The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

I was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them.

In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph:

> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. The author of the linked post might say that this has to do with the need for moderation (indeed this is a big surprise from the 1996 point of view, as there were still unmoderated Usenet groups that people used regularly and enthusiastically, and spam was a recent invention).

I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous. I was going to say that it was self-selected for intellectualism but I know that early Internet participants were often not particularly scholarly or intellectually sophisticated (some of our critics like Langdon Winner, quoted here, or Phil Agre, were way ahead on that score).

So, I might say it was self-selected in terms of people who admired some forms of communicative institutions, maybe like people whose self-identity includes being proud of spending time in a library or a bookstore, or who join a debate club. (Both of those applied to me.) This is of course not quite the same thing as intellectual sophistication.

People were mean to each other on the early Internet, but ... some kind of "but" belongs here. Maybe "but it was surprising, it wasn't what they expected"? "But it wasn't what they thought it was about"?

Nowadays "humane" feels especially surprising as a description of an aspiration for online communications. It's kind of out the window and a lot of us find that our online interactions are much less humane that what we're used to offline. More demonization of outgroups, more fantasies of violence against them, more celebration of violence that actually occurs, more joy that one's opponents are suffering in some way. (I see this as almost fully general and not just a pathology of one community or ideology.)

I'm troubled by this both because it's unpleasant and even scary how non-humane a lot of Internet communities and conversation can be, and because it's jarring to see Barlow predict that specific thing and get it wrong that way. Many other things Barlow was optimistic about seem to me to have actually come to pass, although imperfectly or sometimes corruptly, but not this one.

Also old enough to have been pre-internet:

> Paper maps were absolutely horrible…

No, and still not horrible. I jeep a trucker's atlas in my van for road trips. Siri and Google Maps (Gigi, we call her) don't seem to realize I want to stay on interstates making distance. Wandering some two-lane country road diagonally through Kansas might save me 10 minutes but having oncoming traffic and the possibility of a rock into the windshield (or worse)—not worth it.

I plan my routes with the paper map.

> 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…

That does not ring a bell at all with me. Sure, I'd call and someone wasn't home, but that was the end of it. If someone else answered, it was "Hey, have them give me a call…" And of course answering machines became a thing…

You know, there was just generally less of an urgency to get a hold of someone then.

And you know what sucks now? Someone able to get a hold of you whenever, wherever. (Unless I go out of my way to shut off my device.)

I used to laugh at a family member and spouse. They were early mobile phone adopters and I watched them call one another constantly with, "When are you going to be home?" I finally commented, "You know what would have happened if you had not called? They would have just shown up in 10 minutes or whatever."

Urgency, expectations… too high these days.

> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.

Except for creating portable playlists, sure.

Anyway. <rant off>

> examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech

Would that it were so.

Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or "protect children", and then entrench oneself as the status quo while authoring or suggesting legislation to raise a moat against any competitors that might newly start up. PayPal, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and others tried this. Backpage and e-gold are unsuccessful examples of the same strategy.

Look, I agree with a good part of this article. I also agree that the whole "unregulated internet" is terrible for humankind in general. Crypto is a scam. Meta should be, plain and simple, shut down. Twitter is a madhouse. The list is endless.

However, every single time I feel like stricter regulation should be in place, a congressman speaks about "servers"... and yeah, maybe not.

Dunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.

> 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.

Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay.

First off, GPS-guided trips had not yet eroded people's sense of direction because they did not yet exist.

Second of all, the (odd-numbered) interstate(s) that flow from Michigan to Florida are large and feature many prominently-placed, large signs with large, readable fonts. Even if you exit to a state road, those roads are littered with interstate signs for dozens of miles that will direct you back to the interstate, using words like "North" and "South" which are displayed in large bold lettering.

It's one thing to ignore all those signs because the voice in your Iphone is actively telling you a different thing. It's quite another for those signs and your paper map to be your only known sources of truth, and to steadfastly ignore all of them until you have to pull over and go to sleep.

In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

Edit for the "directionless" iphone-directed youngsters:

* Signs on the interstate in the 90s came with industrial lighting, as they do today. You can read them in the middle of the night

* Signs on state/county/municipal roads were painted to be highly readable even with the comparatively puny headlight strength of the 1990s

* This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.

A good example of this is the mythological way people think often about cryptography imo, as a guarantor of an individual's privacy against the prying eyes of the state, etc.

But the reality is that your usual cryptographic circuit (TLS connection) is just that, a circuit, a cordoning of space off for an interaction between two or more parties. The interaction inside that circuit can be very highly exploitative indeed, i.e., you can now apply for payday loans, gamble, ingest anti-human propaganda online, without anyone around you knowing anything about it.

Which is not to say that cryptographic technology might not broadly be a positive but it's inane to think that all social problems could continually be solved with more code and more cryptography. It has arguably been a key driver of enhanced financialization and militarization of daily life in its current iteration.

> Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.

This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :)

I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone.

As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to look far to see how that is at least harming democracy around the globe. For democracy to flourish you need reflective voters who can entertain multiple viewpoints and make informed decisions. That is what social media - in its most common current form - discourages and rather optimizes for attention-time (which is money).

And of course (some) anonymity paired with global reach would not bring out the best in people. Anger and flames spread faster than conciliatory messages and get you more dopamine posting those.

Just my $0.02.

While I don't necessarily agree that cyberspace should have no regulations, the way we think about regulating cyberspace must be different from the way we think about regulating anything else, because there's no specific place where an event happens.

In the traditional 18th-century nation state model, events always happen somewhere, and it's the government with jurisdiction over that piece of land which decides whether those events are legal or not.If they want those events to stop, they use their monopoly on violence in that place to arrest you and make you stop. This basically doesn't work in cyberspace.

You can't steal candy from a store in Romania without physically being in Romania. This gives Romanian authorities the ability to arrest anybody who steals candy from Romanian candy stores, which makes their anti-theft law enforceable. In cyberspace, things are not so simple. If a German employee of a company incorporated in Delaware with servers in Northern Virginia uses company resources to DeDoS a Slovenian competitor, which prison should they rot in? Who should set the sentence? There's no answer here without unacceptable tradeoffs.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger with crypto, AI and drones. It's already possible for. Russian to coordinate a network of American spies, paying handsomely for their service, without ever falling in reach of American law enforcement. With drones, they'll soon be able to do the spying (or the assassinations) themselves.

I would be extremely surprised if we don't see a terrorist attack in the next 10 years where the culprits have never set foot in the country the attack happens in.

>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.

And then the wolves ate your mules, your wife died of disentery, and you got raped by a grizzly bear. I remember those days too, and all those Oregon Trail kids showed up and ruined it all.

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries.

I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.

They simply scaled until their principles became inconvenient, and then they stopped mentioning them. That's Google and "Don't be Evil".

I get that the information produced and consumed online does has a profound effect on how we think. But right now I need to point out a steady gripe of mine that may or may not be tangential to the author's points depending on how you view things.

There is something unsettling about how the disjunctive experience that digital media environments produce is romantically portrayed. I think we need to get over the concept of things like "cyberspace". There are no corners of the internet that you "inhabit". "Digital gardening" can go too. Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way. At least I can't form a strong argument to support why...yet. But I think this way of thinking is psychologically detrimental. Go debate a dualist and let me know how it goes.

"Saving the internet" may require that we adopt a realist perspective on what the internet is. You are exchanging data. There's more to it, I'm sure, and the effect of this exchange shouldn't be taken for granted.

This is an over simplification, but I think it's a start.

I mean...Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Palantir, Flock are information technology companies, right? I can get a little obtuse and say that this is the case for most companies involved in the transfer of content of all kinds from one place to another.

Tech companies are lawnmowers and the internet is not where your lawn is. Don't expect either to help you touch or cut your grass.

In the print era, distribution was the bottleneck. The sheer amount of plant needed to produce a book or newspaper was impressive. The equipment needed for TV broadcasting was huge and expensive. In the high-speed Internet era, attention is the bottleneck. There's far more content than anyone can absorb.

At last, anyone can talk. Now it's all about finding people to listen. The implications of this shift were not forseen.

Yes, and this is the paradox right at the heart of 'Hacker' in 'Hacker News' aka an arbitrary usurping of established norms - notably without moral impetus.

Institutionalists view the very word 'Hacker' as 'Wrong' because they're essentially 'Rule Breakers'.

But sometimes rules are bad, and need to be broken.

Libertarians view rules as constraints, so why not break them?

More often than not, rules are there fore a reason. (Obviously it's complicated)

There's a huge grey area there but what is not grey ... is the issue of the 'morally neutral' impetus that the author is talking about - the seed of which is right at the root of 'Hacker'.

YC does not say 'build something useful and beneficial' - they say 'build something useful'.

Aka no moral impetus towards the greater good.

'Build a gear that is useful to other gears, without concern for what the gears are actually doing'.

It seems benign when there's no power involved - aka startups.

But it's not benign when there's huge concentration of power.

That system leads to endemic competition - which - at the highest levels is economic warfare, or even actual warfare.

There is no flattening in these systems - those things end up in Feudal Power Structures - everyone 'somewhere on the pyramid'.

If you're 'under Musk' right now - anywhere (and that includes literally almost every VC for whom it's too risky to say anything critical, or so many people in finance tangentially related to $1.5T IPO, or business etc) - you dare not speak out against him.

That's the opposite of 'flat or decentralized' - it's just power without democratic impetus, techno authoritarianism, which is paradoxically the thing they seem to lament.

> This is how "don't tread on me" becomes "Meta should be allowed to do whatever it wants."

> This is how the rights of the lone hacker working in their garage become indistinguishable from the rights of a multinational with a market cap larger than most countries' GDP.

This is the strongest point in the article, in my opinion. The cyberlibertarian ideals make more sense when you look at then from the perspective of the lone hacker. They are fundamentally different from trillion dollar corporations and should not be treated the same way.

> Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over.

> Cyberlibertarianism was the ladder. Once they were on the roof, they kicked it away and started charging admission to look at the view.

Agreed. This is a real hypocrisy.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

A lot of the problems have stemmed actually from a lack of freedom, not too much of it (all of the issues created by the "fantasy of cyberauthoritarianism", rather)

I have a suspicion most Libertarians are actually something else but who haven't realized it yet. When you really dig into it: idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them). The pre-colonial indigenous structures of managing societies were much more aligned with my internal values but they are poorly defined in modern vernacular and we don't have a good "common vocabulary" to talk about how we might want to do things in a different way.

Irrespective of anything else, I think libertarians of any kind have to contend with that Corporations can be extremely powerful entities that can be just as bad as governments. At the very least, setting their sights on governments alone seems terribly inconsistent and incorrect. In no small part because megacorps can yield governments in their favor, and by the point they're extremely powerful megacorps, the libertarian calls against regulation (yielded by megacorps against interests of the population) tend to fail.

But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.

For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.

Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.

(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)

---

I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.

A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.

The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)

There's a strong overlap between technopositivists who view the world through a very narrow lens of the problems they are trying to solve and libertarians who also have a very narrow view based on problems they are trying to solve(taxation, fettered liberty, gov waste, etc).

I don't want to say it's autism, but they both seem to stem from a very low-dimensional understanding of the world. I get it, having been in both camps in the 90s/early 2000s. I got a reminder of it the other day when I saw Benn Jordan pimping anarchism on his YouTube channel. It reminds me of how I thought of the world as a teenager before I understood the nuances and trade-offs of reality.

It's really hard for me to understand an adult who thinks that way. Anarchism and to some degree libertarianism are both heavily tilted towards the strong and any sort of lack of government authority and coercion will soon be replaced with private entities acting far worse. I wish it were not that way, but that is the universe we find ourselves in.

Any human movement at scale is bound to become corrupt really quickly. I say that as someone who was both de-banked and de-cryptoed for noticing the corruption and doing everything by the book.

My belief is that any centralized, collective attempt to fix anything related to politics will only ever create more problems.

The only thing that works is chaos. We should embrace chaos and disobedience.

Note that at least Negroponte (mentioned in the article once) also had Epstein ties. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media...

This just shows you can be right, you can have convincing arguments for why you're right but unless people listen, you will not change anything.

I wonder how Winner feels about all of this.

The title could have dropped the prefix “cyber” and still have been accurate.

> 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.

This is where I fundamentally don't align with the author's perspective. To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?

The author points towards real problems, certainly, but they're problems because they prevent otherwise great new things from being even more amazing. Would I prefer it if apps that give me interesting photos and videos on-demand had fewer dark patterns and better moderation policies? Yes, that'd be nice.

> I was young enough that I also thought "Snow Crash" was a serious political document.

Is snow crash worth reading in 2026? I bought it forever ago and it’s sitting in my shelf

> Radical individualism

I grew up in the U.S. and was programmed apparently to think of this as a virtue. (Rugged individualism was an early variant.)

As I have become older, visited other countries, I see how selfish that is. I put community above individualism now.

> Free-market absolutism

Yeah, never been on board with that one.

I don't think I've ever been a Libertarian of any stripe. And probably even less so as I get older.

> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.

Sea Story:

- Background: US Navy ships go alonside an oiler to refuel and hold a course/speed at restricted maneuvering for a while. Hours, even.

After this nerve-wracking time period, when breaks away from the oiler, then she comes up to flank three and plays a breakaway song over loudspeakers, the 1MC. Totally not meant for music, but that's not the point.

- Story: the CO always wanted "Lowrider", by War, which is an excellent cut, but was well past cliché after so many iterations. The Messenger of the Watch had a boom box, a tape, and the 1MC microphone for the task.

Only, this time, the tape was flipped. Dude hit PLAY on the "Dazed and Confused" soundtrack, and Ted Nugent announced that he had everyone in a stranglehold.

The Old Man was apoplectic, and the cassette was quickly flipped and we got on with life.

Worst way to listen to music, indeed.

I love this. The historical connection, to what all happened, what was, just feels further & further away. This review of where we were feels so important.

Generally I really like & think there's so much sensible here. I do really want to hope eventually we get more personal social, that we do start having more humane social. We all have done so little to make opportunities, being so bound to Big Social, Big Tech, and it feels like that can't endure forever. But it's so far off and speculative, such a far hope, hoping for this post-mechanized post-massified post-dark forest social.

On the IP issue, I do have a lot more sympathy for the Magna Carta here than is given:

> 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 process

And Mat's retort:

> The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly?

It just seems radiantly abundantly clear that IP is a terrible shit show. There's still endless legal lawfare over h.264. New jerkward patent pools spring up to try to harass and harrie av1 and vp9. This Trying to just send video around is inescapably miserable, with the worst forces from every dark corner spring up constantly, to dog humanity from every attempting to make a basic common good available. It's constant IP terrorism.

This is analog to 'ecology without class struggle is gardening'.

The author argues for regulations, but the reason the internet today is anticompetitive is because of anti-circumvention regulations. The ideal world would have digital regulations, but a world with no digital regulations would be better than today's.

And how would you install your regulations? Right now, both the average voter and oligarch prefers centralized platforms.

It's a nice rant I guess, but it's mostly just whinging with a focus on the negatives and a vague appeal to regulation. Maybe cyberlibertarianism hasn't manifested in the way of JPB's Declaration, but it was a tall order and most things don't go as planned. Boomer hippies in particular were often unrealistic.

The spirit of the Declaration is still viable however, even if the shape of the implementation is different from the original idea. Humans are far too chaotic to ever find a singular utopia, online or off, but information technology is still a great enabler for everyone.

There's an increasing trend of articles and blog posts like this one, and unfortunately they share a common theme of complaints about big tech with a call for regulation. Naming and shaming bad actors is good, and not all regulation is bad, but you can't regulate everything to make everyone happy, and eventually you end up in an authoritarian dystopia.

Instead of complaining and waiting around for everyone's preferred flavor of regulation to appear, I suggest we instead embrace the spirit of cyberlibertarianism and DIY solutions that work at a smaller scale. The world is a dangerous place, but we've never had better tools to carve out your own niche and develop solutions to the things that matter to you.

The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.

You read an article like this, and despite some flaws, it restores your faith in humanity a little bit. Maybe I'm not the only one looking at the shitshow in horror.

Then you come to the comment section and are immediately reminded why the whole god damn world has lost its mind.

Many of the central points here (in particular the quote about conflating individual freedom with that of large companies) are in no way specific to the internet, or to technology at all. The cyberlibertarian idea that me personally being free means I can use my giant company to do whatever I want is bad, because the plain unprefixed libertarian idea of the same is bad. There are things about technology, especially software-oriented technology, that highlight that badness, but the badness is there all the time.

What I think we are seeing in the world today are the consequences of the fallacy of believing that the goodness of freedom is independent of its scale --- that no matter who or what entity we are talking about, it is good for them to have freedom. That simply doesn't make sense. Rather, the greater the potential an entity has to do harm, the less should be its freedom.

Meh. Marketing ruined it. That's what eventually ruins almost everything.

Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.

Further reading:

1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.

2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.

3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.

5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.

6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-p....

7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.

8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/j....

9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.

10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.

11) Spiers, Elizabeth. ‘The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites’. Elizabeth Spiers, 1 April 2026. https://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-intellectualism-of-....

I'm impressed by this article. Well written, cogent, and it matches the reality I perceive.

I can't imagine it will be well received here in HN, where I imagine most regulars will side with Barlow, but if it reaches at least some of them (I know skeptics about cyberlibertarianism exist even here), I'll be glad.

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but this sells me on cyberlibertarianism.

There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc...

A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in the space and convince a lot of people to follow them. Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. It's to stay strong, help your friends be strong, and accept that not everyone will make it. That has always been the flip side of freedom.

The Internet, and now AI, delivered so many of the dreams of my childhood. It is a mostly free society, for better or worse. I'm hoping that intelligence remains distributed, enshittification stops when my agent deals with it for me, and the physical world remains as free as it is. But these aren't things that would be changed with new governance of cyberspace, these are features of the optimization landscape of reality and technological progress.

Do we live in the best possible world, of course not. But this one is pretty good, and it's easy to imagine non libertarian ones that are so much worse. I feel a huge debt to the people who designed the Internet with the foresight that they did, the capture exists at a psychological layer, not a physical one.

I think this article touches upon something quite apparent in this modern age.

Talking to people with different opinions is considered tantamount to joining them. It is much better to point the finger of blame rather than suggest a way forward. The best way to criticise someone's argument is to take their words, explain what they really meant by that in a way that supports your argument, making the counterargument ridiculously easy.

What I don't understand is that how people have come to believe that arguing for the things that corporate interests fought for represents standing against those interests.

The thing that has it in a nutshell was this line

>The 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.

Cumbersome to everyone without a battery of lawyers. Copyright law has only become more powerful, and the patent process has become more a game of who can spend the most in court on this meritless claim. Disney didn't spend all those lobbying dollars extending copyright out of concern for the welfare of the people. They did it because they wanted to buy and own ideas and keep them for themselves for as long as possible.

I am all for robust well enforced regulation to help and protect people. I thing laws should be in the interest of society and the welfare of everyone more than it should for individuals. I don't think anyone advocating for personal freedoms is necessarily arguing against the interests of the group. There are people out there suggesting ways to correct the system through many many boring but required changes, some of them quite little, some of them large, one of the large ones is getting money out of politics.

I wonder if John Perry Barlow advocated for electoral reform to reign in lobbying? Because it didn't happen, and quite frankly arguing about the world that came to pass without that happening isn't going to represent anyone's plans for the future no matter

So what do we want to build? How should the better world be. Don't frame it as Not that!. Do you want the Revolution and Reign of Terror or the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution?

You can fight to build something better, don't confuse fighting to tear down as the same thing because you are angry and fighting about it makes you feel good about that.

Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. - John Perry Barlow

For more along this line of criticism, read Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech by Paulina Borsook

Duggan is all over the place with this one. We even have some hints it’s AI-Slop by the end.

Not sure what to tell this guy other than that there’s a universe where parents parent better (ie, by keeping their 10 year olds off the net), and people like him are a little less sensitive, and the internet with all its horrors and wonders does just fine. It really isn’t difficult to not see things that bother you on the internet. For example, it’ll never not be funny to me when moderators cry about getting PTSD by what they see - don’t be a moderator then, genius.

The biggest threat by far to the internet is censorship and regulation, because those things take away the choices for everybody. In a quarter century of using the net heavily I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen something I wasn’t expecting to see that shocked me, like a beheading video or something. It is exceedingly rare if you’re not a dumbass to come across unexpected and shocking material. And if Mr Duggan wasn’t so sensitive, even seeing things he finds disturbing wouldn’t be such a big deal.

I’ll just chalk this post up to more intellectual and emotional infantilisation that is so prevalent these days among these particular types. ‘Handle with care’ emotional maturity stuff.

What? No mention of Web3?

Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.

Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?

As someone for whom the Declaration strongly resonated with, and still does, I think this is the crux of how things end(ed) up going sideways:

> Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms. (Winner)

This is a core American delusion that runs much deeper than merely the Web or the Internet. It's even been legally codified in things like Citizens United - a fallacy that large companies are merely groups of individuals. It's basically the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic applied to activities rather than money.

In reality, large companies are top-down authoritarian structures where most of the individual humans involved have their own individual will suppressed. Rather they are following direction from above, and any individualist choices they are allowed are within that context. If they go against the direction/orders too much, they will simply be replaced with a different more obedient cog (this is something so-called "right libertarianism" directly whitewashes by rejecting analysis of most forms of power dynamics aka coercion).

I do not think it is inconsistent to still believe in those individualist ideas applied to individuals, while also viewing Big Tech - with its many qualities of actually being government - as something whose at-scale "policies" should be subject to democratic accountability. But to do that, meaning to achieve reform without throwing out the whole idea of individual freedom in the online world, requires us to openly reject that corpo fallacy whereby individuals empathize with billion dollar corporations!

But of course from an American perspective this is all kind of moot for the next few years at least as the main support behind the current regime is exactly Big Tech looking to head off any sort of de jure regulation. And so we must not be tempted by their political calls that might claim to address these problems, as this regime's bread and butter is using very real frustrations as the impetus to implement fake solutions that perpetuate the problems while setting themselves up as lucrative speed bumps (eg look at the shakedown currently happening to mere wifi routers).

Which brings us back to why that individualist message is so powerful, despite how it ends up going sideways - because when traditional democratic accountability has been hopelessly neutralized, self-help is the only thing people have left.

"We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong."

I mean and others were swimming around in the same IRC, Usenet, and LambdaMOO etc soup in the early 90s, too, and in the mid 90s I was already screaming about what bullshit techno-libertarian capitalism was, but OK. I didn't live in the Bay Area, I guess I just never caught the disease.

My strident same-ish topic text from the same period back then that I waved annoyingly around, instead, was "The Californian Ideology": https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...

That one has aged a hell of a lot better. And argues exactly the opposite positions on just about everything. God it feels prophetic now.

> 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. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we'll all be hugging.

The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.

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