MLK — Let [Technology Help] Freedom Ring

I spent this morning reading and listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, and it got me a thinkin’…what if King had the power of the Internet to help spread his message? King was a gifted orator, and his impassioned yet precisely measured delivery hits at the most visceral of levels. Just think of the YouTube possibilities….

One doesn’t have to have been alive in 1963 to understand King’s "I Have a Dream" speech. It’s about fundamental human dignity. King was dreaming back to 1776, when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence of certain unalienable rights – Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. King was also dreaming back to 1863, when Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address proclaimed that our country would have a second chance at freedom, "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

It’s enough to make a technology liberator think that compared to King’s fight for basic human dignity, squabbling over "technology freedoms" – copyright and patent reform, restrictive FCC rules, and even King’s estate’s copyright suit against CBS, etc. – pales by comparison. And it would be ridiculous to say otherwise. But technology can help disseminate information more quickly – information about race-related police beatings, government abuse of civil liberties, and other violations of peoples’ rights.

And as is often the case for those of us involved in fighting to keep technology free from burdensome regulation, King was mainly dreaming of the future:

<blockquote>I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.</blockquote>

Freedom would have been ringing from Stone Mountain of Georgia and Lookout Mountain of Tennessee more quickly, I think, if the Web of today existed in the 1950s and 60s. But today’s Internet is helping to bring the fight for freedom globally, and technology has the possibility to spread King’s message in new ways to people in China and other authoritarian regimes.

Here’s King’s "I Have a Dream" speech: