Building The Machinery of Freedom

For those of you keeping score, in the anchor of the Cato Unbound folk activism relay, Peter Thiel offers a mix of optimism and concern: 

A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

And in his follow up, Patri echoes Thiel’s sentiment: 

We need an organized group to reach the land of liberty, but we also need a map and a realistic plan to deal with the enormous geographic obstacles.  Folk activism has given us the group, and economic theory the map — and we’ve learned that we cannot simply walk to our destination.  We need the technologies Peter calls for to let us reach the heights to which we all aspire. The groundwork has been laid, but it alone can’t get us off the ground.  Let’s invent technologies that can.

Both Jason Sorens and Brian Doherty respond.