Read the complete audio transcript +
Introduction
More capability. Power for whom? This is a history of contested tools: what people could do with them, who captured their power, and how others pushed back. These inventions were not all created with a promise of liberation. Their histories include real benefits as well as exploitation and control. Earlier publishers, reformers, and resistance networks were not open-source communities in today’s sense. We can learn from their practices without rewriting their identities.
1662 · THE PRINTING PRESS
Printing multiplied the reach of ideas. It also gave authorities something new to police. England’s Licensing Act of sixteen sixty-two restricted presses and publication. Milton had already challenged prior licensing in Areopagitica, in sixteen forty-four. The licensing regime eventually lapsed in sixteen ninety-five. This was a struggle over permission to publish, not an early software movement. The machine made copying possible. People still had to contest who could speak.
1833 · THE MECHANIZED FACTORY
The mechanized factory increased productive capacity. For many children in Britain’s textile mills, that meant exhausting work and abuse. Humanitarian campaigns and parliamentary investigations helped bring the Factory Act of eighteen thirty-three. It limited children’s work and established factory inspectors. Enforcement was weak, and abuses continued. Here, the response was collective pressure and law. Sharing knowledge mattered, but labor protections could not be replaced by access to a machine’s design.
1899 · THE UNDERSEA TELEGRAPH
Telegraph cables carried messages across oceans at unprecedented speed. Their geography also mapped imperial power. During the Boer War, beginning in eighteen ninety-nine, British control of cables enabled censorship or obstruction of French and German communications in Africa. This chapter has no neat story of an open community saving the day. It asks a harder question: what does access mean when someone else owns the only route?
1933–45 · RADIO & PROPAGANDA
Radio could reach millions at once, making control of broadcasting a source of political power. During the Second World War, a Dutch resistance group used a concealed transmitter to help the Allies. The Met Office archive documents a radio hidden behind paintings in the Netherlands, sending weather observations to support aerial operations. This chapter remembers the courage of those operators. They worked in secret and at great personal risk. Their network is a historical example of cooperation, not an early open-source software project.
1943 · THE RAILWAY
A railway can connect communities. Its institutions can also be directed toward persecution. In April nineteen forty-three, Robert Maistriau and two friends stopped a deportation train in Belgium and freed more than a dozen people. The Buchenwald Memorial preserves the story of their rescue. The accompanying sources explain the wider historical context. This chapter asks us to remember the people affected, and the people who intervened. Technical infrastructure never removes human responsibility.
1968 · SAMIZDAT
In the Soviet Union, samizdat circulated uncensored writing through unofficial networks. From nineteen sixty-eight, the Chronicle of Current Events recorded human rights abuses. Readers became publishers, retyping copies and passing them onward. Contributors risked imprisonment. This is a powerful historical parallel to distributed sharing, but it was not open-source software. The connection is a principle: knowledge can survive when its reproduction is not controlled by a single gatekeeper.
1983 · GNU & FREE SOFTWARE
In September nineteen eighty-three, Richard Stallman announced GNU and invited people to help build a freely shared operating system. Here we reach the free-software movement itself. Its central concern is user freedom: the ability to run, study, change, and share software. This does not make every proprietary program an act of tyranny. It gives people a practical alternative to depending entirely on an owner’s permission.
1993 · THE WORLD WIDE WEB
On April thirtieth, nineteen ninety-three, CERN put its World Wide Web software in the public domain. An open licence followed. A system developed for information sharing among researchers could spread far beyond its first home. This is a counterexample to technological fatalism. Enclosure was not inevitable. Choosing an open foundation helped others build, publish, and connect without asking one central owner for permission.
2002 · TOR & THE OPEN INTERNET
The internet connects people, but it also makes tracking and surveillance possible. Tor grew from onion-routing research and launched its network with free and open code in two thousand two. Developers and volunteer relay operators built a practical tool for more private communication. Later work addressed censorship. Openness does not guarantee safety, and no tool ends oppression. But shared code and shared infrastructure can give people options they would otherwise lack.
An unfinished future
The lesson is not that technology inevitably enslaves us, or that open source automatically liberates us. Freedom also needs rights, accountable institutions, material access, and people willing to defend one another. For our own robotics project, this history becomes a commitment: make the code inspectable, credit the work we build on, share what we learn, and keep people able to change or stop the systems around them. Intelligence is a capability. Who it serves is a choice we keep making.
Selected historical episodes, not a complete history of technology. Dates identify events or periods, not invention dates. Sources accompany every chapter. Researched November 2026.
HERMES