7 ms·

Cyberlibertarians’ Digital Deletion of the Left

37 points by jboynyc 13y ago

a3voices 13y ago
Technological innovation alone leads to a capitalist dystopia like the one seen in the movie Elysium.
- iterative 13y ago
  Right, because you saw it in a movie, so it must be true.
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
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.
tedks 13y ago
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".
- dmix 13y ago
  Indeed, cyberlibertarians are all about decentralized power structures. The internet is actually anti-democratic in a sense, as it gives individuals direct power, not just by proxy of representative politicians or collective voting (as in a "leftist" world). Therefore it's the most classically liberal political position around. And one not to be mistaken with the authoritarian-"liberal" style generally upheld in current politics.
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    Direct power is democratic. You're thinking of republican (the governing structure, not the party).
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Democracy is collective action whether by direct or indirect voting. Direct power is individual action (with the implication of freedom from collective action), and is thus libertarian or classically liberal, not democratic.
      - humanrebar 13y ago
        OK. Your distinction between direct power and direct democracy has been clarified, so I'll set semantic considerations to the side. I do not see why cyber-libertarianism is incompatible with direct democracy any more than a constitutional republic is. In both cases, basic rights should not (theoretically) be able to be overridden through majority votes. The difference is in what counts as a basic right.
        rayiner 13y ago
        You correctly recognize the key issue that "basic rights" are intrinsically a restriction on democracy. The question is: what counts as "basic rights"? In the U.S., we have a basic set of rights: those enumerated in the Constitution itself plus those that exist as a result of long historical practice plus those recognized by the Supreme Court based on a combination of the other two sources. In a Constitutional republic, rights aren't static, but they're slow to evolve. Cyber-libertarianism, at least as espoused by many today, embraces a dramatically broader notion of rights. You don't just have the classic rights of Englishmen (life, liberty, and property), but the right to privacy, the right to free and anonymous exchange of information, the right to tinker with your cell phone, the right to turn your apartment into a hotel, the right to transfer money freely and anonymously, etc. Cyber-libertarians tend to believe that government should be restrained from acting unless absolutely necessary, and almost never believe that government action is necessary when it comes to cyberspace. The more rights you recognize, and the broader those rights, the narrower the scope of democratic self determination. This viewpoint is the diametric opposite of constitutional republicanism. Under that view, government, by the will of the majority, can act so long as it does not invade certain "basic rights." Under cyber-libertarianism, the assumption is reversed. Government is barred from acting unless there is an immensely pressing justification.
- jboynyc 13y ago
  Not sure I follow. Significant parts of the left see the institutions of the state as a means to the realization of democracy. Take, for instance, most socialist, social-democratic, or Left parties in contemporary Europe. They advocate for the state to take an active role in making space for democracy (for instance by legislating codetermination in the workplace) and de-commodifying labor to protect the working classes from capital. True, many leftists -- especially those in the communist and anarchist left -- have the long-term goal of abolishing the state, but that doesn't mean the institutions of the state cannot play a role in advancing some of the goals of the left in the interim. Even Nikolai Bukharin did not deny this. That's what the author is arguing here -- that the state should not be ruled out tout court as a potential site of engagement for those seeking to realize the promises of radical democracy. The author is not saying that state already is the realization of democracy, as your paraphrase suggests.
exelius 13y ago
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.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The author does not call people leftists or rightist, but rather associates language and causes with the left or right. He points out that cyber-libertarianism tend to use the terminology of the left ("freedom", "open"), while embracing the values of the right. Not every one on every issue, but as a pattern of behavior across many issues. The article points out that because of this language, people who otherwise identify with leftist causes end up supporting cyber-libertarian policies that further rightist causes. I think the best thing in the article is about the different definitions of "freedom." Cyberlibertarians use "freedom" to mean "freedom from." This is quite incompatible with what many leftists,[1] might mean by "freedom," specifically the freedom of the masses to act collectively to shape their society. [1] And indeed, many who would probably consider themselves "conservatives" in a pre-Tea Party world.
rayiner 13y ago
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.
rjknight 13y ago
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.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  After reading your comment, I agree that most of the post is a practice in guilt by association without actually getting to much actual analysis or argument. I'm curious what you think, guilt by association arguments aside, would be "devastating" to cyber-libertarian ideas.
wcummings 13y ago
>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"
- krapp 13y ago
  Regulation and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - spindritf 13y ago
    You can't regulate what you can't see so they will be at odds at least occasionally and probably much more often.
bsgreenb 13y ago
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.
- solidhybrid845 13y ago
  I got the same sense from this article. He values "cyberlibertarians" based on what they contribute to the right vs left and concludes that their contributions favor the right more. Although the distributed vs centralized argument is nothing new (see federalists vs anti-federalists in the late 18th century) it seems to have been largely absent from political discussions for a long time. The author seems to be struggling to fit these new ideals into his liberal vs conservative world view and rather than being able to see this "free and open" movement as something different, concludes that it's a political ploy to weaken big government regulatory powers for the profit of wealthy capitalists. It does seem that younger generations are more open to a wider variety of political ideology, but I don't think familiarity with technology has much to do with it other than the incidental fact that the internet allows people to be exposed to ideas they would probably never hear from the mass media or mainstream political debates.
spikels 13y ago
This shit is hilarious! "computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power"
knowitall 13y ago
Interesting, but I think I'll stick to lorem ipsum for the time being.
iterative 13y ago
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.
- knowitall 13y ago
  It is economic equality: everybody owns the same, which is nothing. Envy is a powerful force...
- rayiner 13y ago
  "Democracy" and "freedom" are wholly compatible with promoting economic equality, given the understanding that "freedom" means the right of the people to exercise their will through democratic institutions.[1] If promotion of economic equality is what benefits the greatest number, then it is natural to assume that free people will exercise their will to minimize economic inequality (as they have in social democracies in Europe). [1] To a leftist, and indeed many other people, what separates authoritarianism and free society is not the lack of someone telling you what to do, but who that someone happens to be. Arguably, a classic libertarian government is indeed authoritarian: state power is exercised pursuant to the policies of philosopher-kings who believe in a particular set of "rights" (private property, etc), not pursuant to the will of the people themselves (who may very well have different beliefs). Indeed, even as someone who isn't a leftist, I have a hard time seeing much difference between classical libertarianism and divine monarchy. Whenever I hear talk of "natural rights" I think about who kings once justified their unilateral exercise of state power by reference to divine natural law.
  - solidhybrid845 13y ago

37 points by jboynyc 13y ago

a3voices 13y ago

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

iterative 13y ago
Right, because you saw it in a movie, so it must be true.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

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.

tedks 13y ago

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".

dmix 13y ago
Indeed, cyberlibertarians are all about decentralized power structures. The internet is actually anti-democratic in a sense, as it gives individuals direct power, not just by proxy of representative politicians or collective voting (as in a "leftist" world). Therefore it's the most classically liberal political position around. And one not to be mistaken with the authoritarian-"liberal" style generally upheld in current politics.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  Direct power is democratic. You're thinking of republican (the governing structure, not the party).
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Democracy is collective action whether by direct or indirect voting. Direct power is individual action (with the implication of freedom from collective action), and is thus libertarian or classically liberal, not democratic.
    - humanrebar 13y ago
      OK. Your distinction between direct power and direct democracy has been clarified, so I'll set semantic considerations to the side. I do not see why cyber-libertarianism is incompatible with direct democracy any more than a constitutional republic is. In both cases, basic rights should not (theoretically) be able to be overridden through majority votes. The difference is in what counts as a basic right.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        You correctly recognize the key issue that "basic rights" are intrinsically a restriction on democracy. The question is: what counts as "basic rights"? In the U.S., we have a basic set of rights: those enumerated in the Constitution itself plus those that exist as a result of long historical practice plus those recognized by the Supreme Court based on a combination of the other two sources. In a Constitutional republic, rights aren't static, but they're slow to evolve. Cyber-libertarianism, at least as espoused by many today, embraces a dramatically broader notion of rights. You don't just have the classic rights of Englishmen (life, liberty, and property), but the right to privacy, the right to free and anonymous exchange of information, the right to tinker with your cell phone, the right to turn your apartment into a hotel, the right to transfer money freely and anonymously, etc. Cyber-libertarians tend to believe that government should be restrained from acting unless absolutely necessary, and almost never believe that government action is necessary when it comes to cyberspace. The more rights you recognize, and the broader those rights, the narrower the scope of democratic self determination. This viewpoint is the diametric opposite of constitutional republicanism. Under that view, government, by the will of the majority, can act so long as it does not invade certain "basic rights." Under cyber-libertarianism, the assumption is reversed. Government is barred from acting unless there is an immensely pressing justification.
jboynyc 13y ago
Not sure I follow. Significant parts of the left see the institutions of the state as a means to the realization of democracy. Take, for instance, most socialist, social-democratic, or Left parties in contemporary Europe. They advocate for the state to take an active role in making space for democracy (for instance by legislating codetermination in the workplace) and de-commodifying labor to protect the working classes from capital. True, many leftists -- especially those in the communist and anarchist left -- have the long-term goal of abolishing the state, but that doesn't mean the institutions of the state cannot play a role in advancing some of the goals of the left in the interim. Even Nikolai Bukharin did not deny this. That's what the author is arguing here -- that the state should not be ruled out tout court as a potential site of engagement for those seeking to realize the promises of radical democracy. The author is not saying that state already is the realization of democracy, as your paraphrase suggests.

exelius 13y ago

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.

rayiner 13y ago
The author does not call people leftists or rightist, but rather associates language and causes with the left or right. He points out that cyber-libertarianism tend to use the terminology of the left ("freedom", "open"), while embracing the values of the right. Not every one on every issue, but as a pattern of behavior across many issues. The article points out that because of this language, people who otherwise identify with leftist causes end up supporting cyber-libertarian policies that further rightist causes. I think the best thing in the article is about the different definitions of "freedom." Cyberlibertarians use "freedom" to mean "freedom from." This is quite incompatible with what many leftists,[1] might mean by "freedom," specifically the freedom of the masses to act collectively to shape their society. [1] And indeed, many who would probably consider themselves "conservatives" in a pre-Tea Party world.

rayiner 13y ago

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.

rjknight 13y ago

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.

humanrebar 13y ago
After reading your comment, I agree that most of the post is a practice in guilt by association without actually getting to much actual analysis or argument. I'm curious what you think, guilt by association arguments aside, would be "devastating" to cyber-libertarian ideas.

wcummings 13y ago

>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"

krapp 13y ago
Regulation and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- spindritf 13y ago
  You can't regulate what you can't see so they will be at odds at least occasionally and probably much more often.

bsgreenb 13y ago

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.

solidhybrid845 13y ago
I got the same sense from this article. He values "cyberlibertarians" based on what they contribute to the right vs left and concludes that their contributions favor the right more. Although the distributed vs centralized argument is nothing new (see federalists vs anti-federalists in the late 18th century) it seems to have been largely absent from political discussions for a long time. The author seems to be struggling to fit these new ideals into his liberal vs conservative world view and rather than being able to see this "free and open" movement as something different, concludes that it's a political ploy to weaken big government regulatory powers for the profit of wealthy capitalists. It does seem that younger generations are more open to a wider variety of political ideology, but I don't think familiarity with technology has much to do with it other than the incidental fact that the internet allows people to be exposed to ideas they would probably never hear from the mass media or mainstream political debates.

spikels 13y ago

This shit is hilarious! "computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power"

knowitall 13y ago

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

iterative 13y ago

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.

knowitall 13y ago
It is economic equality: everybody owns the same, which is nothing. Envy is a powerful force...
rayiner 13y ago
"Democracy" and "freedom" are wholly compatible with promoting economic equality, given the understanding that "freedom" means the right of the people to exercise their will through democratic institutions.[1] If promotion of economic equality is what benefits the greatest number, then it is natural to assume that free people will exercise their will to minimize economic inequality (as they have in social democracies in Europe). [1] To a leftist, and indeed many other people, what separates authoritarianism and free society is not the lack of someone telling you what to do, but who that someone happens to be. Arguably, a classic libertarian government is indeed authoritarian: state power is exercised pursuant to the policies of philosopher-kings who believe in a particular set of "rights" (private property, etc), not pursuant to the will of the people themselves (who may very well have different beliefs). Indeed, even as someone who isn't a leftist, I have a hard time seeing much difference between classical libertarianism and divine monarchy. Whenever I hear talk of "natural rights" I think about who kings once justified their unilateral exercise of state power by reference to divine natural law.
- solidhybrid845 13y ago