The Online Rant: Does information naturally gravitate towards freedom?

Edit: This post moved to http://www.theonlinerant.com/2007/10/27/does-information-naturally-gravitate-towards-freedom/

There is an old hacker saying, "Information wants to be free." Now when I say old, I don't mean old in real world time. I mean old in Internet time. Where if it is older than a year, it is considered ancient. The saying is kind of a cliche, but lately I've been wondering if there might be some truth to it.

The question is, does information naturally gravitate towards freedom? In an information based society like ours, the above question is very relevant and rather important. For thousands of years governments, religions, and businesses/trade guilds have used control of information to protect their power and position.

These days all of that is changing. As the information age comes into full swing, control of information is getting harder to maintain. And suppressing unwanted information is nearly impossible. The best anyone can hope for, is that the unwanted info will be forgotten. But you can't remove it or hide it. So that information will always be there.

Every government, business, and religious group that relies on information control is feeling the effects today. Repressive, and even democratic, governments around the world that try to hide their policies and actions are finding that it is nearly impossible. New scandals and abuses are daily leaked to the Internet and spread far beyond the reach of the governments involved. Religious groups like the Scientologists that rely on secret knowledge for elites, are fighting a losing battle to keep that knowledge off of the Internet. Business models that rely on a monopoly of information are all feeling the pressure of competition from non-experts. Copyrights and patents are becoming increasingly hard to protect.

Basically, if it is information, it will end up on the internet at some point. And once it does, it will be there forever. I'm not sure what that really means for our society. I know that it means a lot of change for a lot of different areas and people.

By the way, here are a couple of video's that illustrate the point.