For the last half-thousand years, ever since there has been a press, the press has had a tendency to marry itself to power, willingly or otherwise. The existence of the printing press in western Europe destroyed the unity of Christendom, in the intellectual, political and moral revolution we call the Reformation. But the European states learned as the primary lesson of the Reformation the necessity of censorship: power controlled the press almost everywhere for hundreds of years.

In the few places where the European press was not so controlled, it fuelled the intellectual, political and moral revolution we call the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which taught us to believe, as Thomas Jefferson said, "When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

But in the world liberal capitalism made, as AJ Liebling declared, freedom of the press belonged to him who owned one. Venality, vanity, fear, lust for profit and other forces brought the owner, slowly or rapidly as character determined, into power's embrace. In the 20th century, the press – and its progeny, broadcast – became industrial enterprises, which married power and money far more incestuously than any megalomaniac press lord ever could, which is why the few remaining corporeal examples, nor matter how semi-corporate their vileness, retained a certain quaint, freebooting flavour.

Now, the vast interconnection of humanity we call the internet promises to divorce the press and power forever, by dissolving the press. Now, every mobile phone, every document scanner, every camera, every laptop, are part of an immense network in which everything we see, we think, we know, can be transmitted to everyone else, everywhere, immediately. Democracy in its deepest sense follows. Ignorance ceases to be the inevitable lot of the vast majority of humanity.

The great promise of the Enlightenment is finally fulfilled: the greatest intellectual, political and moral revolution in the history of humanity.

If that's the way the network behaves. But it can also be completely controlled, filtered, monitored and surveilled, giving power the most overwhelming conceivable advantage over freedom. Which way the network behaves is determined solely by the software that comprises it. Freedom of the press, freedom of information, freedom of thought itself are now "implemented" rather than "declared", "protected" or "guaranteed".

Mao Tse-Tung declared that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. His successors believe that it grows out of controlling the internet. The young people of liberty destined to overthrow them have already started to grow up; they know power grows out of the freedom of the software that is the net. They, and we, are being taught by the courageous young people of liberty transforming the Maghreb and the Middle East today.

But the existing net is far too centralised. Too many depend upon centralised services for social networking and publication; those services are operated by businesses that can be coerced, bought or bribed. Almost every individual depends on telecommunications service providers who are everywhere monopolists or oligopolists, incestuously interpenetrated by state power, therefore subject to manipulation or control. Power controlling the net in sophisticated ways doesn't have to resort to mass murder in order to extirpate freedom; it can predict very successfully just exactly who to neutralise.

This is the situation the free software movement foresaw a generation ago, against which we have been building our "ark", our free software systems. Our software is inside everything: it runs Google and Facebook; it competes everywhere very successfully against Microsoft; it performs flawlessly every day in every bank, insurance company, engineering firm, supermarket and pretty much everywhere else. We built this ark of free software because we knew we'd need it when the net was the centre strand of human culture, and power tried to control it completely.

So, we have not lost, though every government and every deep pit of misbegotten wealth on earth is trying to centralise and thus control the net that is humanity's future. We can humanise the net, decentralise it, so it cares more about our individual privacy and freedom than it does about the profits of the "platform" companies or the needs of despotism's secret police.

Hardware itself is no longer scarce, and will soon be omnipresent in a new, very inexpensive form: cheaper than mobile phones, much more energy-efficient than any computers widely in use right now, small and compact – no larger than the battery chargers that our current, primitive devices require us to carry around – these tiny computer systems will be scattered around every home and office in almost all societies, ubiquitous as mobile phones, and much more powerful. With free software inside, they can become "FreedomBoxes": devices that assure each individual user, each still-human being, of the right to communicate safely, freely, without monitoring or control.

With them, we can learn and share and inform – from, with, and to everyone everywhere always. Smart devices whose engineered purpose is to work together to facilitate free communication among people, safely and securely, beyond the ambition of the strongest power to penetrate, they can make freedom of thought and information a permanent, ineradicable feature of the net that holds our souls.

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• Eben Moglen is speaking at The Morningside Post's second annual conference, "Information Overload? Navigating the Age of Democratised Media", at Columbia University, New York on Friday 25 February. More details via Facebook