Cyberlibertarians’ Digital Deletion of the Left

There's a good argument to be made about this kind of thing. This isn't it.

The author starts out critiquing people who see connections between their own politics and technology where no such connection exists, then proceeds to ramble through a variety of tenuously connected issues, labeling anything he doesn't like the look of as "cyber-libertarianism", then segues into a piece about neoliberalism that has no obvious connection with the text that precedes it other than an attempt to rescue his argument by wrapping it in someone else's metaphor.

The really fucking annoying thing is that you can draw connections between, say, Hayek, decentralised networks and silicon valley hiring practices. You really can do this and actually be quite devastating, but the author seems to be throwing as many "boo" words in as possible (Hayek 'n' Mises, Ayn Rand because why not, the Tea Party) rather than assembling any kind of argument. He lumps Julian Assange in with the bad guy crowd, but I presume he doesn't think that leaking the activities of the US government in Iraq and around the world was some kind of right-wing plot. He says various things about the EFF, some which are true but which give an overall misleading picture by ignoring their actions which don't fit his narrative. By the time he gets to Carl Malamud, he's reduced to saying "I'm not sure he's done anything I disagree with, and I can't disagree with anything he's said, but his work is championed by libertarians so he's probably one of them".

The closing paragraphs, where he talks about general principles and values, are actually pretty good! If you ignore most of the factual claims, it's a decent article. I think the author could benefit from a slightly more nuanced and informed perspective on both the technology and the attitudes of the people who use and create it though.

What we are observing right now - is technology becoming more like magic to common people, and that is disturbing.

Instead of understanding operating principles behind devices we now quantify them by few superficial quantities at best: screen size, pixels, gigahertz, amount of bytes. None of that tells you exactly what device does.

Goverment is able to deploy complex 1984 monitoring technologies without massive negative sentiment - because average person does not understand technology, direction it is going, and long term implication of such surveilance.

Amount of information available to us taught us to ignore things, so we often ignore things we do not agree with. In the age of information we have all incentives we need to stay ignorant.

And as technology continues to get more complex this will get worse, not better.

I read this entire article, and I'm still not sure what it really said. IMO the author falls into the same trap as most of the media, casting people as "leftist" or "conservative" when most take a liberal position on some issues and not on others.

What's really happening, in my opinion, is that there are people who are happy with the status quo. These people are usually doing pretty well (see Koch bros or startup millionaires.) They are politically inclined to believe in things that are in their own self-interest: for many tech geeks, that is the "freedom" of information because it sustains the belief that they can personally profit from such a situation.

You saw a lot of this with Google. For a long time, they were all about freedom of information and open source software because their mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". A key part of doing that is having access to all of the world's information. But now that they have proprietary information that is in their interest to keep to themselves, that tune of openness and transparency is changing a bit (see Google+, et al).

Many tech folks have the same thoughts about government regulation. "If only HIPAA didn't exist, I could create a universal medical records solution!" Nevermind that if the regulation didn't exist, someone would have done it a long time ago: tech people see government regulation as a limiting factor in their potential for greatness.

It's not about "left" or "right", it's about individuals who believe many different things for many different reasons. To call out "cyberlibertarians" as a unified group is disingenuous at best: net neutrality is a classic case where this falls apart. The cyberlibertarian believes in additional government regulation on telecommunications not out of a belief that government regulation is a good thing, but because they fear the loss of a profitable market that belongs to technologists. It's special-interest politics at its finest.

This article isn't about a leftist view of cyberlibertarianism, but about a liberal view of cyberlibertarianism.

I doubt that many leftists see the capitalist Western states as "the realization of democracy".

>Cyberlibertarians across the political spectrum focus a great deal on the promotion of tools, objects, software, and policies whose chief benefit is their ability to escape regulation and even law enforcement by the state (including surveillance-avoidant technologies and applications such as Tor, end-to-end encryption, PGP and Cryptocat).

You say "escape regulation", I say "re-claim their basic human right to privacy"

This shit is hilarious!

"computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power"

The need to label everything as right and left betrays a primitive binary mentality. A more accurate designation here would be distributed vs non-distributed systems. Then we can have an intelligent conversation about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches.

Also, it seems like this need to split everything right vs left is more characteristic of the older generation who are less familiar with technology. I think our generation thinks more in terms of solving problems with the best tool available-- be it the government, the market, or open source.

I probably don't share many views in common with the author, but I think this analysis of the nature of cyberlibertarianism is brilliant and spot-on. In particular, he insightfully captures the disdain with which cyberlibertarians view democracy as well as the nature of so-called "grassroots" movements like the opposition to SOPA being part of a proxy war between big corporate content creators and big corporate content distributors.

The article is a mess, but the root of the problem is that while the article presents giving “power to the people” and "dethron[ing] authoritarians" as goals of the left in principle, in practice what the left does when it comes to power is always the opposite. Leftists may talk about believing in democracy and freedom, but these principles are incompatible with the left's overarching goal, which is promoting economic equality. Since people are inherently different, the only way to guarantee economic equality is to use state power to control people. Of course, even where leftist principles are put into practice, such as in Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, etc., the result still isn't economic equality, only a lack of freedom and general impoverishment of the most of the population.

Interesting, but I think I'll stick to lorem ipsum for the time being.

Technological innovation alone leads to a capitalist dystopia like the one seen in the movie Elysium.