Science & Tech Quote by Russell Means

He grabs a sacred cow of late-20th-century America, the "free market", then flips it to expose what he thinks is the real scam: most markets are already managed, fenced, and policed, so calling them "free" is branding, not description. Russell Means is speaking as an Indigenous activist who watched land, labor, and resources become commodities through laws written by the same governments and corporations that profit from them. In that light, his opening line is bait. He invites the listener into familiar libertarian language, then drags that language into a history it usually avoids.

The provocation is his claim that information is the "last genuine free market". It's not naive techno-utopianism so much as a strategic comparison. Information, in the early computer age, felt harder to enclose: it moved fast, replicated cheaply, embarrassed gatekeepers. Means treats it as an anomaly in an economy otherwise defined by ownership and extraction. The subtext is: if power can't control land anymore without looking like a colonizer, it will try to control the next frontier - speech, data, networks - with copyrights, surveillance, and infrastructure monopolies.

His second exception is sharper: "free markets where indigenous people are still surviving". That phrase quietly redefines freedom away from consumer choice and toward autonomy: local exchange, subsistence, relationship to place. The closing "that's basically becoming limited" lands like an obituary. Both "free" spaces - Indigenous lifeways and open information - are being tightened by the same logic of enclosure. Means isn't celebrating markets; he's warning that "freedom" is what gets eliminated first, and that the fight is moving from territory to bandwidth.