisation at the Cypherpunk Congress, in Mumbai, India. I’m still in my pyjamas in San Francisco.
This part, at least, was somewhat planned. I told Mykola Siusko and Becca Creamer, the organisers, I had an important announcement, which I’d do by a remote video link. Everything else is a little improvised.
For a start, I sort of hate video presentations at conferences. It’s always a challenge to keep the energy up in a live audience when they pull up the giant screen, and someone gives their pre-recorded spiel. This is why, two hours earlier, I had decided to liven things up by announcing Terminal Values as a giant, glowing, disembodied head.
I am dignity incarnate.
A month previously, I 75% quit my job at the Filecoin Foundation. I’d spent the last five years funding and advising organisations who were building a decentralised vision of the Internet and Web. I left because I realised I was antsy to get back in the game. As you may have noticed, things are, in the year of our lord 2026, going down. But after five years of being heads-down in one ecosystem, I didn’t really have a strong grip of the lay of the land, and what needed to be done. I tagged along to the Global Free Speech Summit in Tennessee the day after I left my job to scope things out.
Late at night there, I ask my friend Farzaneh Badii: what is to be done? She’s an Iranian exile and human rights activist, who has spent the last years in the digital trenches, fighting for the open Internet at governance meetings and conferences: at ICANN, the IETF, the W3C, and other mysterious acronyms.
We start writing a list. The list starts at Velvet Taco, moves on to Robert’s Western World honkytonk, and ends at an absinthe bar on the edge of town. At some point, the items stop beginning with “Someone should…” and start reading “We should…”. Domains are bought. Plans are made.
I’ve done this before — launch an org — an inadvisable number of times. The most successful in this domain was plotting with Suw Charman-Anderson to start what became the Open Rights Group in the UK.
(I feel like we don’t convey enough how easy it is to start a thing, and how hard it is to end it once you start. For a procrastinator like me, it’s an excellent gee-up.)
And now I’m a floating head, astrally projected thousands of miles away by the Internet that isn’t just a vehicle for my beliefs, but the proof-of-possibility that forged my beliefs, trying to explain Terminal Values for the first time.
Terminal Values
The name: it comes from an essay Techdirt’s Mike Masnick commissioned from me, two years ago. It means that the values we fight for — the old-fashioned Internet idealism of a global network, free of surveillance and censorship, for everyone, by everyone — are ends in themselves. That’s the meaning of terminal values. That’s opposed to “instrumental values” — the values you pick to help you achieve other, nobler ends.
I wrote it because something kept bugging me about my strategy (as Director of Strategy) at EFF in the last decade.
Politics had been polarising over that time. The traditional “undivide and deconquer” tactic of civil libertarians was increasingly unviable. Previously, we would reach out across every political aisle to pull together a ragtag coalition of Internet freedom lovers. I’d cut my activist teeth pulling together a proto-net-neutrality coalition of “strange bedfellows” (as every press release we sent had headlined) which had included progressive gadflies MoveOn and the gunnier-than-the-NRA Gun Owners of America. The idea of an equivalent model campaign in the 2020s, featuring MAGAs and democratic socialists, or just Democrats and Republicans, living together, had become unthinkable.
So instead we started tailoring the arguments to each constituency. To progressives and libertarians, I talked about the dangers of geotracking when it could be used to expose users of Grindr in states with anti-gay laws, or visitors to abortion clinics. To the right and to marginalised communities, we connected their concerns about being silenced in mainstream social media to the importance of supporting alternatives to the social media giants. (To hear many of these arguments from that time, check out the podcast I hosted with Cindy Cohn, How To Fix The Internet.)
I believed then, and believe now, that this is a valid strategy — indeed, I don’t think any of us thought of it as a strategy at all, just as the obvious, only thing to do.
But we spent our time talking about what the Internet did for other causes, and not the principles behind the Internet itself. I believe these ideas are radical and liberatory in themselves, and worthy of consideration whether they improve the chances of other policies or not.
The Internet comes with its own ideas about liberty, just as the printing press did, like the steam engine did, and coinage did, like agriculture and religion before them. Absolute freedom of speech, absolute privacy, without gatekeepers or government surveillance, is a possibility realised by modern technology — but you only grasp its ramifications and its value when you feel its power and possibility thrumming through the machine in front of you. You don’t argue for a free press before you see and touch and use a printing press. Technology changes what we think of as freedom. Everyday politics often lags behind these changes, so a technological revolution explained in the terms of the systems of thought that preceded it will always miss something vital — and risk smothering it in its cradle.
So, somewhere along the way, I stopped arguing for the future the Internet makes possible, and started arguing merely for its present benefits. And the political operators we spoke to, more popular and confident than us, began using and modifying our arguments themselves, for a vision of technology that was biased, just a little bit, toward their political group. Free speech for me, but not for thee. Privacy and encryption — but with backdoors, just in case those other people are up to something.
Once again: I don’t think that was a bad approach at all. But it did have consequences. The most important one being: after ten years of not telling the stories and the dream, people simply forgot them. And a new generation grew up, feeling that there was something good buried in the network, but without history or context to understand what was possible, or that they were not alone in their dreams. They turned to more immediate politics, with bigger stories to tell.
I gently argued this in that 2024 article, but as I watched time move on, I felt it more and more. Farzaneh and other radical voices, still in the trenches, told me it was getting worse. There were either lone voices arguing for the fundamentals, from orgs like EFF and Fight for the Future, or more often no voices at all.
So: Terminal Values, reflecting its name, will go back to these basics: free speech, free software, free knowledge, free association; secure and private personal technology, under the direct control of its users, operable without borders, without censors, and without limitations. And we’ll present them as they should be: for everyone, not for what they do for one camp or another.
(And yes, it’s also a pun on terminal. Someone taught you what a terminal was, right?)
Twenty Minutes Into the Future
It’s hard to tell from 8,400 miles away, but I think my floating head did okay. We got donations and sign-ups, and people talked online. Mainly about the giant floating head, to be honest. The number one thing people said was “Hey, it’s like Max Headroom!”
This is great, because a movement needs an aesthetic, a look-and-feel, and a vibe. Max Headroom appeared in the Eighties, but prefigured a Nineties visual world of VR and neon. A Nineties style is perfect for the dreams of a better Internet. As the years move on, the Nineties has stopped being a weird Gen X side-alley, and started being a place of interest for curious new people to visit and adopt. There was a long while when we all desperately worked to avoid looking like we were stuck in the Nineties. Now, people wear those haircuts with pride. We’re going to lean into that.
The number one thing I want to pluck from the Nineties is its orientation to the future. From our viewpoint a quarter-century on, the Nineties future was imminent, promising, and changeable. Max Headroom lived twenty minutes into the future, because he embodied what people felt was coming in the run-up to the millennium, far too fast to stop.
I feel — against the temporary pessimism of the present age — that we are in such a moment again. We want Terminal Values to argue for causes and actions that sound semi-ridiculous right now, but in six months’ time will seem prescient — or hopelessly dated.
(Also, Terminal Values abbreviates to “TV”, and the number of Nineties-themed TV puns we can make is nearly infinite.)
Let me give you a concrete example, which shows, I think, how TV can complement and extend existing campaigns. The brilliant Thorin Klosowski wrote a piece for EFF this week called “Tech Companies Are Trying to Shift the Entire Concept of Privacy (Again)”. He skewers the new rewriting of norms that tech companies are pursuing whereby one person gets to “consent” to the recording and surveillance of everyone else in a video meeting, or private conversation. I urge you to read it — as if you haven’t already read enough today.
TV’s role in this is to “yes, and” these points — and point to the future conundrum. It’s terrible for one person to consent to hand over everybody’s conversation to a third party. But we have to work out a way for an individual to be able to use their own devices to interpret, translate, absorb or simplify the conversations they are part of, using technology that they fundamentally control.
Commercial AI and hardware that hand all that data off to companies, and thence to hackers and governments, can’t be the answer. But for digital technology to play its starring role in augmenting us, whether by compensating for our disabilities or by extending our temporary limits, we have to work out a way for it to safely and transiently partake or share in what we are doing and thinking. That doesn’t weaken privacy: it reaffirms the personal and private decision-making that privacy is intended to protect (what, in the 2024 article, I termed “cognitive liberty”).
Should that point be crammed into a piece about the rapidly changing mores of conversation recording, and the regulations around it? Probably not without weakening it. But somebody has to make that point — about the devices and tools we should be building, and that will exist, twenty minutes into the future. That’s our job.
“Open” Means Open to Everything — and Everyone
As I’ve talked about before here, there’s a valid strategy for technology-using activists which involves diligently avoiding the use of tech that does not accord with one’s values.
TV’s approach is that nothing technological is alien to us. Our aim is to experiment with technology, in order to see what might happen twenty minutes into the future, and to see what new opportunities and values might emerge from it — and how to mitigate its dangers. If you don’t use it, you can’t understand it, or talk about it.
We’re also determined to talk with any community, including any political community. Every group of thinkers can and should get their policies around the future in order. Some will reject us: I’ve had conversations, for instance, with the representatives of dictatorships, groups of authoritarian communists, and right-wing ethnonationalists. They have rarely gone particularly well. But it’s up to them to reject us, and it’s up to us to make the case for freedom.
If You’re Explaining, You’re Winning
There’s an old slogan in political activism that I first heard from Fred von Lohmann: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
I think this is true for 90% of the work of achieving political goals. But sometimes, you just have to tell the bigger story, complicated and subtle though it may be.
We want to free all of our allies in this fight from having to do all the explaining, so they can go straight to winning.
Policy advocates shouldn’t have to constantly re-explain the history that allowed us to know that DRM is a bad idea, that closed security is no security, that network censorship leads to network fragility, and so on. Freed from the need not to explain, we’ll try to spell out the fundamentals, radical though they may be — and do this not just to the wider public, but to (sometimes shocked) policymakers in the venues where these fundamental points cannot easily be made by those at the negotiating table.
My favourite moments in tech activism — like Cory Doctorow blogging from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group, or anti-software-patent activists paddling into Strasbourg to argue against restricting technological ideas — come from dedicated, knowledgeable technologists walking into venues where their ideas are almost certain to be misunderstood or rejected. There, they clearly, repeatedly, and sincerely articulated a complex, unsexy, technically challenging and radically honest viewpoint. Ultimately, they prevailed. The broadcast flag was rejected; the software patent directive was thrown out. Sometimes you have to explain to win.
First they sail at you, then you win.
Photo: Alberto Barrionuevo, CC BY-ND 3.0 ES.
What Now and How Much
So what will Terminal Values do in an average month? Well, as we speak, Farzaneh is en route to the IETF, arguing for the values encoded in the network’s protocols. I’m cutting explainer videos, and trying to get to the bottom of what the hell happened in the UK since I left. I’ve been speaking to human rights activists eager to find private ways to use AI — and connecting with AI startups who are already getting a knock on the door from government agencies, keen to sweep up your conversations. There’s more than that. I doubt any month is going to be average for the next few years.
Where will the money come from? The Open Rights Group was started with a pledge of five pounds a month from its founding members. I’ve always been a fan of monthly, individual donations: you can vote with your money, and you can pay what you can.
That said, Terminal Values is barely two weeks old. I can’t even ask you for that money, because we don’t yet have the business account. (You can give us crypto, though. You guys never worry about that stuff!)
TLDR: Join Me
If you’ve read this far, I hope you already like the cut of Farzaneh’s and my jib. You probably have some objections or concerns about our approach because you’re thoughtful and view every argument critically, plus our core demographic is absolute pains-in-the-arse like you. You’ll also be curious about the nitty-gritty of the positions we’ll be advocating.
Shorter, less personal pieces and more detailed policy analysis are coming. I just couldn’t wait any longer to tell you, reader, because I’m more excited about the future than I have been in a decade.
All I can ask right now is that you keep track of us, and what we’re doing. I’ll continue to post updates here, but what would help the most is if you’d join our Signal announcement list, or our mailing list. We plan to livestream the revolution — having regular check-ins where we don’t just explain our approach, but challenge you to tell us what to think.
The giant floating head compels you!
Giant open source floating head, that is: https://github.com/dannyob/obs-lsd