Attack of the Zombie Cyberlibertarians

time to stick a fork in it

The term “cyberlibertarianism” was coined by Langdon Winner in his 1997 article “Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects of Community”—which along with Richard Barbook and Andy Cameron’s “The Californian Ideology” was one of the most perspicacious early accounts of the emerging worldview of Silicon Valley. Winner 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 in the years to come.” Importantly, as Paulina Borsook emphasized in her 2000 book Cyberselfish, another prescient critique of the phenomenon, most of the adherents to this worldview were not self-described “libertarians.” Indeed, what made it influential was its broad appeal to people who may have been unfamiliar with or otherwise unsympathetic to libertarian economic doctrines.

The late David Golumbia’s 2024 tome Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology builds on Winner, Barbrook and Cameron, and Borsook to develop the most systematic account to date of the origins, features, and influence of this sensibility. Golumbia defines cyberlibertarianism as “a commitment to the belief that digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of the democratic process—meaning democratic political sovereignty.” Like his predecessors, he emphasizes that “‘cyberlibertarianism is not the name of a political movement or party.” Unlike libertarians, cyberlibertarians generally do not self-identify as such. Rather, what unites them is an often tacit conviction that “mass computerization produces social and political freedom.” Because the “freedom” digital technology produces is superior—more spontaneous, authentic, organic, etc.—to that of other modes of social organization, it must be protected from any oversight by “nonmarket forms of political power,” in particular the state.

As all of this suggests, cyberlibertarianism in its early form was closely linked to and highly dependent on the dogmas of the adjacent and overlapping cyber-utopian worldview espoused in the pages of Wired, in the manifestos and screeds of Electronic Frontier Foundation activists John Perry Barlow and Mitchell Kapor, and in documents like “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” written by Wired’s Esther Dyson along with the conservative futurists Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, and Jay Keyworth. As Winner explains, “[i]n cyberlibertarian writings, the prospect of many-to-many, interactive communication via computer networks is upheld as the source of a renewed ‘Jeffersonian vision’ of citizen and political society.’” Allowing cyberspace to flourish, free from the meddling of government bureaucrats, would enable the reinvigoration of community and civil society—such was the argument often made in the early years of the internet, with frequent allusions to Jefferson and Tocqueville.

Golumbia explains the relationship between cyber-utopianism and cyberlibertarianism by analogy to a “magician’s trick” where one hand “holds a flashy object” while the other one “is doing the work.” In this case, the “flashy objects” are the cyber-utopian rhapsodies about digital technology that long pervaded the discourse, while “the work” refers to the removal of a massive sector of the economy from government oversight. A simple example can be found in the 1994 “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” which directly shaped the Telecommunications Act drafted in Congress the following year. The Magna Carta declared: “The key principle of ownership by the people—private ownership—should govern every deliberation. Government does not own cyberspace, the people do.” But here, and in the legislation influenced by the document, “private ownership” meant “corporate ownership”; by a remarkable magician’s sleight of hand, the reality that control over the internet was being privatized and transferred to Sprint, Pacific Bell, AOL, and other commercial interests was glossed as equivalent to “ownership by the people.” Elided entirely was the core distinction found in the Jeffersonian tradition of American political thought—to which cyber-utopians so often appealed—between smallholders, the backbone of democracy, and land monopolists, who in seeking to reestablish a quasi-feudal order had made themselves democracy’s antagonists. In other words, as Winner observes, the Magna Carta “advocate[d] greater concentrations of power over conduits of information” but managed to spin that outcome as a triumph of “democracy.”

In recent years, the cyberlibertarian magicians have started fumbling the trick. Perhaps there is no longer any “flashy object” to point to so as to distract from the reality of concentrated private monopoly power as the inexorable political outcome of the digital revolution. Or perhaps there could be, but they’ve been forgetting to point to it. As I’ve pointed out, even—or especially—those directly responsible for the revolution’s latest phase (generative AI) seem incapable of offering anything close to the old cyber-utopian vision, or even one that is not overtly dystopian. As a recent New York Times op-ed from tech reporter Jasmine Sun documented, “whether you talk with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians,” all of them foresee a future in which a tiny elite lords over a “permanent underclass” left unemployed and disempowered by the rise of artificial general intelligence.

For a few years, “Web 3”—which would supposedly reboot the internet using blockchain technology—presented itself as an effort to salvage the cyber-utopian dream. But the major Web 3 projects—most dramatically, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—very quickly fell into the same patterns of oligarchic concentration of wealth and power as their predecessors. (See Peter Ryan’s and Adina Glickstein’s contributions to Compact for detailed analyses of this set of developments.) Under the second Trump administration, in which crypto has become a key element of a blatantly corrupt pay-to-play scheme, there is barely any effort to conceal the sordid reality of an industry that until recently cloaked itself in layers of idealistic rhetoric. Crypto, explicitly created as a technology for obsolescing the state, is now a lobby like any other, pressing lawmakers for light regulatory treatment from the government it promised to destroy. Because crypto’s fate is now so tightly tied, via stablecoins, to once-detested fiat money, as well as to the fortunes of powerful insiders, a federal bailout is a plausible near future scenario.

One would think, given all of this, that cyberlibertarian dogma would be in retreat, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Even as they broadcast to us that they are building world-destroying or, at best, corruption-enabling technologies the lords of tech and their ideological allies are still certain of one thing: their glorious endeavors must be protected from the meddling of big government. Hence the dogged pursuit of a federal moratorium on state-level AI restrictions. On one level, this pursuit is entirely understandable on the basis of industry self-interest, and indeed, is no different from the anti-regulatory agenda of any other industry. But the relatively light regulation of digital technology compared to other media was always justified on the claim that tech was somehow different, and that interference in it amounted to an assault on organic Jeffersonian civil society, not on the bottom line.

This is why cyberlibertarian ideologues have lately attempted to frame oversight of crypto and AI not just as regulatory overreach but as attacks on “free speech.” The notion that “code is speech” goes back to lawsuits pursued by Barlow and Kapor’s EFF in the 1990s, where powerful encryption algorithms, once considered weapons of war, were granted First Amendment protections. From here it wasn’t far to the recent claim made by some in the industry that crackdowns on crypto scams amounted to an attack on the scammers’ free speech, or that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was an instrument of censorship. Even more bizarre are the widespread claims that what should really worry us are “woke” regulations on AI. The message seems to be something like: “We are building a superintelligence that will replace humanity. Its First Amendment rights must be protected!”

Thirty-some years into its existence, cyberlibertarianism is a zombie ideology. But as we know from the movies, zombies can subsist for a long time, and can do a lot of damage while they do. I’m not sure that I know how to behead an ideology, but it might be about time we figure that out.

This week in Compact:

• Felice Basbøll on the ‘Alpine divorce’ panic

• Stephen Adubato reviews Ross Barkan’s Colossus

• Leila Mechoui on why worries about kids’ screen time are misplaced

• Susan Pickard on the strange career of Jan Morris

• Jacob Eisler on the SCOTUS Callais decision

• Christopher Coome on the occultist revolution