The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the night trying to figure out where you are and where you are going. Once when driving from Michigan to Florida I got so lost in the middle of the night in Kentucky that I had to pull over to sleep and wait for the sun so I could figure out where I was. I awoke to an old man staring unblinkingly into my car, shirtless, breathing heavy enough to fog the windows. To say I floored that 1991 Honda Civic is an understatement. You would leave your house and then just disappear. This is presented as kind of romantic now, as if we were just free spirits on the wind and could stop and really watch a sunset. In practice it was mostly an annoying game of attempting to guess where people were. You'd call their job, they had left. You'd call their house, they weren't home yet. Presumably they were in transit but you actually had no idea. As a child my response to people asking me where my parents were was often a shrug as I resumed attempting to eat my weight in shoplifted candy or make homemade napalm with gasoline and styrofoam. Sometimes I shudder as a parent remembering how young I was putting pennies on train tracks and hiding dangerously close so that we could get the cool squished penny afterwards.Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented. Tapes squealed. Tapes slowed down for no reason, like they were depressed. Multiple times in my life I would set off on a long road trip, pop in a tape, and within fifteen minutes watch as it shot from the deck unspooled like the guts from the tauntaun in Star Wars. You'd then spend forty-five minutes at a Sunoco trying to wind it back in with a Bic pen knowing in your heart you were performing CPR on a corpse. Then you'd put it back in the player out of pure stubbornness, and it would chew itself again immediately, and you'd drive the next six hours in silence with your own thoughts, which were not as good as Pearl Jam.

So I am, mostly, grateful for the bounty the internet has provided. But there is something wrong, deeply wrong, with what we built. The wrongness was there at the start. It was baked into the foundation by people who told themselves a story about freedom, and that story was a lie, and we are all, every one of us, paying their tab.To understand what happened we need to go back to the 90s. A Declaration of the Independence of CyberspaceOne of the first and most classic examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech is the classic "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" by John Perry Barlow written in 1996. You can find the full text here. I remember thinking it was genius when I first read it. I was young enough that I also thought "Snow Crash" was a serious political document. Today the Declaration reads like one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law.It helps to know who Barlow was. Barlow was a Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also a Wyoming cattle rancher. He was also, briefly, the campaign manager for Dick Cheney's first run for Congress. (You did not misread that.) He spent his later years as a fixture at Davos, the World Economic Forum, where the very wealthy gather each January to remind each other that they are interesting. It was at Davos, in February 1996, fueled by champagne and grievance over the Telecommunications Act, that Barlow banged out the Declaration on a laptop and emailed it to a few hundred friends. From there it became, somehow, one of the founding documents of the modern internet.These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.Many of the pillars of "modern Internet" are here. Identity isn't a fixed concept based on government ID but is a more fluid concept. We don't need centralized control or really any form of control because those things are unnecessary.

It was this and the famous earlier "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A MagnaCarta for the Knowledge Age" that laid a familiar foundation for a lot of the culture we now have. [link]The Magna Carta is also our introduction to the (now familiar) creed of "catch up or get left behind". The adoption of new technology must be done at the absolute fastest speed possible with no regulations or checks. You don't need to worry about the consequences of technology because these problems correct themselves. If you told me the following was written two weeks ago by OpenAI I would have believed you. If this analysis is correct, copyright and patent protection of knowledge (or at least many forms of it) may no longer be unnecessary. In fact, the marketplace may already be creating vehicles to compensate creators of customized knowledge outside the cumbersome copyright/patent processThe cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Your inability to imagine a world where you don't get exactly what you want becomes a manifesto.Winner Saw It ComingSo there are dozens of these pieces and they all read the same. If you don't regulate these technologies humanity will only benefit. Education, healthcare, industry, etc. We don't need regulations because the transformation from the medium of paper to digital has transformed the human spirit. But one was extremely surprising to me. Langdon Winner wrote something almost prophetic back in 1997. You can read it here. He coins the term cyberlibertarianism (or at least is the first mention of it I could find) and then goes on to describe an almost eerily accurate set of events.In this perspective, the dynamism of digital technology is our true destiny. There is no time to pause, reflect or ask for more influence in shaping these developments. Enormous feats of quick adaptation are required of all of us just to respond to therequirements the new technology casts upon us each day. In the writings of cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the challenge are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust.

Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflatethe activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operationsof enormous, profit seeking business firms. In the Magna Cartafor the Knowledge Age, concepts of rights, freedoms, access, andownership justified as appropriate to individuals are marshaledto support the machinations of enormous transnational firms.We must recognize, the manifesto argues, that "Government doesnot own cyberspace, the people do." One might read this as asuggestion that cyberspace is a commons in which people haveshared rights and responsibilities. But that is definitely not wherethe writers carry their reasoning.What "ownership by the people" means, the Magna Cartainsists, is simply "private ownership." And it eventually becomesclear that the private entities they have in mind are actually large,transnational business firms, especially those in communications.Thus, after praising the market competition as the pathway to abetter society, the authors announce that some forms of compe-tition are distinctly unwelcome. In fact, the writers fear that thegovernment will regulate in a way that requires cable companiesand phone companies to compete. Needed instead, they argue,is the reduction of barriers to collaboration of already large firms,a step that will encourage the creation of a huge, commercial,interactive multimedia network as the formerly separate kinds ofcommunication merge.In all he lays out 4 pillars of this ideology. Technological determinism. The new technology is going to transform everything, it cannot be stopped, and your only job is to keep up. Stewart Brand's actual quote, which Winner pulls out and lets sit there like a body on display, is "Technology is rapidly accelerating and you have to keep up." There's no room to ask whether we want any of this. The wave is coming. Surf or drown.It does not occur to anyone in this discourse that 'drown' is a choice the wave is making, not a natural law. Waves do not have intentions. Destroying your livelihood and leaving you to rot isn't a requirement of the natural order as much as that would convenient. Radical individualism. The point of all this technology is personal liberation. Anything that gets in the way of the individual maximizing themselves be it government, regulation, social obligation, your annoying neighbors, is an obstacle to be removed.

Winner notes, with what I imagine was a very dry expression, that the writers of the "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" cited Ayn Rand approvingly. In 1994. As intellectual grounding. For a document about computers.There is something deeply funny about a movement claiming to invent the future and grounding its case in a Russian émigré's airport novels about steel barons in love with their own reflections.Free-market absolutism. Specifically the Milton Friedman, Chicago School, supply-side flavor. The market will sort it out. Regulation is theft. Wealth is virtue. George Gilder, who co-wrote the Magna Carta, had previously written a book called Wealth and Poverty that helped sell Reaganomics to the masses. He then wrote Microcosm, which argued that microprocessors plus deregulated capitalism would liberate humanity. He was very serious about this.Don't worry, Gilder is still out there. He loves the blockchain and crypto now. He now writes about how Bitcoin will save the soul of capitalism, which it is somehow doing while also destroying the planet. Both can be true in his cosmology. The ideology is flexible like that.A fantasy of communitarian outcomes. This is the part that should make you laugh out loud. After establishing that government is bad, regulation is theft, and the individual is sovereign, the cyberlibertarians then promise that the result of all this will be... rich, decentralized, harmonious community life. Negroponte: "It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people." Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II.We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. You have to hold these four ideas in your head at the same time to see the trick. The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane.