The Critique of Cyberlibertarianism

From free and open source software to free culture and "internet freedom"; from net neutrality to "censorship," to demands for unbreakable encryption and absolute anonymity: these and many other terms serve as rallying cries for digital activists from across the political spectrum. Raising questions about what the terms might actually mean, let alone what might be the arguments for and against the causes they seem to represent, is simply to stand in the way of progress. To oppose the favored position is to be idiotic, a Luddite, or morally inferior. Freedom and justice lie only on the side of the cause advocates promote.These claims should give those of us outside the hothouse of digital advocacy pause. Given the urgency with which digital enthusiasts tell us that projects like open source software and internet freedom are vital political causes, it is odd that we find such a lack of detailed discussion of positions supporting and opposing them, or demonstration of the ways that they fit into the rest of our politics. It is hard if not impossible to find full descriptions of the various nuanced positions and their pros and cons in digital advocacy as there is for other political issues. Instead, one finds work after work recommending just one position, or at best slight variations of that one position, often seeming as if they are copy-pasted from each other, with very little interest in articulating the underlying and foundational questions that the topics seem to entail. When free software pioneer Richard Stallman (2002: 43) famously says that in the phrase "free software," "free" means "free as in free speech, not as in free beer," that statement is almost always taken to be clear and sufficient. Yet even cursory reflection will show that what the free software movement recommends has almost nothing in common with what "free" means in "free speech." Further, to the very limited degree that software is analogous to speech, it automatically has the same protections as do other forms of speech. It is nearly impossible to find free software advocates reflecting on this, or providing anything like the detailed analyses that would be required to connect free speech to free software.The second striking fact about these topics is that while they are discussed and promoted as if they are obviously political, their relationship to non-digital political issues and orientations is at best opaque. While words like privacy and rights and free and freedom occur repeatedly in the names these issues are given, it is frequently less than clear exactly how we are to line them up against other non-digital or pre-digital uses of these terms. When encryption advocates demand, for example, that governments be absolutely unable to surveil or retrospectively examine electronic communications even with a legal warrant because of what they call "privacy," it is difficult to find any digital enthusiast reflecting at all on the fact that privacy has to mean something different in that context than it does in what lawyers and judges and legislators use the term to mean, since it has rarely if ever in any prior democratic context been used to mean that law enforcement and legislators should never be able to serve properly executed warrants. It is not that the encryption promoters might or might not have been offering a correct analysis, but instead that questions itself of the nature of privacy—deep, political-philosophical questions that have been debated in the United States and every democracy for hundreds of years—get shunted aside in favor of a dogma whose function is to forestall our asking those real questions. Everyone should be in favor of absolute freedom of speech, we hear repeatedly—despite the fact that quite a few lawyers, judges, legal scholars, and democracies other than the United States take a different approach to this complex question—but at least we (think we) understand what the principle of "freedom of speech" has been taken to mean. When we are told that everyone should be in favor of more or less absolute "internet freedom" because it is "freedom of speech for the internet," or some similar formulation, all of a sudden these deep and abiding questions fall away.Cyberlibertarianism is a term scholars and journalists have developed to try to highlight and understand this phenomenon (the term was introduced in Winner 1997). Despite its utility, it is important to say at the outset that the term has potentially misleading connotations: its incorporation of the word libertarian may suggest that it is meant to point at the widespread presence of overt libertarian politics in digital culture. It does mean that, to an extent, but it also points at a wider phenomenon that may not be immediately obvious from the word itself.Cyberlibertarianism may at its narrowest core be taken as a commitment to the belief that digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of (democratic) governments—that is, of democratic political sovereignty. Frequently, the sentiment can be reduced the view that democratic governments cannot or must not regulate the internet—or to flip this formulation on its head, that the internet should be a place to which laws do not (or cannot) apply. Even in this narrow form, cyberlibertarianism is in many ways openly self-contradictory, not least visible in its alternation between the view that governments are unable to use laws to regulate digital technology, and the view that governments must not be allowed to use laws in this way, two ideas that are in real ways incompatible. Despite that, in part because one version of another of this idea may sound comprehensible at first, a surprisingly wide range of digital enthusiasts subscribe to it as a core, unassailable principle, one that it would be foolish even to consider investigating in any strongly critical way. It is an article of faith, the central tenet of the most famous statement articulating what we now call cyberlibertarianism, John Perry Barlow's (1996 2001) "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," and also of the 1994 "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" crafted by such antidemocratic luminaries as George Gilder and Alvin Toffler (then working closely with Newt Gingrich) (Dyson et al. 1994), which was the immediate spur for Winner's original cyberlibertarianism essay.In a broader sense, and since Winner's original analysis and others that echo it in the late 1990s, cyberlibertarian dogma has grown into a set of tropes and rhetorical strategies that work to shape the ways the public talks about important topics rather than encouraging rigorous research into the nature of the claims made, asking who may benefit from the policies being proffered, and in general doing the actual work of deliberative democracy. For those of us watching things from this angle, it has been a remarkable irony that tools advertised as promoting "democratization," the accessibility of knowledge, and the wide dispersal of information can have been simultaneously conjoined to a belief system that seems designed precisely to prevent the exercise of those values.Calling cyberlibertarianism a "belief system," though, gives it too much credit. "Belief system" implies that there is a coherent body of doctrine available that can be articulated both in terms of the grounding of its premises and in the way that its elements proceed from those premises. Cyberlibertarianism can claim no such coherence: many of its most cherished principles directly contradict one another, even when they can be specified in adequate detail, which they often cannot.For example, the values of privacy (which might or might not be the same thing as secrecy) and openness (which might or might not be the same thing as publicity, or transparency) are ones that, under various names, have long been discussed in a wide range of philosophical and political venues, from political philosophy to legal scholarship to jurisprudence. It is widely acknowledged by thinkers across the political spectrum (that is, those who do not focus primarily on digital technology) that privacy and openness can conflict with each other in important ways: maximum privacy would seem to suggest that nothing is ever put out in the open, where maximum openness would seem to suggest that everything must be. Sober thinking about these topics recognizes that both privacy and openness are important values, that they may conflict with each other, and that it is the job of politics—of government, of the citizenry, of thinkers, of judges and lawyers—to carefully weigh these values and others like them in specific cases. While there are certainly cases that nearly everyone would acknowledge should be ruled almost entirely by privacy (a child's medical records—but should those records be available to emergency room doctors even without the parents' consent, to save the child's life?) and others ruled almost entirely by publicity (legislative proceedings—but should that prohibit confidential discussion of diplomatic and military matters that are uncontroversially confidential matters of state?), the majority of cases fall in between.In cyberlibertarian writings regarding these questions, answers to them are presented as obvious, unproblematic absolutes, even if these absolutes conflict with each other. Everything should be maximally private, we will read from them on one day; everything must be maximally open, the next. There are no contradictions, digital evangelists insist: it is obvious that everything must be private and that everything must be open, and further, it is obvious where and how each of these contradictory principles apply.These assertions require much more skeptical consideration than they have received until now. Non-dogmatists have every justification in demanding they be grounded in direct engagement with the foundational ideas that they seem to touch on the surface, while typically failing to do so in practice—to explain, for example, how "democratization" intersects with actually existing democratic institutions and democratic theory; to push back on the idea that democratically enacted laws are somehow inapplicable when computers are involved; to reject the notion of a radical break with all existing institutions and thought coupled with the simultaneous assertions that all the hopes those institutions and thoughts represent are somehow being realized in the new disruptive digital ones, even as they gleefully attack and destroy existing structures and values built to promote them.One of the related but less visible effects of cyberlibertarian dogma is the profoundly deforming effects it has on the rest of politics. Despite the propagandistic assertions that open source, end-to-end encryption, and anticopyright are themselves profoundly political causes that also rise above ordinary politics, the activism and agitation around these concepts affects ordinary political concepts that most digital enthusiasts rarely if ever talk about: the ability of capital to capture and bypass regulation; the relatively stable regimes of law and jurisprudence on which democracy depends; consent of the governed; many of the rights encoded in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (other than the hypertrophied version of "freedom of speech" championed by both digital activists and the far right), such as equality under the law, due process, and so on; and the very ability of democratic governments to pass laws about and regulate economic activity. Thus one of the signal dangers of cyberlibertarianism is a kind of sleight of hand: we seem to be talking about one thing, but in fact we are talking about something else, and the something else is far more important and consequential than our apparent subject. We seem to be talking about copyright or freedom of speech or the "democratization" of one technology or another, or of information, but if we listen closely, we hear a different conversation, one in which the very question of our right and ability to govern ourselves is being called into question.One of cyberlibertarianism's chief effects is to minimize or eliminate entirely the power of democratic governments to choose which technologies do and do not fit our vision of a good and healthy society. In practice this means quieting or altogether muting the voices of those who insist that democracies must have the power to decide what technologies are good for their citizens, and that for democracy to mean anything, there must be actual political (legislative, regulatory, judicial) mechanisms by which democracies exercise this power beyond what cyberlibertarianism recommends—which is almost exclusively deregulated free markets. Some versions of democratic oversight of technology take the form of abolition (see especially Benjamin 2019; Selinger and Hartzog 2019; Stark and Hutson 2022); others of heavy regulation (Bracha and Pasquale 2008; Pasquale 2016, 2020) or licensure (Pasquale 2021). All of these approaches have been so thoroughly muted by cyberlibertarian discourse that many of us do not even appreciate that they are possible. Not only are they possible: in too many ways, the future of democracy depends on the ability of citizens to reclaim that power from the companies and technologists who have so effectively undermined it.• • • •Langdon Winner, one of the world's leading philosophers of technology, coined the term cyberlibertarianism in his 1997 article "Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects for Community." The ideas he expressed there were developing elsewhere around that time as well, including in a much-cited essay called "The Californian Ideology" by media studies scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1995, 1996). While scholars and other commentators use the label "Californian Ideology" as a near-synonym with cyberlibertarianism, the first term can suggest that the system of thought only operates in California (or even only in the Bay Area), and thus risks confusion. A third work, Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook (2000), is a semiethnographic account by a journalist (formerly a somewhat enthusiastic supporter of the digital revolution as a writer for the central digital utopian publication Wired). In that book Borsook uses the term technolibertarianism in a very similar way to Winner's and Barbrook and Cameron's terms, but technolibertarianism lacks the specifically digital connotations of the cyber- prefix. The term cyberlibertarianism continues to turn up with some regularity in scholarship (e.g., Chenou 2014; Dahlberg 2010), journalism and social media. Other critical work that does not necessarily use any of these terms nevertheless demonstrates the deep embedding of right-wing ideas in digital evangelism (see especially Morozov 2013 and Schradie 2019).Winner (1997: 14) describes cyberlibertarianism as "a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics." The two prongs of this statement are crucial: on the one hand, an ecstatic enthusiasm for digital technology itself—something that is of course found pervasively throughout our culture, especially in Silicon Valley—and on the other, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of core terms like freedom.Winner (1997: 14) writes that these views about digital-technological progress are too often characterized by a "whole hearted embrace of technological determinism. This is not the generalized determinism of earlier writings on technology and culture, but one specifically tailored to the arrival of the electronic technologies." That technological determinism, typically framed as apolitical, insists that "the experiential realm of digital devices and networked computing offers endless opportunities for achieving wealth, power and sensual pleasure. Because inherited structures of social, political, and economic organization pose barriers to the exercise of personal power and self-realization, they simply must be removed" (15). It is this attitude toward the "inherited structures of social, political, and economic organization," especially the construal of them as "barriers," that characterizes cyberlibertarianism as a political force. This kind of language pervades not just the writings of overt right-wing figures like Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel but of those with nominally left-of-center political leanings like Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler. These latter writers frequently take as given right-wing definitions of social freedom, the role of government, and the role of institutions, while occasionally paying what is mostly lip service to the political goals of nonlibertarians. In doing so they play an active role in promulgating the view that digital technology is blowing apart our existing social structures so completely that we have no choice about whether or not to preserve them, and that these explosions are largely, if incoherently, good for democracy. They recommend—and too many follow these recommendations, inside and outside of the technology world—that we let what they call technology take the lead, and let social institutions like governments catch up and ponder and perhaps adjust to what technology has done only afterward, if they continue to exist at all.The history of digital culture's revisionist approach to social problems has been the subject of many of the best investigations of the origins and growth of digital culture, especially Fred Turner's (2006a) From Counterculture to Cyberculture and Adam Curtis's documentaries, especially his All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) and The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007). Again and again in these works, echoing material from Winner, Barbrook and Cameron, and Borsook, we see people who think they are working toward goals associated with "social justice" or a vaguely 1960s-inspired flower-power vision of world improvement, who become entranced by the "possibilities" of digital technology and transfer their social beliefs into technological ones, without careful reflection on whether these goals are in fact compatible. One need look no further for an example of this pattern than to Steve Jobs, whose pursuit of "insanely great" technology via the empowerment of individuals was heavily and directly marked by counterculture radicalism. One might even mount a reasonable argument that perhaps Jobs's crowning achievement, the iPhone, escapes certain typical limitations of commercial products and has some kind of socially beneficial effect, although it is hard to see how these effects are much more than marginal. It is even harder to see why discussions of the pro-social features of the iPhone should preclude our talking about aspects of the product that may be antisocial or antidemocratic.It is a huge leap from the kind of social justice pursuits associated with the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s to the design, manufacturing, and distribution of one of the most successful commercial products of the first decades of the twenty-first century, one that exists primarily to serve the interests of Apple's board of directors, along with the senior executives and shareholders of a huge publicly traded company. Further, the intense self-involvement and lack of engagement with the immediate social world often thought to be predictable by-products of this kind of consumer technology are distant from the communal and egalitarian values of the 1960s. Yet from the Jobs perspective, the 1960s radical impetus to help the world by turning away from self, turning away from commerce, turning toward other people and their needs, gets warped into the what looks almost like its polar opposite. The situation would be less remarkable if it did not entail the tenacious insistence on the continuity between the two projects, despite the obvious lack of fit between them.The confluence of 1960s social activism and digital utopianism resulted in a profound shift whose consequences remain underexamined to this day. Built on top of the civil rights and antiwar movements, much of 1960s activism was predicated on the notion that democratic government is and should be the primary guarantor of social equality, both in terms of the rights of minorities (rights which pure majoritarian democracy will inherently fail to protect) and the attempts to realize through government certain principles that in the United States are found in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, as might best be understood via the US Supreme Court's actions in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. This focus on equality has long been understood as one of the bedrock principles of left politics, arguably its defining principle, from the moderate insistence on voting rights and public education to the farther-left demands for economic equality across the board via communism. Throughout the social movements of the 1960s, equality in its various forms was a hallmark that was hard to miss, and was in fact the natural target of the many conservative forces that opposed these social movements.Some early digital enthusiasts saw an easy alliance between these egalitarian goals and the provision of digital technology, and it is no surprise that the technology that drew them together most often was one variety or another of what came to be called the personal computer (along with Turner 2006a and Turner 2006b, Markoff 2005 is devoted in particular to the countercultural claims of the personal computer movement). Putting computing power in the hands of individuals when it had until then been confined to businesses, the military, and governments certainly seems to be, and no doubt is in some ways, compatible with or even a realization of egalitarian goals. It's hard not to see Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, or Bill Gates and Paul Allen, as exemplary individuals who use materials available at hand to empower not only themselves but other individuals in their milieu. That does not necessarily mean they understood or imagined some of the ultimate ends to which what they were building would be put to use, let alone that they themselves would be its architects.Nevertheless, what is striking about cyberlibertarianism is the way that it does not merely enjoy, but stubbornly insists upon a countercultural, utopian social orientation on the one hand, yoked on the other to one of the most aggressive corporatist and deregulatory (and in this sense, anti–social welfare, anti–civil rights, and anti–New Deal) agendas in recent history; the imposition of that agenda has resulted in some of the deepest economic and even social inequality seen in the United States, and to some extent worldwide, for at least one hundred years. The story of social liberation has gotten yoked to the story of business success and innovation, and it appears in some way important to the Silicon Valley marketing plan to insist on its social mission even as it appears to realize many of the precise goals that the 1960s social movements emerged to combat. In fact it's become hard to dislodge the stories from each other, so that in many cases when critics attempt to paint Silicon Valley efforts as simply business efforts and not projects of social beneficence, we are often accused of extreme dystopianism and negativity, despite these accusations coming from business executives and workers themselves, for whom the mere charge of being part of business should not, one would think, be equivalent to moral condemnation.Because they are so aligned with powerful business interests, the values today associated with the ubiquitous spread of computerization are far more easily understood in the context of right-wing rather than left-wing political aspirations. It is these values, and the definitions that inform them, that characterize cyberlibertarianism, which becomes as notable for what it pushes aside as for what it embraces. Many who would declare themselves outright opponents of right-wing politics in general and political libertarianism in particular find themselves championing individual rights and economic freedom, advocating markets as the solution to all social problems, fighting government regulation, and defending the rights of companies like Google to do exactly as they wish, while causes like public education, civil rights, labor conditions, the social safety net, and especially proper regulation of business get either stalled or pushed aside entirely. This is how cyberlibertarianism works: not as much by party politics, as by controlling the terms of discourse and the conversation itself, so that only variations in rightist political formations ever get on the table, and all concerns are subsumed under a general faith that digital technology is making things "better."Barbrook and Cameron (1996: 50) write that what they call the "Californian Ideology . . . simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism." Along with that (digital) technological determinism—the belief that digital technology is inevitably leading toward political progress—what binds the apparently disparate politics of cyberlibertarianism together is an "anti-statism" that "provides the means to reconcile radical and reactionary ideas about technological progress." "The Californian ideologues," write Barbrook and Cameron, "preach an anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism: a bizarre mishmash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism" (56).The context in which that mishmash occurs is one built and sustained by capital; thus even the apparently left and anticorporate energies among digital utopians are easily diverted to capitalist ends, especially when these ends are not clearly labeled as such. As we shall see, movements like "open source," "open access," "piracy," "hacking," "open government," and even "free software" and others all have clear lineages in and ongoing connections to important pillars of right-wing political doctrine, yet are frequently recommended as if they point in the opposite direction—and advocates strongly resist efforts not just to describe these foundations, but to provide any foundational support for the doctrines at all.Cyberlibertarianism is especially dangerous because like all libertarian anti-philosophies it speaks in the name of an individual or "negative" freedom that takes advantage of rhetoric based in values like democracy, rights, and equality while at the same time agitating strongly against all of the structures and institutions that democracies build to protect those values. For example, the phrase "digital rights" is one with wide currency in cyberlibertarian discourse, and to the untrained ear it can sound as if it must refer to advocacy for human and civil rights in digital contexts. At times it may well mean this, but in its initial deployments, the phrase meant something else entirely: it meant the idea that copyright and intellectual property should have very different meanings on computers than off of them, and even carried the connotation that the "right" to obtain works of intellectual property without compensation to their creators was in some way aligned with human rights. The poster child for this movement was always Wikipedia, which was uniformly portrayed as an unalloyed human good, yet which has consistently disparaged the idea that creators, especially and oddly, academics, should have property interests in their work. Even academic treatments of "digital rights" (e.g., Herman 2013; Postigo 2012) offered very little space to the view that creator rights might have any grounding in or relationship to human rights. To the contrary, the ambiguity in the word rights in this context is consistently used to blur the line between the narrow and legalistic meaning of rights in terms of "ownership" of intellectual property (IP), versus the wider sense of rights in "human rights."Along the way, Wikipedia and other not-for-profit projects are put front and center as if they are the major beneficiaries of the anticopyright movement, and the interests of readers, music listeners, and other consumers of IP are the main ones to be considered in discussions of the topics, whereas interests of creators are either unimportant or active subjects for disparagement. Quite regularly, creators from Metallica to Dr. Dre who attempt to assert their rights to be compensated for work are subjected to ridicule in the name of a very nebulous idea of "rights," while the creators like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, and others who offer thinly reasoned arguments about the selfishness of creators who want to be paid for their work are lauded and repeated just as endlessly.It would be wrong to suggest that the legions of Reddit and Y Combinator and Twitter writers attacking the work of creators are part of some nefarious plot to direct profits toward an unseen commercial entity, let alone one in which those individuals have a vested interest. To be sure, even though much of their individual use may be of resources like Wikipedia that have developed relatively rights-free business models for which it is fair to say that no compensation is expected, the proliferation of arguments in favor of file sharing via torrent and other forms of "digital piracy" (Mueller 2019 provides the best critical account of this concept) suggests that individual interests in those materials do play a significant role. It is also the case that companies that have business models that profit directly from IP belonging to others (especially Google and its YouTube platform) may do a huge amount to seed these discussions. But even more broadly, the ideology of "open" and "free" pervading these discussions is broader than the commercial or consumer interests of those who advance them.This is part of why organizations like EFF, CDT, and Fight for the Future that have direct histories with commercial entities are of such great concern, as are quasi-academic bodies with strong industry ties like the MIT Media Lab, Stanford's Internet Observatory, the Berkman Center at Harvard, and the Data & Society Institute (originally sponsored by Microsoft Research) are only slightly more concerning than organizations like Mozilla, the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, and the Linux Foundation that have more distant relationships, even though corporate capital does make significant use of and profit from all of these resources. All of these organizations and many others, and the many individuals informed by them, no matter how much goodwill there may be in at least some of those who support them, are characterized by the power they have to advance a dogma that will brook no question, and that by assertion of dogmatic slogans exerts tremendous pressure against reasoned debate. "Open," "free," "democratize": who could possibly argue against movements to which these labels get applied? Yet when those labels point in precisely the opposite direction of the values they seem to name, we must be much more willing to demand precise explanation for how they fit into more widely accepted and more widely explicable articulations of those values. It cannot be enough to assert that there are things called "digital rights" and that by dint of the sound of that term, they are part of "human rights": direct, substantive, and meaningful connections between canons of human rights, and the interests advanced in the name of "digital rights," must be made clear before the arguments can be evaluated. Too often, the main function of cyberlibertarian discourse is to make demands for these connections seem at least unreasonable, if not ludicrous, despite them being anything but.We thank the University of Minnesota Press for allowing us to publish this excerpt from David Golumbia's last complete manuscript entitled Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology to be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2024. Copyright by the Estate of David Golumbia.