‘All men are created equal’: America has lost its values. It’s time to go back to the founding text | Ted Widmer - The Guardian

America is approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The words "all men are created equal" ring hollow in 2025 - inequality, surveillance, and algorithmic bias undermine that promise daily. But this isn't just a political crisis. It's a code crisis. The founding text of the United States is, in many ways, the ultimate open-source document: iterable, auditable, and meant to be forked by future generations.

If the internet had a Declaration of Independence, we've already rewritten it - and not for the better. Just as America has drifted from its founding ideals, technology has strayed from its original values of decentralization, openness. And equality. Ted Widmer's Guardian piece argues we must return to the founding text. For technologists, that means returning to the RFCs, the GNU Manifesto. And the ethical frameworks that built the web. Let's examine how we lost our way - and how we can pull the repository of values back to main.

Every great project starts with a manifesto. The Declaration of Independence is a README md for a nation: it states purpose, enumerates grievances, and declares intent. Compare it to the GNU Manifesto by Richard Stallman. Both documents laid out a vision of freedom - the former from tyranny, the latter from proprietary software. Both were radical for their time.

In software engineering, we maintain a CHANGELOG. America's changelog includes amendments, supreme court rulings, and civil rights acts. Yet today, many developers ignore the foundational principles of open collaboration. We ship features without ethical review, deploy models trained on biased data. And accept walled gardens as inevitable. This is akin to ignoring the Bill of Rights because the UI is prettier.

The parallel is exact: a founding text isn't a relic - it's a living document that requires constant merging. The Declaration's self-evident truths need to be compiled against the operating system of modern society. And tech's own founding texts (like the original Internet RFC) deserve the same reverence.

In production environments, we've all seen code comments that reference outdated assumptions. "All men are created equal" has become one of those comments - cited but not executed. The gender-neutral language of "all people" is a recent patch, but the underlying inequality persists in algorithms - hiring pipelines, and API access.

A 2023 study from the AI Now Institute found that facial recognition systems still misidentify women of color up to 34% more often than white men. That's a runtime error on the equality function. The founding text promises equal protection; the technology stack delivers unequal outcomes. We have a regression bug in our societal main go.

Returning to the founding text means treating equality as a core invariant - not a feature flag that can be toggled off for profitability. Just as the Declaration demanded immediate remedy from King George, our codebases demand immediate remedy from bias. We need to write tests for equality, not just Performance.

The internet's founding text is the Request for Comments (RFC) series. RFC 1, written in 1969 by Steve Crocker, established a process for peer review and consensus. It was humble, open, and designed for iteration. Compare that to today's corporate control over protocols: WhatsApp's encryption is proprietary, Twitter's API is paywalled, and TikTok's algorithm is a black box.

We've abandoned the RFC ethos. The web's constitution - the W3C standards - is increasingly ignored by browser vendors who ship experimental features without consultation. The result is a fragmented internet that no longer guarantees "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (or reliably fast page loads). Returning to the founding text means re-embracing the RFC process: transparency, community review. And no single entity holding the private key.

In production, we use semantic versioning for our software. Why not for our governance, and the Founding Fathers expected amendmentsWe need an RFC for Big Tech - a living document that defines our digital rights. Projects like Public Money, Public Code are a start. But we need a broader constitutional layer.

• RFC 1 - The beginning of open standards
• RFC 2822 - Email formatting (still standard)
• RFC 7540 - HTTP/2 (collaborative performance)
• Future RFC X - Digital Bill of Rights?

The early internet was a peer-to-peer dream. DEC, Sun, and the university networks were decentralized by necessity. Then came the browser, the ad network, and the platform economy. "All men are created equal" became "all users are treated equally - as data. " The founding text promised equality before law; Big Tech promises equality before the algorithm. Which isn't the same.

Widmer's piece reminds us that the Declaration was a radical break from monarchy, and today's tech giants are the new monarchsThey decide who speaks, what is true, and how value is distributed. The square root of all this is centralization: few companies control DNS, cloud, and search. That's not a bug; it's a design choice. We can fork.

Projects like ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon) and the Solid project (led by Tim Berners-Lee) attempt to decentralize control they're the digital equivalent of returning to the Articles of Confederation - but we need something stronger, like a Constitution that enforces data portability and algorithmic transparency.

Open source software (OSS) embodies the spirit of the Declaration: code freely available, modifiable. And redistributable. But the OSS ecosystem suffers from its own inequality. Maintainers are underpaid, security vulnerabilities go unfixed, and corporate reliance on volunteer labor is exploitative. The founding text says "all men are created equal" - but not all contributors are equally valued.

Consider the Log4j vulnerability in 2021. A single unpaid maintainer was responsible for a library that powered most enterprise Java applications. That's a governance failure. We treat open source as a resource to extract, not a commonweal to nurture. The Declaration established a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Open source needs a similar social contract: funding, governance, and credit.

Concrete examples: The Linux Foundation and GitHub's sustainability initiatives are steps. But we need a cultural return: treat open source as a civic duty, not a side project. Every company that uses OSS should contribute back - code, money. Or time. That's living up to the founding text,

AI is the most powerful tool since the printing press, and but it amplifies existing inequalitiesTraining data is scraped from a web that already has bias; models predict based on historical injustice. "All men are created equal" isn't reflected in the loss functions of large language models - they improve for coherence, not justice.

The European Union's AI Act is one attempt to write a new founding text for AI. But regulation alone won't fix the moral deficit. Engineers need to embed equality into the architecture. That means diverse training datasets, bias audits as part of CI/CD. And transparency in model decision-making. We need an AI version of the Declaration - a clear statement that algorithms shall not deny due process or equal protection.

Projects like the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI are a start. But it's not binding. The original Declaration was a revolutionary act - it demanded change. Technologists must treat AI ethics not as a PR move. But as a constitutional amendment to the code of conduct.

What would it look like to return to the founding text in practice? I propose a Governance RFC - a living document that every tech company would commit to, much like the Declaration committed signers to mutual defense. This RFC would include:

• Data Sovereignty: Users own their data; companies are stewards, not landlords.
• Algorithmic Transparency: All significant decisions influenced by AI must be explainable.
• Equality Guarantees: No discrimination based on race, gender. Or class in automated systems.
• Right to Fork: Any platform must allow data export and interoperability.
• Grievance Mechanism: A clear process for users to challenge unfair decisions.

This isn't theoreticalThe FTC's recent actions against data brokers show a willingness to enforce these principles. And the EFF's ongoing work provides a legal framework. But we need engineers to code these values into the stack - not wait for legislation.

Returning to the founding text means treating privacy as a feature, not a bug. It means building systems where equality is a pre-condition, not a post-hoc analysis. The Declaration didn't say "we'll try to be equal someday. " It asserted it as self-evident, and our code should do the same

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is a chance to rebase our societal repository. Ted Widmer's piece in The Guardian is a git blame on America's values - showing where we diverged from the main branch. For technologists, the message is clear: we must return to the founding text of the internet - openness, equality, decentralized authority - and commit to it again.

This is not nostalgia, and it's a technical necessityThe current trajectory leads to surveillance capitalism, algorithmic feudalism, and digital serfdom. But we have the tools: open source, cryptography, peer-to-peer protocols. And a global community of engineers who believe in liberty and justice for all.

Ask yourself today: What does your code say about equality,? And are your APIs fairDo your models discriminate? If the Founding Fathers reviewed your codebase, would they approve the pull request? It's time to go back to the founding text - not as a museum piece. But as a living document that guides every git commit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What does the Declaration of Independence have to do with technology?
The Declaration established the principle that all people have equal rights. Technology's founding documents (like the GNU Manifesto, RFCs. And the Web's original design) similarly assert openness and equal access. Both are under threat from centralization and inequality.

Q2: Can software engineers really fix inequality?
Engineers can't solve all societal problems alone. But we can ensure our systems don't perpetuate inequality. By designing for bias testing, data privacy, and consent, we reduce harm. The first step is acknowledging that code isn't neutral-it reflects its creators' values.

Q3: What is the "founding text" of the internet?
Most experts point to the RFC (Request for Comments) series, especially RFC 1. Others mention Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web. All emphasize collaboration, open standards. And peer review-values parallel to those in the Declaration of Independence.

Q4: How can I start "going back to the founding text" in my daily work?
Start small: audit your code for bias, contribute to open source under a fair license, demand transparency from your platform vendors, and engage in governance discussions in your community. Read the original RFCs and the GNU Manifesto. Think of each commit as a vote for the kind of internet you want.

Q5: What is the most important takeaway from Ted Widmer's article?
Widmer argues that America has lost sight of its founding ideals-particularly equality-and must return to the Declaration's original spirit. He warns against treating historical documents as relics. The same applies to tech: our founding principles of openness and equality are not optional; they're the core of the system.

What do you think?

Do you believe the founding principles of the internet (openness, decentralization, equality) are still recoverable,? Or have they been permanently overwritten by corporate interests?

Should engineers be morally responsible for the societal impact of their code,? Or is that a burden that belongs to regulators and executives alone?

If you could write one "RFC for Digital Rights" that every platform must add, what would be its single most important clause?