Freedom Technology: An Investment Thesis on Digital Ownership

The central question in technology is shifting from what can be built to who controls the systems that are built. For much of the last two decades, the internet economy optimized for abstraction. Infrastructure became something companies rent rather than operate directly. Software moved from local machines into subscription services. Identity, distribution, payments, memory, and work migrated into platform-controlled accounts. More recently, intelligence itself has begun moving behind APIs whose rules, data flows, and long-term incentives remain largely invisible to the user.

This shift was not a mistake. Abstraction made technology easier to use, cheaper to adopt, and faster to scale. Cloud infrastructure turned computing into a programmable utility. Modern deployment platforms compressed engineering workflows. AI interfaces made frontier models accessible to millions of people almost overnight. These are real achievements. The problem is that abstraction often transfers control upward: from users to platforms, from developers to APIs, from institutions to vendors, and from open environments to privately governed systems.

2ØY believes the next major technology cycle will be shaped by freedom technology: systems that increase the ability of individuals, developers, companies, and communities to own, move, verify, build, and coordinate. This is broader than open source alone. Open source is one part of the thesis, but the deeper theme is control over the essential layers of digital life: software, networks, money, identity, data, and intelligence.

The first major layer was software freedom.

Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 around a clear ethical claim: users should have the freedom to run, study, modify, and share the software they use. “Free” referred to liberty, not price. The open-source movement later reframed parts of this tradition in more pragmatic and commercially legible terms, especially around the 1998 Netscape source release, with figures such as Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens helping define the language of open source. Linus Torvalds’ Linux kernel, released in 1991, had already demonstrated that open collaboration could produce infrastructure of extraordinary technical and economic importance.

Free software and open source are not identical. Stallman has long emphasized that free software is an ethical position about user freedom, while open source is a practical position about software quality, reliability, and development efficiency. The distinction matters. Yet for investors, both traditions point toward the same structural insight: important technical systems do not have to be sealed inside private black boxes in order to become valuable, durable, or economically significant.

That insight is now measurable. A 2024 Harvard Business School working paper by Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, and Yanuo Zhou estimated the demand-side value of widely used open-source software at $8.8 trillion. The same study estimated that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software if open-source software did not exist. Open source is therefore not a marginal category within the software economy. It is one of the hidden foundations beneath it, lowering the cost of company formation, accelerating research, and allowing small teams to build with institutional-scale leverage.

The second layer was internet freedom.

The early internet expanded the ability to publish, learn, organize, transact, and build without permission from traditional institutions. It gave individuals and small teams access to distribution that previously belonged to media companies, universities, retailers, banks, and governments. That expansion of agency was real, and it created enormous social and economic value.

But the modern internet also re-centralized many of those freedoms inside platforms. Creators can reach global audiences, but their relationships often live inside accounts they do not own. Businesses can acquire customers through digital platforms, but their visibility depends on algorithms they cannot inspect. Communities can gather online, but the rules governing speech, monetization, discovery, and payment can change without meaningful consent. Internet freedom, in this context, means rebuilding the parts of the network that allow users to retain agency: portable identity, open publishing, encrypted communication, user-owned social graphs, interoperable protocols, and distribution systems that are not entirely dependent on a single gatekeeper.

The third and most foundational layer is monetary sovereignty.

Software freedom gives people control over the tools they run. Internet freedom gives them access to information, audiences, and distribution. But without the ability to store, transfer, and receive value without arbitrary permission, both remain constrained. Economic agency is what turns expression into action: the ability to fund work, preserve savings, enter markets, support communities, and coordinate with others across borders.

This is why crypto is central to the thesis. Not because every token is useful, or because speculation should be confused with freedom. Much of the crypto market has been extractive, short-term, or purely narrative-driven. The important breakthrough is architectural: crypto introduced a credible model for self-custody and permissionless settlement. Bitcoin turned digital value into an asset controlled by keys rather than account access. Ethereum extended that principle into programmable financial coordination, showing that contracts, applications, and organizations can operate on public rails rather than inside a single company’s database.

In closed financial systems, access can be denied, accounts can be frozen, payments can be blocked, and entire groups can be excluded because of geography, policy, compliance pressure, or platform risk decisions. Some controls are legally necessary, but a world in which every financial action depends on intermediated permission is a world in which freedom remains conditional. The strongest crypto systems do not eliminate institutions; they create an alternative settlement layer beneath them. They give individuals direct custody, developers neutral infrastructure, and communities a way to coordinate capital without relying entirely on banks, payment processors, or platform operators.

The fourth layer is cognitive sovereignty.

AI is becoming the interface to knowledge work, memory, decision-making, and creation. If that interface exists only as a closed subscription API, then the most important productivity layer of the next economy will be rented from a small number of model providers. Open-weight models, local inference, self-hosted agents, private memory stores, and user-controlled data pipelines point toward a different architecture: intelligence that can be audited, adapted, deployed privately, and owned closer to the edge.

This does not mean every person or company will run frontier models locally. Most users will continue to choose convenience when it is cheaper and better. The investment implication is not that local AI replaces cloud AI, but that credible alternatives change the balance of power. They improve privacy, deepen customization, reduce platform dependency, and give developers and enterprises leverage against closed systems. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in work, education, research, and decision-making, the ability to control the intelligence layer becomes strategically important.

The investment question, then, is not whether closed systems can create value. They clearly can. The question is where long-duration value compounds. 2ØY believes it compounds in systems that increase agency rather than merely capture dependency. Enclosed platforms can be powerful, but when their returns rely primarily on switching costs, opaque rules, data capture, or unilateral control, their durability weakens as users and developers become more aware of the cost of surrendering control.

This is why 2ØY does not evaluate a freedom technology simply by whether its code is public. Public code is not enough. A project can be open-source and still be unusable, insecure, underfunded, poorly governed, or economically extractive. The relevant question is whether the system creates durable freedom in practice.

We look for several qualities. The first is exit rights: users should be able to move data, run alternative clients, self-custody assets, self-host critical services, verify rules, or fork when necessary. The second is developer gravity: the system should become a foundation on which other builders create new products, not merely a product consumed by end users. The third is economic sustainability: the project must be able to fund maintenance, security, documentation, governance, and long-term development without betraying the openness that made it valuable. The fourth is distribution advantage: openness should translate into trust, adoption speed, integration networks, community contribution, or default-standard status. The fifth is market position: the project should sit in a domain where control will matter more over time, such as money, AI, cloud infrastructure, identity, privacy, security, compute, data, crypto, or developer tools.

This is the distinction between an open project and freedom infrastructure. An open project can begin with enthusiasm. Freedom infrastructure requires governance, capital, security, distribution, and business models strong enough to endure.

2ØY believes the best investments of the next era will give users more choice, more portability, and more creative power. They will not merely make technology easier to consume; they will make it easier to own, adapt, and build upon.

That is where the open future compounds.