# Data wants to be free Well it used to want to be free. This was a property about data that was first discored during the computer resolution. Woz was adament that the mac software should be publically avialable to people. So that people who wanted to read that could read it. Because it containted important information about how the system worked. But in order to be able to read it people could just copy and pastes it and get a free copy of the software. *** No values judgements *** Software is somethings free and sometimes you have to pay for it. This is the state of hte world and both seem pretty reasonable. *** / No values Judgements *** ## Why not books Well why did we discover this thing when computers came around. We had books and stuff and you could photo copy them. But the problem is that when you photo copy them you got to pay for paper. Same with tapes and music. Same with Cars and steal. If you wanted to copy a car you got to pay big bucks for steal and smelting equipment and sooner or later it just becomes so prohibative that you just don't bother. So there is friction in copying things. But computers meant there was no friction. ## Compuders: Data are gremlins So the magic thing is that data became free to copy. Storage was free. So copying it became free. Well not really bandwidth and hard drives were expensive. But they got reduced to a constnat cost that you could figure out. I mean you only needed to worry about more storage after your hard disk was full. And there is something nice about the ritual of giivng someone a floppy disk with some data on it. ## Lime wire One example of this happened in the windows xp days. I had been drawin into various local skermisihes between windows operating system and my agency and abliity to self determin my experince. and decided it was time to cut the cord and install linux. I didn't have bb or anything. So set out for the local university to try and get a iso i could install. I asked a guy there at the computer societ and he sent me home to download limewire and get it myself. In hind sight this guy did not really know what he was talking about. Cos he sent a 15 yearold with a dialup intenret connetion to download a 700 MB file. Anyway i failed and this because i quickly got distracted by all the media that was out there wanting to get copied. ## Anyway data wants to be free And that seemed great. The implication is that as soon as you tell somoene a secret they can tell it to someone else. But there was secret friction before. You could not learn everyones secrets cos it just takes too much time. ## Cryptography can keep data in prison and still do stuff Cryptogrpahy makes it such that you can make data not be free. Not be sticky and lock friction and copyable. This has never been possible to have information that was think useable but also un knowable. Ah but we can use MPC / FHE to make data do work out side of data vault.