Information wants to be free

[7]According to historian Adrian Johns, the slogan expresses a view that had already been articulated in the mid-20th century by Norbert Wiener, Michael Polanyi and Arnold Plant, who advocated for the free communication of scientific knowledge, and specifically criticized the patent system.

Brand's attribution of will to an abstract human construct (information) has been adopted within a branch of the cypherpunk movement, whose members espouse a particular political viewpoint (anarchism).

[citation needed] According to this philosophy, hackers, crackers, and phreakers are liberators of information which is being held hostage by agents demanding money for its release.

Other participants in this network include cypherpunks who educate people to use public-key cryptography to protect the privacy of their messages from corporate or governmental snooping and programmers who write free software and open source code.

[citation needed] Chelsea Manning is alleged to have said "Information should be free"[10] to Adrian Lamo when explaining a rationale for US government documents to be released to WikiLeaks.

In the cyberpunk world of post-singularity transhuman culture described by Charles Stross in his books like Accelerando and Singularity Sky, the wish of information to be free is a law of nature.