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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 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.
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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