Science & Tech Quote by Bram Cohen

Bram Cohen doesn’t dress this up as neutral engineering; he dares you to notice the politics hiding in the code. “Technological activist” is a blunt self-ID meant to puncture the Silicon Valley fantasy that tools are apolitical. The line “I have a political agenda” works as a preemptive strike: he names the agenda himself so critics can’t reduce it to a shady side effect of innovation.

The subtext is classic cypherpunk: individual autonomy is the default, institutions are the threat model. He frames “basic human rights” as a package deal that scrambles polite categories. Free speech sits beside “recreational drugs” and “so-called ‘vices’,” a deliberate refusal to let moral stigma decide what counts as legitimate freedom. That “so-called” is doing real work, turning vice into a label imposed by power rather than a stable ethical fact.

The list also maps cleanly onto technologies Cohen is associated with, especially peer-to-peer systems that route around gatekeepers. “To use any information and technology” reads like a defense of open protocols, encryption, and censorship resistance: if control points exist, they will be used. “To be free of intruders” and “to privacy” extend that logic from speech to surveillance, insisting that freedom isn’t only the right to speak but the right not to be watched while deciding what to do.

Context matters: Cohen came of age in the late-90s/early-2000s internet, when file-sharing fights made “information wants to be free” collide with corporate enforcement and state scrutiny. The quote is less a manifesto for rebellion than an argument that technical architecture is a civil-liberties battlefield.