The key term there is “essential liberty”, by which he meant political rights. Choosing to delegate management of a computer’s firmware to a third party firstly isn’t giving away any political rights, and is a rational choice in some circumstances. It’s a choice I might make for some computers I own or operate, and not others. Suggesting that this choice has anything to do with what Franklin was talking about is nonsense on stilts.
Yes, delegating firmware management unaudited is giving away political rights. You do not know what is in there.
The ones who write the code make the rules. The ones who make the rules, wield power. Those that are attracted to the exercise of power, inevitably abuse it.
Trying to handwave that "computer says no" couldn't possibly be abused to political ends is literally shoving your head in the sand. DRM would not be a thing if computing was fundamentally apolitical.
Any code I didn’t write myself, from the ground up using no third party components, in a language I developed, ‘could’ possibly be abused in this way. Even then, do I have to also write the microcode in the chip as well, and supervise the fab? This extreme absolutist stance is completely non viable. I certainly don’t see how I could live life taking that level of extreme paranoid seriously, or how anyone could in an advanced technological society.
The whole point of laws and government is to outsource such concerns. That’s why free speech, the rule of law and democracy matter so much. Those are the essential freedoms he was talking about. Everything else is based on those, because with those you don’t need to trust the vendor, because your legal rights will be protected.
So sure, essential freedoms are exactly that, essential, but extending that to absurd lengths is fuzzy thinking that obscures what’s actually important by confusing it with things that aren’t practically attainable generally anyway.
