Opinion: Libertarian Millennials Like Snowden Are the Future

We can hope

Snowden, who spent his 30th birthday on the run, is one of a new breed I call the "Libertarian Millennial". Apolitical, perhaps even post-political, they do what they do because they have come to their own conclusions in their own time and in their own way. "I don't want to live in a society that does these [surveillance] sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," Snowden declares. There you have it: "I don't", "I do not" and "everything I do and say" are the key phrases here. …

In the world of the Libertarian Millennial, the act is not complete without social media, without the bringing together of the crowd as receptor of their personal feelings, their manifesto. And since it is embedded technology – which we wear on our bodies or will even have implanted inside our bodies – that is our future, more and more LMs will emerge, both as lone wolves – individuals out to do maximum physical harm and wreak mayhem in the name of a religion or a political ideology; or as charismatic individuals, people doing what they think is right, and through that effort, rallying people and movements around them.

Snowden has been quoted as having written: "The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed." And that "the truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped." His breed of Libertarian Millennial is coming, too. It is they who cannot be stopped.