Technological advances naturally tend to consolidate power in the hands of those who govern it, giving them an ability to selectively confer power on others through the techniques they control. This ability is generally seen as an economic function of the free market, but the instrumental use of the technique for practical ends is mirrored by the emergence of an environment which produces certain types of people. The result is a type of work and culture that are mediated by the value systems that produce and are perpetuated by the "platforms" that reify them. This type of system need not coerce in order to capture its users economically, psychologically, and physically. How might we optimize for technological systems that instead promote individual freedom, and competency in the context of an overwhelmingly mediated information economy? Four tools present themselves as convivial tools capable of subverting mediated systems for the good of their users: encryption, zero knowledge proofs, LLMs, and sound money.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org