The logic of my prophecy is stronger than I think you now suppose it to be, so I will go through it again in more detail.
I aim to demonstrate that the large-scale introduction to practice of the freedoms of expression and association must inevitably break the grip of the even the most ruthless and desperate tyrant, in spite of his armies and secret police. Clearly, without the freedom of expression, no one except the regime's propagandists will be able to freely advance their opinions in public. Naturally, therefore, all (or most all) public opinion will serve the interests of the regime---namely, those of manipulating popular sentiment in ways that serve its agenda of self-perpetuation. Once freedom of expression is put into practice, a plurality of views will come to be expressed. The self-serving ideas that issue forth from the mouth of the regime will then be opposed by many others. Propaganda's spell will be broken. This will tend to change society directly, by turning the people against the policies of the regime, and making them better able to question more critically its public values. It will also tend to occasion the formation of opposition groups by the new freedom of association. The new, organized opposition will eventually put its demands to the ruling party. The party will then have two options open to it. It may capitulate by embracing reform or giving up power, or it may seek to perpetuate itself by force. In doing so, it will be forced to call upon its political institutions---its armies, secret police, and so on---to impose its will. But it will likely find that those institutions have been corrupted. It will likely encounter mass defection, and the reaction, and with it the regime, will founder. Such are the severe consequences for a regime that ignores the threat posed by the introduction of widespread, mainstream free expression and association. Thus, when regimes come to face that threat in Freenet, their countermeasures will be equal to the threat we pose. They will act with desperate urgency---with the ferocity of a cornered animal. This concludes my most important (and, apparently, controversial) argument: that Freenet can never take root under a tyranny. On the contrary, it will lead to the institution of an Orwellian national technology programme, to ensure that no computer technology will ever again serve the cause of freedom. > I doubt the former. It is highly unlikely IMHO that there would be > massive public opposition in the West to banning anonymous p2p. After > all, it's mostly used by pedophiles, perverts, and teenage warez dudes! In a free society, we may counter such arguments with our own. We may promote Freenet's role in checking the power of governments to use propaganda and control thought. And then perhaps we may even win over our adversaries, or succeed in spite of their opposition. In this way, as I have argued, we may strengthen and preserve existing freedoms; or to look at it another way, we may prevent the rise of tyrants. Yet, if my reasoning is correct, we should not ask Freenet to do more than that---we should not ask it to take root under existing tyrannies. It is up to us and us alone to rid the world of such regimes. I do not suggest that we start building tanks and missiles; even if that were desirable it would probably be useless. If my reasoning is correct, then, we will have to come to terms with the fact that Freenet cannot do quite so much as we had hoped, though it still has a valuable role to play. We will have to stop asking Freenet to do what it cannot do, and start asking ourselves, instead, to do what we do not yet know how to do. (Here I have simply restated the logical consequences of accepting my main argument.)
