In the aftermath of the Sopa fight, as top Eurocrats are declaring the imminent demise of Acta, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership begins to founder, as the German Pirate party takes seats in a third German regional election, it's worth taking stock of "nerd politics" and see where we've been and where we're headed.

Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.

In "nerd determinism," technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

But, while it's true that geeks can get around this sort of thing – and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers – this isn't enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn't matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.

What's more, things that aren't legal don't attract monetary investment. In the UK, where it's legal to unlock your mobile phone, you can just walk into shops all over town and get your handset unlocked while you wait. When this was illegal in the US (it's marginally legal at the moment), only people who could navigate difficult-to-follow online instructions could unlock their phones. No merchant would pay to staff a phone-unlocking role at the corner shop (my dry-cleaner has someone sitting behind a card-table who'll unlock any phone you bring him for a fiver). Without customers, the people who make phone-unlocking tools will only polish them to the point where they're functional for their creators. The kind of polish that marks the difference between a tool and a product is often driven by investment, markets and commercialism.

That's not to say that some dedicated hacker won't polish the hell out of a semi-legal or illegal tool for the sheer satisfaction of a job well done, but those heavily polished gems are the exceptions. Leave aside the self-interest geeks should have in good technology rules – the fact that you, personally, can't start a business based on supplying the tools your less-savvy neighbours can use. Without self-revealing, easy-to-use tools, the benefits of technology are only extended to technologists. If you want a world where only the clued-in get to reap the benefits of technology, you are a technocrat, not a geek. What's more, as you age, and your ability to stay current on technical subjects is eroded, you will become a serf along with your poor neighbours.

"Nerd fatalism" is the cynical counterpart of "nerd determinism." Nerd fatalists hold that the geeky way of doing things – the famed "rough consensus and running code" – and have an ideological purity that can't be matched by the old-time notions of deliberation, constitutionalism, and politics. These things are inherently corrupt and corrupting. If you move to Whitehall to defend technology, in a few years, you will be indistinguishable from any other Whitehall wonk, just another corrupted suit who sells out his ideals for realpolitik.

It's true that politics has internal logic, and that habitual participants in politics are apt to adopt the view that politics is "the art of the possible" and no fit place for ideals. But there's an important truth about politics and law: even if you don't take an interest in them, it doesn't follow that they won't take an interest in you.

So we can design clever, decentralised systems such as BitTorrent all day long, systems that appear to have no convenient entity to sue or arrest or legislate against. But if our inventions rattle enough cages and threaten enough bottom lines, the law will come hunting for them. The law will seek out arbitrary victims – think of how Sopa set out to prohibit hardening DNS against fraud and phishing because it would be convenient to use fake DNS entries to stop people from reaching The Pirate Bay. When it does, technology can't save them. The only defence against a legal attack is the law. If you don't have an organised body for someone else to sue, it means that there will be no organised body to mount a defence in court, either.

If people who understand technology don't claim positions that defend the positive uses of technology, if we don't operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, if we don't speak out for the rights of our technically unsophisticated friends and neighbours, then we will also be lost. Technology lets us organise and work together in new ways, and to build new kinds of institutions and groups, but these will always be in the wider world, not above it.