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Notes -
What do you think about cyberlibertarianism?
Cyberlibertarianism is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the internet should be fully unrestricted and ungoverned. The idea coalesced in the 1990s when the consensus on tech was far more optimistic.
I think it's a beautiful, unattainable ideal. It symbolizes (more than libertarianism) a broader absolute freedom and physical transcendence, to realize whatever you dream. But in reality, absolute freedom is impossible, power hierarchies are inevitable, and the internet is a physical construct that can be seized (on the other end of the spectrum, individuals and companies bypass without consequence internet restrictions like copyright, even in repressive countries via complex VPN setups). Intersectionally, the internet has led to good (e.g. long-distance communication with friends/family) and bad (e.g. asociality and toxicity from social media); should it be as unregulated as today if individuals and groups won't stop themselves from negative spirals (which may anyways lead to future violence and restrictions)?
Cyberlibertarianism's Origins
The ideas of cyberlibertarianism have been described in Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, Alvin Toffler, 1994) and A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (John Perry Barlow, 1996).
Basically to summarize the latter, it begins with
and includes statements like
Langdon Winner's "foresight"
The actual term "cyberlibertarianism" first appeared in Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community (Langdon Winner, 1997).
I think this is a good read. In a sea of cyberlibertarian idealism and optimism, Winner was realistic and pessimistic. He actually defines cyberlibertarianism in detail, then predicts how it will be adopted and warped, in practice, with outcomes.
Specifically, Winner defines cyberlibertarianism by breaking it into four sub-beliefs:
Then he pivots to realism with this (IMO) excellent paragraph
In the remainder, Winner successfully predicts that cyberlibertarian dogma will lead to:
Winner didn't have extreme foresight, just observation. These "predictions" had already began: the television industry (e.g. CNN) was already large and influencing the zeitgeist to further its interests, toxic online communities had already started forming (e.g. Usenet), and local stores were already being replaced (e.g. by Amazon). Winner also looked at historical literature on philosophy, economics, and politics.
The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism
This blogpost showed up on Hacker News and inspired my post.
tl;dr: the author of this rambling blogpost describes the evolution of the internet under cyberlibertarianism (the dominant viewpoint in its early years), then criticizes cyberlibertarianism using the problems of today's internet.
I don't really like it: it's full of ad hominems, meaningless analogies, and overconfident claims (especially about other's thoughts). But it's somewhat informative, and I agree with the underlying ideas: cyberlibertarianism is naively optimistic, hence today's internet has failed to reach its full expectations.
The underlying wrench in the works for cyberlibertarianism is spam. This is a fundamental problem that messes with the very notion of free speech. This was true even before LLMs, though obviously the problem is much worse now.
In case it’s not clear how this is related, consider trying to run a website like this one according to cyberlibertarian ideals: ideally, the website would be distributed somehow, not hosted on a centralised server where whoever is paying the bill has arbitrary control over what happens on the site. Each participant on the network would contribute some minor amount of resources for storing messages, and messages would be synced by having the peers talk to each other. But what do you do when someone spams the network with terabytes of messages? You say "Ok, well let’s put a rate limit for each user" alright, the spammer makes new accounts and uploads at the max rate for each account as fast as they can create accounts. You say "Ok, well let’s limit account creation." But how? Who decides whether you’re allowed to make an account or not?
With the advent of blockchain, I actually do think there are some answers here—you can bind account and post creation to payment on a blockchain, and that will cull the spam. But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition, but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?
And this isn’t even touching on the fact that building decentralised systems is really hard compared to building a typical centralised website. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a bit of grit can make their own website. But making your own decentralised system requires you to be a legit 140+ IQ big brain who knows the arcanery of software engineering inside and out.
For these reasons, the ideal is rarely pursued, and even when it is, it’s in clunky ways that don’t provide the "full service" experience you get with centralised software. For example, torrents are decentralised, but they don’t address the very-much-relevant question of "where do you get the metadata for the torrent you want in the first place?" And answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay," where you get the regular old whac-a-mole dynamics of law enforcement seizing domain names and issuing warrants while the devs run off to some Pacific island and register a new domain there (and the US government will promptly bribe the local government to close the domain and arrest the devs, which may or may not work—they tend to just take the bribe money and not actually do what was asked, so you have to resort to aggressive negotiations, yada yada, but I digress)
Proof-of-work was invented specifically to solve this problem, and it did. Sybil attacks are not a fatality.
We can own purely digital goods now.
That hasn't been true for more than two decades. Magnet links date back to 2002. And we have far more sophisticated things like IPFS or eth.limo now.
Dapps are not the future, they're the present. Hyperliquid moves hundreds of millions of dollars every day and it completely decentralized. This isn't the 2010s anymore.
I agree in spirit, but in practice, I've gotta disagree. Many of the services you name aren't really decentralised: they're riding on venture capital, masquerading as decentralised systems, and in my estimation is there is no serious technical model to survive beyond the "subsidised by venture capital" phase.
SInce that's what I was referencing, Hyperliquid has famously no VC equity whatsoever. And 2025 numbers are ~$843M in revenue on $2.95T of trading volume.
I think your view of the sector is a few years out of date really. This is still true of a lot of small projects, but we're way past the point where crypto is just VC moonshots. Now it's just another part of "serious" finance. Which is where the real worry actually is: established actors like Circle pulling the ladder behind them with regulation.
IPFS is riding on venture capital. HL is not decentralised: it’s just a normal centralised gambling platform, where blockchain is as relevant as the stones in stone soup.
Flatly wrong claims are not an argument.
HL is a smart contract run by a foundation. It legally has very little to do with a custodial platform.
And IPFS is a decade old open source protocol. The viability of protocol labs is as irrelevant to it as the viability of Rainberry to BitTorrent.
You may have had a point if I said Filecoin. I did not.
That was not my claim. Look, I'm aware of the smoke and mirrors behind all this, I don't care to discuss it further.
Technically true while de facto not true at all. The only way to connect IPFS to any relevant degree of real-world usage is via a domain owned by Protocol, otherwise you have to run an IPFS daemon locally, which nobody does. Like, I'm literally a software nerd and I have never met one person in my entire life who has done this (besides me, and that was only to try it out and be annoyed with how comically inefficient it was before turning it off and deleting it). Contrast that with torrents -- even many non-technical people I know who couldn't program their way out of a Python tutorial use torrents!
Dogma is no more an argument than ignorance, and nobody knows how U.S. v. Storm's 1a implications are going to be fully decided.
Once again it just sounds like you're talking to me from decades ago.
Most nodes run in browser like essentially all dapp infrastructure. Only nerds think about installing their own client anymore.
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I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums, since normal libertarianism doesn't argue that people and companies should be unable to trespass unwanted guests and intruders in their owned buildings.
In your home, you can kick out people for any reason. You don't like their hair, you think they suck too much at Mario Party, and yes, because you don't like something they said or they were too loud or they wouldn't shut up. Why shouldn't that be the same rights to your privately owned internet forum?
This is what I call the "mandated friend" issue. Your friend choosing to not hang out with you after you called his mom a whore isn't a free speech issue, they're exercising their own right to association which is an associated right of free speech. Free speech does not mandate you a friend.
It's when government gets involved, as the party that claims a monopoly over violence and whose every action is subtly backed with that potential violence in the background, that rights start to be violated. Bad individuals use violence from time to time too, whether a bar fight or a political assassination, but those are not accepted and they get arrested and charged. It is government that asserts a monopoly on force.
Most free speech complaints in the western democracies nowadays are mandated friend style complaints, government does get involved at points, sometimes overtly bullshit but these tend to stick out because they're relatively rare now.
It's not merely a matter of moderation -- in the traditional tech model, there's actually only one governance system: absolute monarchy. Whoever controls the server controls the forum, and that's the end of it. They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want. I'd wager this level of power is not what anyone actually wants out of a discussion forum. The reason everything is built this way isn't because people want it this way, but because it's easy to build.
The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.
For what it's worth, even centralised platforms targeted at technical users often do have some level of mitigation to monarchal power here: for example, on Github (or any similar service), you can upload your SSH public key to the service and sign your commits. This means it's literally not possible for /u/spez to use his control over the platform to make malicious edits in your name, because he doesn't have your private key. (Well, there's a lot of asterisks here... but I'll spare the pedantry).
I'm not sure that actually matters too much. Most people are not going to use sites where such explicit abuse is constantly being done and Spez faced a lot of backlash over it, and the bad PR forced him to apologize.
Sure there might be some abuse in small communities but major ones will shy away from it as they currently do. The risk is just too great to constantly employ. Abuse can happen, especially thanks to the Network Effect. But still at the end of the day they can only step down a little bit before most people start to leave.
Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn. And once they have that power, they can abuse that power. Except for the whole market thing.
And if you want alternative types of communities because you personally don't trust the mainstream as hosts or you're the type of rare rare niche where no one is boycotting for you, you can also just go make your own and go to them. Like say, TheMotte! I heard that's a site that some people use for a specific niche.
Aren't free markets neat? Without government regulations to tell you otherwise (enforced through violence), you really can just go build your own theme park with blackjack and hookers if you want.
Not really. There’s technically child porn stored in the bits of the Bitcoin blockchain, and there’s no way to remove it, yet this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I was honestly kind of shocked that no major government tried to use this as an excuse to prosecute anyone running Bitcoin as a trafficker of child porn, because this is in a literal sense technically true.
Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!
The issue here is that there is material that general society agrees on removing even in the US, which is one of the most open and free speech focused nations like the aforementioned child porn. That Bitcoin gets away with it on some technical issues doesn't mean that the world is going to be happy if this becomes the default of the internet and pedophiles are spreading around undeletable images.
There's also of course, stuff that people want to delete of themselves. Accidently posted a nude selfie of yourself from your phone instead of the pic of your dog? People are gonna want to delete that, not have it enshrined forever in the public eye. There's also stuff like trade secrets, and copyright. Piracy is already a major issue for creators today, companies are not going to embrace a widespread system where everything is permanent and takedowns are impossible. Or about how lies that cross the line into legally defamatory material? Gotta figure out a way for courts to order it removed.
There has to be a way to remove things, and once there is a way to remove things that way can be abused. "You can choose to not see the child porn or copyrighted material" isn't going to make society or companies happy.
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Oh great, I just got a spam email that hacked one of my email accounts to send me "pay us bitcoin or we send your naughty browsing history to everyone" blackmail attempt.
I don't have a camera and microphone attached to my PC so I laugh to scorn your clumsy efforts at "we took control and recorded you self-abusing to disgusting porn", criminals!
But these idiots want to make it even easier for criminals to scare money out of the gullible, and more importantly, clog up the inboxes of those of us who don't care if the world sees our perverted kinks history?
No, thank you. That's like the "all drugs of whatever sort should be legal and available without limit" notion, only considered a good idea by those who don't have to deal with the kinds of people who want to take all sorts of drugs all day long and/or deal in same.
I live in a locale in which hard drugs are illegal and simultaneously there are addicts all over some regions of the nearest major city. There are trash strewn druggie encampments and Hep C infected shit everywhere. It is pure anarcho-tyranny.
Given wide scale non-enforcement, I'd like it to be officially legal. Or I'd like actual enforcement.
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Also this kinda super libertarian internet ethos essentially means you've gotta boot the elderly and mentally impaired off it. I'd get it if the internet was wholly an artistic and communicative realm for nerds but the second you move commercial functions on it you need guardrails or it's an absolute PVP mess.
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What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!
People are too used to everything on the internet being "free". Many people who might be associated with cyberlibertarianism in truth really want cybersocialism.
But in the long run, if the internet is indeed to retain some degree of liberty instead of being turned into a state-controlled panopticon, more granular and automated models of actually paying for what you want are going to become the norm, or else we will drown in ads and spam as you correctly pointed out.
Everyone, since again as you correctly pointed out, public and free spaces will be utterly destroyed by bots sooner or later.
I'm not saying it should be free, but your power level should definitely not be proportional to your real-world wealth. If you want that system, there's no reason for cyber libertarianism in the first place: just play in the existing system, which already works that way.
The compute cost of good-faith contributors in a forum like this is a rounding error from zero. In a space where people share media, it could be non-zero, but I still think it's small. Cost only really becomes relevant in the presence of bad-faith actors (i.e., spammers). PoW is one method of mitigation, but it's not the only one. For example, making a space invite-only basically renders spam a moot problem, The problem then of course is how do you get an invite in the first place? Perhaps you could make the invite request PoW, relative to the current spam pressure on applications or something,
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Yeah, Duggan is imo 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with ideology - today's social media is anything but cyberlibertarian anyway - and everything to do with what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever: Before, if you grew up in a crackpot community you might literally be unaware of the viability of alternative viewpoints well into your teens. Same deal for the relatively ubiquitous benign moderate religious communities. I've grown up in the latter, and we still had plenty of crackpots, too. Not to mention that Duggan seems like the kind of person who would like to just generally ban any speech to the right of Bernie Sanders.
I think unfortunately, this also goes the other way. Misinformation is also much easier to get, giving us the toaster fucker problem:
"Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers."
'Man wakes up in 2040, tells his friend "I want to fuck a toaster". The friend replies "You know you can just order a sexbot, right? I really don't want to know about the details."'
I mean with AI we're prettymuch already there in terms of art and fiction. Which is probably enough considering I've heard sufficient stories of 'person with massive boner for X fetish art/writing actually tries X fetish and squicks ungodly hard' on the internet
Whoosh... (see also and from 1:10 onwards)
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“Look, it’s been over 30 years since the show ended. Let it go.”
Obligatory.
Also extremely impressive considering it predates any non-research AI models by at least half a decade or more.
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The EFF and their dreams of a digital frontier were both right and wrong. Right in that it was a frontier, right in that it did create a new world, wrong in that the new world wasn't one of anarchy, wrong that its tether to realspace didn't allow it to survive as an independent entity.
I've expanded on this idea before, but all politics are ultimately totalitarian. In this sense the lover of liberty has a duty to fight a vain and unending war on all attempts at control. What may be called cyberlibertarianism is just one more battle, one that was, as all battles for liberty, ultimately lost.
Now we fight a new fight, one of cypherpunks against totalizing surveillance and enforcement. One that we will most likely lose too. With our only solace being the fact that total power is ultimately self defeating. And that what few cracks we create may grow large and destroy our enemies long after we are all dead.
Take whichever sides you want. But man's lust for freedom isn't hypocritical, it is, if anything, tragic.
When I was younger, this seemed a fun sort of ideal. Now that I'm older, it sometimes seems like the only thing keeping our moderate-trust society from falling into a low-trust society is that digital everything makes the verify in "trust but verify" cheap.
A few decades back you'd see "no out of town checks" because nobody knew if your bank out of state existed. Today, merchants (maybe excepting tradesmen who have other recovery options and dislike merchant fees) often dislike checks and prefer credit cards, where the system can verify available balance before completing the transaction. The technology is certainly fallible in its own ways, but better than poorly-trained human operators is a low bar. That said, the line between "high-trust" and "totalitarian panopticon" isn't completely clear in my mind, and people occasionally call out analog high-trust societies as stifling and such.
You misunderstand the nature of high trust. In a high trust society, the panopticon is unnecessary and useless, because people do the right thing when nobody is watching. This is why the shopping cart test is what it is, because defection is consequence free.
Totalitarian regimes are inherently low trust, because the infrastructure is always built around the idea that power is unsecure and must guard itself against enemies.
"If we don't spy on everyone, people will take advantage" is not something Singaporeans or Swiss or Japanese would say about their neighbors. In fact the opposite would be their reaction, incensed indignation and disgust that someone would dare disobey the law.
I think I'd push back on that: the general examples of high-trust societies that get brought out are often either totalitarian (by American standards) and/or have very different (looser) privacy norms than Americans are used to. Singapore bans chewing gum, and is happy enough to cane tourists caught being mischievous with spray paint in ways I suspect apply to locals too. The Nordics require a degree of financial transparency that would at least make most Americans I know a bit uncomfortable. And most of these also depend heavily on distributed public stigma for violating social norms in ways that look rather like a panopticon.
I have occasionally called out Singapore as proof-of-concept that you could do totalitarianism with a neoliberal aesthetic (in the way that Nazism is totalitarianism with a right-wing nationalist aesthetic and Soviet communism is totalitarianism with a socialist aesthetic).
The amount of Singaporean life that is controlled by the state is much higher than the western right-wingers who stan the place for the strong law enforcement and lack of redistribution would accept. As well as things like chewing gum bans, there is:
If we accept the definition of totalitarianism as "nothing outside/against the state" and the existence a sliding scale from liberal pluralism to totalitarianism, I would say that Singapore is the second most totalitarian rich country after Saudi.
Maybe it's some other right-wingers you're talking about, but it all looks alright to me, mate.
If anything it's the neoliberals who seem like LARPers to me. They're all like "look at all the meritocracy and race-mixing", but have no stomach for the death penalty and corporal punishment. Like please, the same people who pearl-clutch over Bukele want to play Lee Kuan Yew stans?
All the LKW stans I've known have either been right-wing or (very confused) libertarians.
Recently-ish, a bunch of Elite Human Capitals started acting like he's Their Guy.
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You realize he said Swiss, not Swedish?
Switzerland is not exactly famous for its financial transparency; rather the opposite, actually, though the reality is a lot more nuanced these days (truly anonymous secret Swiss bank accounts no longer exist).
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Yeah I notice this isn't totalitarianism.
Americans just think loose morals are inversely correlated with the man crushing you with his boot because they get their political science from Harry Potter and Star Wars. They just get this silly aesthetic sense that social conservatism but harder is what totalitarian means. Or worse, that any form of government that isn't Republican automatically qualifies.
But when I say totalitarian, I actually mean it like Mussolini did: in the "nothing outside the State" sense, whatever "the State" happens to be in the given society.
It doesn't look at all like a panopticon because it specifically involves the individual and his freedom of choice. Social enforcement is always going to happen unless one is a crazy Rousseauan that wants to dissolve society altogether. The conflict is precisely whether the enforcement is through the means of individuals and their pleasure, or that of a centralized authority that is all-powerful and ultimately denies individual wills.
I shall remind you that libertarians, a fortiori cyber-libertarians, believe in freedom of association.
Right; caning is merely draconian, not totalitarian. Totalitarianism is about scope of control, not so much the penalties for violating controls. Banning chewing gum is a more totalitarian than caning for vandalism.
Social conservatism can certainly be totalitarian; think of a stifling system where everyone's life is basically plotted out for them by others, everyone has a place and every place a person. Could be religious, could be patriarchical, could be feudal.
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