There's a good argument to be made about this kind of thing. This isn't it.
The author starts out critiquing people who see connections between their own politics and technology where no such connection exists, then proceeds to ramble through a variety of tenuously connected issues, labeling anything he doesn't like the look of as "cyber-libertarianism", then segues into a piece about neoliberalism that has no obvious connection with the text that precedes it other than an attempt to rescue his argument by wrapping it in someone else's metaphor.
The really fucking annoying thing is that you can draw connections between, say, Hayek, decentralised networks and silicon valley hiring practices. You really can do this and actually be quite devastating, but the author seems to be throwing as many "boo" words in as possible (Hayek 'n' Mises, Ayn Rand because why not, the Tea Party) rather than assembling any kind of argument. He lumps Julian Assange in with the bad guy crowd, but I presume he doesn't think that leaking the activities of the US government in Iraq and around the world was some kind of right-wing plot. He says various things about the EFF, some which are true but which give an overall misleading picture by ignoring their actions which don't fit his narrative. By the time he gets to Carl Malamud, he's reduced to saying "I'm not sure he's done anything I disagree with, and I can't disagree with anything he's said, but his work is championed by libertarians so he's probably one of them".
The closing paragraphs, where he talks about general principles and values, are actually pretty good! If you ignore most of the factual claims, it's a decent article. I think the author could benefit from a slightly more nuanced and informed perspective on both the technology and the attitudes of the people who use and create it though.
After reading your comment, I agree that most of the post is a practice in guilt by association without actually getting to much actual analysis or argument.
I'm curious what you think, guilt by association arguments aside, would be "devastating" to cyber-libertarian ideas.
What we are observing right now - is technology becoming more like magic to common people, and that is disturbing.
Instead of understanding operating principles behind devices we now quantify them by few superficial quantities at best: screen size, pixels, gigahertz, amount of bytes. None of that tells you exactly what device does.
Goverment is able to deploy complex 1984 monitoring technologies without massive negative sentiment - because average person does not understand technology, direction it is going, and long term implication of such surveilance.
Amount of information available to us taught us to ignore things, so we often ignore things we do not agree with. In the age of information we have all incentives we need to stay ignorant.
And as technology continues to get more complex this will get worse, not better.
I read this entire article, and I'm still not sure what it really said. IMO the author falls into the same trap as most of the media, casting people as "leftist" or "conservative" when most take a liberal position on some issues and not on others.
What's really happening, in my opinion, is that there are people who are happy with the status quo. These people are usually doing pretty well (see Koch bros or startup millionaires.) They are politically inclined to believe in things that are in their own self-interest: for many tech geeks, that is the "freedom" of information because it sustains the belief that they can personally profit from such a situation.
You saw a lot of this with Google. For a long time, they were all about freedom of information and open source software because their mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". A key part of doing that is having access to all of the world's information. But now that they have proprietary information that is in their interest to keep to themselves, that tune of openness and transparency is changing a bit (see Google+, et al).
Many tech folks have the same thoughts about government regulation. "If only HIPAA didn't exist, I could create a universal medical records solution!" Nevermind that if the regulation didn't exist, someone would have done it a long time ago: tech people see government regulation as a limiting factor in their potential for greatness.
It's not about "left" or "right", it's about individuals who believe many different things for many different reasons. To call out "cyberlibertarians" as a unified group is disingenuous at best: net neutrality is a classic case where this falls apart. The cyberlibertarian believes in additional government regulation on telecommunications not out of a belief that government regulation is a good thing, but because they fear the loss of a profitable market that belongs to technologists. It's special-interest politics at its finest.
The author does not call people leftists or rightist, but rather associates language and causes with the left or right. He points out that cyber-libertarianism tend to use the terminology of the left ("freedom", "open"), while embracing the values of the right. Not every one on every issue, but as a pattern of behavior across many issues. The article points out that because of this language, people who otherwise identify with leftist causes end up supporting cyber-libertarian policies that further rightist causes.
I think the best thing in the article is about the different definitions of "freedom." Cyberlibertarians use "freedom" to mean "freedom from." This is quite incompatible with what many leftists,[1] might mean by "freedom," specifically the freedom of the masses to act collectively to shape their society.
[1] And indeed, many who would probably consider themselves "conservatives" in a pre-Tea Party world.
The concept of freedom can quickly become confusing, but I think the accepted terminology is that "freedom from" is negative freedom as in protections like universal healthcare. While "freedom to" is positive freedom as in expressions like absolute[-1] freedom of speech [0]. Where negative freedom is more left and positive freedom more right. You of course also have to account for the political y-axis (or similar concept [1]) i.e. the level of authoritarianism.
I think it's interesting that many of the concepts that the US prides itself on originally included negative freedom in a more prominent way than you see today [2][3][4].
[-1] Non-absolute freedom of speech can probably also be seen as a negative freedom.
In mass communication it is important to group ideas together. Some words possess no ownership. I can not describe myself as gold, because I clearly am not, but I could call myself a patriotic American. You attach words with positive connotation to yourself while tossing negative words at your opponent. The positive/negative definitions are determined by the ideology of those you are communicating to, not yourself.
In the non-political sense, we can see words like "Lite" or "Professional" attached to food or software. I can't say something is sodium free, but I can call it "Lite."
Eventually these words become meaningless because too many people have chosen to attach the words to themselves or others.
People in the United States see left and right differently than other countries. From some standpoints, the Democrats are on the right, and the Republicans just a little further.
The first "siege" on internet freedom came with the Children's Online Protection Act (COPA.) Research it if you want to know more.
Was COPA a bill to protect children from the evil's of internet pornography? Or was it a law to enable the government to suppress free speech on the internet? The law received support from the "left" and from the "right" and was signed by a Democrat President (was Bill Clinton left or right?) The Supreme Court threw the whole thing out.
Indeed, cyberlibertarians are all about decentralized power structures. The internet is actually anti-democratic in a sense, as it gives individuals direct power, not just by proxy of representative politicians or collective voting (as in a "leftist" world). Therefore it's the most classically liberal political position around. And one not to be mistaken with the authoritarian-"liberal" style generally upheld in current politics.
I really dislike the term cyberlibertarians, since it conflates a (nearly) authority-less society with the movement. We don't call people that go 250 km/h on desert highways "highwaylibertarians". Libertarians will always do what is right, regardless of the law, provided there are no consequences (and even then, they often take the risk). Right now, that is setting up TOR for people longing for unrestricted information, in the past it was smuggling black slaves from the south to Canada.
As for the confusion between democracy and freedom: The root cause of course is that many non-libertarians pattern match and see democratic country and free speech next to each other. But when they try to "democratize" Iraq or Egypt to their horror they see that despite record turn out rates even more restrictive social policies.
This is because the majority of non-libertarians fail to fully accept that democracy only establishes common wishes as a basis for legality. This in and of itself is actually undesirable. Liberalism had a history of "natural" or "negative" rights which during the expansion of the Great Society, it abandoned.
I think you're confusing modern American liberalism with classical liberalism. Despite the word "liberal", they are pretty different. The emphasis on positive rights, like the right to healthcare, is one of the major distinctions.
Actually I'm purposely mixing them. Liberalism was never as black and white as people made it out to be. Sure John Locke had a long list of reasons why natural rights should be a modern tenant of a just society, but to the average citizen the shift from classical liberalism to contemporary liberalism was a series of steps, each of which made sense.
I understand what you're saying, but the average citizen wasn't alive for both John Locke and the Great Society. I guess I disagree with there even being a shift at all. They are quite different worldviews that unfortunately share the word "liberalism".
> Right now, that is setting up TOR for people longing for unrestricted information, in the past it was smuggling black slaves from the south to Canada.
Could you possibly be more self-serving?
For the record, some libertarians think that slaveholders should have been compensated for the "theft" of their "property" and that buying out slaveholders would have been cheaper, and therefore morally superior, to fighting the civil war. There's an ugly strain of Confederate sympathizing among some outspoken libertarians: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/10/th...
I'm honestly not sure if you are a troll or not. If not, do not start conversations with "Could you possibly be more self-serving?"
Libertarians, by definition, hold liberty to be a fundamental human right. It is incompatible to advocate for slavery.
As for buying out slaves from the South: obviously that would have been cheaper AND morally superior. When States joined the union they agreed to a constitution. When the constitution was changed to end slavery several states left the union. The unionists held onto military property that was physically located in the south. They were the aggressors in the war.
I don't sympathize with the slave holders, I find them abhorrent. But when you have bank loans tied to slave ownership, the impact of legalizing slavery should be handled rationally. The number of lives lost in the civil war could have been avoided.
Lincoln's election was the trigger to the Southern attempt to secede.
Also, I think the assertion that libertarian ideals are had much to do with participation in the Underground Railroad deserves some citation. Participants include free blacks, Native Americans, certain Christian denominations (like Quakers and Wesleyans), and other abolitionists. I don't doubt they share many values with libertarians, but more obvious motivations for each type of participant come to mind than libertarian fervor.
> Liberalism had a history of "natural" or "negative" rights which during the expansion of the Great Society, it abandoned.
No, it didn't. While certainly some liberal thinkers had a view of rights as exclusively negative, that was not a universal view within liberalism long before the Great Society, and, anyhow, the acceptance of the idea of some positive rights (which isn't necessary to support of Great Society programs -- belief that government should provide things in a particular set of circumstances doesn't require viewing them as rights) does not require abandoning any belief in the existence of specified negative rights.
>belief that government should provide things in a particular set of circumstances doesn't require viewing them as rights
Except that for the government to provide things to people, it has to take them from other people, which conflicts with negative rights. You pretty much need to believe in positive rights to justify violating negative rights.
> Except that for the government to provide things to people, it has to take them from other people, which conflicts with negative rights.
No, it doesn't. It may conflict with particular concepts of negative rights, but a general right not to be taxed, for example, was never a part of the liberal consensus.
> You pretty much need to believe in positive rights to justify violating negative rights.
You seem to think that "negative rights" means a single absolute overarching negative right that the government should do nothing whatsoever effecting you. And, you know, you are entitled to view that as the proper relationship of government to the individual, but absolutely wrong to characterize that as something that was once part of liberalism that is no longer.
I can imagine sets of negative rights which allow taxation and are logically coherent, but there are none which I can imagine anyone considering useful. Can you give an example of such a set?
But I asked for usefulness, not just logical coherency. By that I meant useful in the context of your claim, which was that someone could believe in the Great Society programs without believing in positive rights. Not all logically coherent sets of beliefs are ones an actual person would hold as their only beliefs in the category.
For example, almost anyone will agree that it's bad to take a person's only food away. The (negative) right not to have one's property infringed on exists in the mind of any reasonable person, and they consider it to apply to that case, at least. Perhaps that right is overridden by something in some other cases, but what would you call the overriding something if not a positive right?
I don't think cyber-libertarianism is incompatible with direct or representative democracy. It's probably fair to say that the structure of government takes a back seat to certain expectations about what a "free" person may do in the internet age.
I also agree that cyber-libertarians would not support restrictive government regulation. But it would also not support restrictive corporate control. Effectively, it recognizes new interpretations of the rights to assembly, privacy, property, and speech (and perhaps others). I don't see how that's incompatible with "the right of people to act collectively through government". It just clarifies the implicit stipulation: "as long as natural rights are respected".
Correct. That's why it's ultimately anti-democratic and not at all attempting to adopt leftist ideals (other than maybe social freedom). Note I said "direct power" not "direct democracy" which tends to be confusing to observers.
>Indeed, cyberlibertarians are all about decentralized power structures.
This isn't really true. Libertarians are all about having many centralized power structures. You could call this "decentralized," but it's decentralized in the sense of email being decentralized -- in reality, four entities control email; in a libertarian world I doubt things would be different.
What leftists want is distributed power structures. Facebook is centralized; Email is decentralized; FreeNet[1] is distributed.
I think it'd be a lot more forthcoming for libertarians to say what they actually mean -- something like feudalism -- rather than try to lay claim to a historically leftist term[0].
> not just by proxy of representative politicians or collective voting (as in a "leftist" world)
Are you using quotes here for a reason other than to tonally denigrate leftism?
Voting and representation are hardly hallmarks of leftist political structures. The largest popular leftist movement in the United States recently (Occupy) was based entirely on direct consensus systems (not democracy) (for better or worse).
Democracy is collective action whether by direct or indirect voting. Direct power is individual action (with the implication of freedom from collective action), and is thus libertarian or classically liberal, not democratic.
OK. Your distinction between direct power and direct democracy has been clarified, so I'll set semantic considerations to the side.
I do not see why cyber-libertarianism is incompatible with direct democracy any more than a constitutional republic is. In both cases, basic rights should not (theoretically) be able to be overridden through majority votes. The difference is in what counts as a basic right.
You correctly recognize the key issue that "basic rights" are intrinsically a restriction on democracy. The question is: what counts as "basic rights"? In the U.S., we have a basic set of rights: those enumerated in the Constitution itself plus those that exist as a result of long historical practice plus those recognized by the Supreme Court based on a combination of the other two sources. In a Constitutional republic, rights aren't static, but they're slow to evolve.
Cyber-libertarianism, at least as espoused by many today, embraces a dramatically broader notion of rights. You don't just have the classic rights of Englishmen (life, liberty, and property), but the right to privacy, the right to free and anonymous exchange of information, the right to tinker with your cell phone, the right to turn your apartment into a hotel, the right to transfer money freely and anonymously, etc. Cyber-libertarians tend to believe that government should be restrained from acting unless absolutely necessary, and almost never believe that government action is necessary when it comes to cyberspace. The more rights you recognize, and the broader those rights, the narrower the scope of democratic self determination.
This viewpoint is the diametric opposite of constitutional republicanism. Under that view, government, by the will of the majority, can act so long as it does not invade certain "basic rights." Under cyber-libertarianism, the assumption is reversed. Government is barred from acting unless there is an immensely pressing justification.
Not sure I follow. Significant parts of the left see the institutions of the state as a means to the realization of democracy. Take, for instance, most socialist, social-democratic, or Left parties in contemporary Europe. They advocate for the state to take an active role in making space for democracy (for instance by legislating codetermination in the workplace) and de-commodifying labor to protect the working classes from capital. True, many leftists -- especially those in the communist and anarchist left -- have the long-term goal of abolishing the state, but that doesn't mean the institutions of the state cannot play a role in advancing some of the goals of the left in the interim. Even Nikolai Bukharin did not deny this.
That's what the author is arguing here -- that the state should not be ruled out tout court as a potential site of engagement for those seeking to realize the promises of radical democracy. The author is not saying that state already is the realization of democracy, as your paraphrase suggests.
>Cyberlibertarians across the political spectrum focus a great deal on the promotion of tools, objects, software, and policies whose chief benefit is their ability to escape regulation and even law enforcement by the state (including surveillance-avoidant technologies and applications such as Tor, end-to-end encryption, PGP and Cryptocat).
You say "escape regulation", I say "re-claim their basic human right to privacy"
The need to label everything as right and left betrays a primitive binary mentality. A more accurate designation here would be distributed vs non-distributed systems. Then we can have an intelligent conversation about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.
Also, it seems like this need to split everything right vs left is more characteristic of the older generation who are less familiar with technology. I think our generation thinks more in terms of solving problems with the best tool available-- be it the government, the market, or open source.
I got the same sense from this article. He values "cyberlibertarians" based on what they contribute to the right vs left and concludes that their contributions favor the right more. Although the distributed vs centralized argument is nothing new (see federalists vs anti-federalists in the late 18th century) it seems to have been largely absent from political discussions for a long time.
The author seems to be struggling to fit these new ideals into his liberal vs conservative world view and rather than being able to see this "free and open" movement as something different, concludes that it's a political ploy to weaken big government regulatory powers for the profit of wealthy capitalists.
It does seem that younger generations are more open to a wider variety of political ideology, but I don't think familiarity with technology has much to do with it other than the incidental fact that the internet allows people to be exposed to ideas they would probably never hear from the mass media or mainstream political debates.
I probably don't share many views in common with the author, but I think this analysis of the nature of cyberlibertarianism is brilliant and spot-on. In particular, he insightfully captures the disdain with which cyberlibertarians view democracy as well as the nature of so-called "grassroots" movements like the opposition to SOPA being part of a proxy war between big corporate content creators and big corporate content distributors.
The article is a mess, but the root of the problem is that while the article presents giving “power to the people” and "dethron[ing] authoritarians" as goals of the left in principle, in practice what the left does when it comes to power is always the opposite. Leftists may talk about believing in democracy and freedom, but these principles are incompatible with the left's overarching goal, which is promoting economic equality. Since people are inherently different, the only way to guarantee economic equality is to use state power to control people. Of course, even where leftist principles are put into practice, such as in Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, etc., the result still isn't economic equality, only a lack of freedom and general impoverishment of the most of the population.
"Democracy" and "freedom" are wholly compatible with promoting economic equality, given the understanding that "freedom" means the right of the people to exercise their will through democratic institutions.[1] If promotion of economic equality is what benefits the greatest number, then it is natural to assume that free people will exercise their will to minimize economic inequality (as they have in social democracies in Europe).
[1] To a leftist, and indeed many other people, what separates authoritarianism and free society is not the lack of someone telling you what to do, but who that someone happens to be. Arguably, a classic libertarian government is indeed authoritarian: state power is exercised pursuant to the policies of philosopher-kings who believe in a particular set of "rights" (private property, etc), not pursuant to the will of the people themselves (who may very well have different beliefs). Indeed, even as someone who isn't a leftist, I have a hard time seeing much difference between classical libertarianism and divine monarchy. Whenever I hear talk of "natural rights" I think about who kings once justified their unilateral exercise of state power by reference to divine natural law.
The obvious difference between a libertarian government and divine monarchy is in the level of authority given to the government. In a monarchy, the monarch's will is law. Under libertarian government, the government is extremely limited to only protecting a very small set of rights. You could in theory have a libertarian monarchy where a king was only given a limited authority to enforce laws related to natural rights violations, but the two concepts are very different.
A libertarian democracy of course is more desirable. Which means the people's votes, or the authority given to their representatives, would be limited to only those issues related to natural rights violations. Under a libertarian government, the people are still quite free to exercise their will, only they could not use the government to impose their will on other individuals. Social problems can still be solved through community organizations outside of the government.
I think the biggest weakness of the pure libertarian philosophy is the uncompromising defense of property rights. If a small group manages to acquire all of the property, they can use their monopoly to exploit everyone else while the government protects their "rights".
My view is this: once you bind everyone under the monopoly on violence that is government, its wrong to not let the people who are bound decide what the government should do. That's the fatal flaw of non-anarchist libertarianism to me. Its some cabal getting together to decide what "natural rights" should be then using the monopoly of violence to protect what may be their minority viewpoint. Appealing to "natural rights" is no better than appealing to "divine law." Its self-serving hand waving.
That's the old "there is no morality without God" argument. Just because rights aren't handed down on stone tablets (i.e. natural rights) doesn't mean that there are no rights. In the English tradition, rights arise from the long-standing practices and beliefs of a society. Thus, unless we have a society that embraces savagery and murder in general, it's not "just fine" for the majority to cause the genocide of a minority.
Also, what's worse: a system in which the rights of minorities may occasionally be trampled, or a system in which a minority of philosopher kings by design circumscribes the political self-determination of the majority?
Classical libertarians are in the position of arguing that self-determination (the right of a free people to structure their society as they wish) is slavery, and that the object of peoples' political freedom should be circumscribed to a narrow domain handed down by an Inner Party of philosopher kings.
The author starts out critiquing people who see connections between their own politics and technology where no such connection exists, then proceeds to ramble through a variety of tenuously connected issues, labeling anything he doesn't like the look of as "cyber-libertarianism", then segues into a piece about neoliberalism that has no obvious connection with the text that precedes it other than an attempt to rescue his argument by wrapping it in someone else's metaphor.
The really fucking annoying thing is that you can draw connections between, say, Hayek, decentralised networks and silicon valley hiring practices. You really can do this and actually be quite devastating, but the author seems to be throwing as many "boo" words in as possible (Hayek 'n' Mises, Ayn Rand because why not, the Tea Party) rather than assembling any kind of argument. He lumps Julian Assange in with the bad guy crowd, but I presume he doesn't think that leaking the activities of the US government in Iraq and around the world was some kind of right-wing plot. He says various things about the EFF, some which are true but which give an overall misleading picture by ignoring their actions which don't fit his narrative. By the time he gets to Carl Malamud, he's reduced to saying "I'm not sure he's done anything I disagree with, and I can't disagree with anything he's said, but his work is championed by libertarians so he's probably one of them".
The closing paragraphs, where he talks about general principles and values, are actually pretty good! If you ignore most of the factual claims, it's a decent article. I think the author could benefit from a slightly more nuanced and informed perspective on both the technology and the attitudes of the people who use and create it though.