The freedom to configure is the freedom to make a better world.

Chances are you fell in love with technology the day you took some tool that didn't quite work for you and made it betterbetter suited to you and your idiosyncratic needs and uses. Then you shared your improvements and made other people's lives better too, and what sweeter feeling is there? Cory Doctorow explains why the right to configure is the signature right of the 21st century.

Chances are you fell in love with technology the day you took some tool that didn’t quite work for you and made it better—better suited to you and your idiosyncratic needs and uses. Then you shared your improvements and made other people’s lives better too, and what sweeter feeling is there? Cory Doctorow explains why the right to configure is the signature right of the 21st century, its promise latent in the very idea of a URL, a persistent identifier that can be use to combine, filter, munge, and mash any asset, stream, file, or pointer connected to the world’s giant, electronic nervous system. Configuration is security: the ability to put useful but misbehaving code in a sandbox, the right to fuzz the inputs and find the unexpected outputs, the right to spoof an untrustworthy system rather than entrusting it with sensitive data. Configuration is under attack: lawmakers want to limit our ability to execute working crypto; the entertainment industry wants to stop mash-ups; the tech giants don’t want to be scraped, ad-blocked, or filtered. The right to configure is the right to speak, to be heard, to study, to learn, to improve, to resist, and to collaborate. Configurability is being flensed from the web by corporations seeking to stifle competition, by states looking to control their populations, by well-meaning, poorly informed decision makers who think that any problem involving computers (that is, every problem!) can be solved by selectively breaking computing itself.