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 frequently take as right-wing of social freedom, the of government, and the of while what is to the political of In doing so they an in the view that digital technology is our existing social structures so that we have no about or not to them, and that these are if good for democracy. too many these and outside of the technology we let what they call technology take the and let social institutions like governments up and and to what technology has only if they to at of digital approach to social has been the of many of the best of the and of digital culture, especially From to and especially his All by of and The to of Freedom and in these from Winner, Barbrook and and we who they are working toward with or a vision of who by the of digital technology and their social into technological ones, without reflection on these are in fact no for an of this than to whose of technology the of was and directly by might even a that the of and has some kind of it is hard to how these effects are much more than It is even to of the of the should our talking about of the that may be or is a from the kind of social justice with the rights of the to the and of one of the most of the first of the one that primarily to serve the of of with the and of a Further, the and lack of engagement with the immediate social often thought to be of this kind of technology are from the and values of the Yet from the the radical to the by from from toward other and their into the what almost like its The would be less remarkable if it not the on the between the two the obvious lack of fit between of social activism and digital in a whose to this on of the rights and much of activism was on the notion that democratic is and should be the of social both in terms of the rights of which democracy will to and the to principles that in the United States are found in the and of as might best be the in the of This focus on equality has long been as one of the principles of politics, its principle, from the on rights and public to the demands for economic equality across the the social of the equality in its various forms was a that was hard to and was in fact the of the many that these social digital enthusiasts an between these and the of digital technology, and it is no that the technology that them most often was one or another of what to be called the personal with and is in to the claims of the personal computing power in the of when it until been to the and governments certainly seems to and no is in some ways, with or even a of hard not to and or and Paul as who use available at to not only themselves but other in their That does not necessarily mean they or some of the to which what they were would be put to let alone that they themselves would be its what is striking about cyberlibertarianism is the way that it does not but insists a utopian social on the one hand, on the other to one of the most and in this sense, and in the of that has in some of the economic and even social in the United and to some for at least one The of social has to the of and and it in some way important to the Silicon to insist on its social even as it to many of the that the social to In fact hard to the from each other, so that in many cases when to Silicon as simply and not projects of social we are often of and these from and for the of being part of should one would be to they are so with the values with the of are far more in the context of right-wing rather than political It is these values, and the that them, that cyberlibertarianism, which as for what it aside as for what it who would themselves of right-wing politics in general and political in find themselves rights and economic freedom, as the to all social and the rights of companies like to do exactly as they while causes like public the social and especially proper regulation of or aside This is how cyberlibertarianism not as much by politics, as by the terms of discourse and the so that only variations in political ever on the and all are under a general that digital technology is things and Cameron that what they call the "Californian simultaneously the of and the of This is only a nearly belief in technological with that technological belief that digital technology is leading toward political the politics of cyberlibertarianism is an that the means to radical and ideas about technological "The Californian Barbrook and an of a of and economic up with of technological context in which that is one built and by thus even the and digital are to especially when these are not as we like and even "free and others all have clear in and to important of right-wing political are frequently as if they point in the advocates strongly not just to these but to any foundational for the at is especially because like all libertarian it in the of an or freedom that of in values like and equality while at the same time strongly against all of the structures and institutions that democracies to those For example, the phrase is one with wide in cyberlibertarian and to the it can sound as if it must to advocacy for and rights in digital it may mean this, but in its the phrase meant something else it meant the idea that copyright and should have very different on computers than of them, and even the that the to of without to their was in some way with The for this movement was always which was as an which has the idea that especially and should have in their Even of (e.g., very little to the view that rights might have any grounding in or relationship to To the the in the word rights in this context is used to the line between the narrow and of rights in terms of of the wider of rights in the way, and other projects are put and as if they are the of the anticopyright and the of and other of are the ones to be in of the of are or for from to who to their rights to be for work are to in the of a very idea of while the like and others who arguments about the of who to be for their work are and just as would be to suggest that the of and and the work of are part of some to direct toward an let alone one in which those have a To be even much of their use may be of like that have developed relatively for which it is to say that no is the of arguments in favor of and other forms of the best critical account of this that in those do a It is also the that companies that have that directly from to others and its may do a to these even more the of and "free" these is broader than the or of those who is part of like and for the that have direct with are of such as are with like the the at and the by are only more than like the and the that have more even capital does use of and from all of these All of these and many and the many by them, no how much there may be in at least some of those who them, are characterized by the power they have to a dogma that will no and that by of against who against to which these Yet when those point in precisely the of the values they seem to we must be much more to for how they fit into more widely and more widely of those It cannot be to that there are things called and that by of the sound of that they are part of and between of and the in the of must be clear the arguments can be the function of cyberlibertarian discourse is to demands for these seem at least if not them being anything the of for us to this from The of to be by the of in by the of

Sociology · History · Philosophy · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Capital and Networks · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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