One of the ways that the curated media dismisses movements like Democratic Socialism is to say that we want to "turn the country into Scandinavia" - as if that were a bad thing! At best, they imply that there is a trade off between innovation and economic security.

I'd like to explain why this is hilariously wrong with some examples from my own industry (software). In short, arguably the two most important pieces of software written in the last 30 years both came out of Scandinavia, and were written by people who could work on what they wanted without fear of economic consequences. One is for business and one is for education, and I'll throw in a really cool "new technology" one at the end just for fun.

Linux

Unless you have been living off grid in a shack for the last 30 years (in which case, how are you reading this?) you have heard of Linux. Linux is a free, open-source operating system written by a guy named Linus Torvalds. Linus is Finnish, and he wrote core of Linux when he was in graduate school in Finland. (Incidentally, Finland has arguably the best education system in the world.)

The internet basically runs on Linux. The server that hosts this site's content is almost certainly Linux based, and most businesses use it for both public facing and internal work. Without Linux, we would all be paying massive fees to Microsoft to license Windows, and this would act as massive tax on the economy. Sites like this might not be possible because of the licensing overhead. One might say that the internet would be somewhat stagnant without Linux.

My favourite picture of Linus from the early time shows him drinking beer in a sauna. For me this illustrates what free people look like when work is a joy, and an essential part of a full life.

Minecraft

If you haven't heard of Minecraft, then you probably don't have children. Minecraft is essentially a software game in which you can build things. What sorts of things? Anythings! Players build everything imaginable from clever tree houses (like one of my kids) to models of the Taj Mahal. The game even has a kind of electronics (called redstone), and my other kid has been building an entire CPU in the "game". And that's just my kids - there are tens of millions more using it.

There is an excellent write up in the NYT magazine section today, explaining how Minecraft is the way that kids these days learn by doing. In my generation, we all ran around outside and built stuff out of junk, but in Minecraft, kids can do similar kinds of things without risking tetanus, and without needed to be living somewhere "safe".

Minecraft comes with no directions, so the kids have to figure everything out by trial and error or by talking to their friends - and boy do they. The NYT article starts off with a story about a kid who figured out how to make a random number generator by having a cow wander around a paddock and step on switches. The program can be run on your own machine or on a shared server, which leads to all kinds of interesting social learning opportunities around shared goals and team construction.

Many educators are interested in Minecraft as a tool for teaching innovation and teamwork. There are even researchers studying how political organisation occurs spontaneously in unrestricted multi-user environments.

Oh yes, Minecraft - possibly the most important piece of educational software written in the last 30 years - was the brainchild of a Swede named Marcus Perrson.

FPV FreeRider

The last piece of software is more of a niche product, but it is an essential tool for learning to fly multi-rotor aircraft (aka drones). FreeRider is a simulator for flying arbitrary multi-rotors - including the one you just built out of parts you ordered over the internet. It can do this because is physics-based and lets you specify things like how many motors you have, how big they are, how heavy they are and so on.

And not only can FreeRider simulate arbitrary multi-rotors, but it can also model where you fly! It comes with competition environments complete with gates and fun things like ocean cliffs. Even cooler, it hooks directly up to your remote control unit via USB, so you can practice flying your craft using your own remote control system even when you are trapped inside during a long Swedish winter. That is because FreeRider was written by another Swede, John Holmvall.

Multi-rotors are the one of the best examples of post-information-era technology. Like the personal cybernetic revolution before it, the technology is being driven by hobbyists and hackers, not large commercial entities. Innovation is bottom up, distributed and flourishes where basic human needs are widely met - like Sweden.

Freedom

The information economy is the source of much of the economic growth of the last 30 years, yet some of the most important pieces were not created by the big economic players. The World Wide Web itself was the brain child of some "pampered" scientists at CERN who wanted to share their data with the world. This is the promise of a different kind of economics, one where people are treated as fully human and allowed to reach their maximum potential. And that promise is what we all need to fight for.