Cyberlibertarianism

"In the years before his untimely death, David Golumbia produced this scorching, razor-sharp analysis of the twenty-first century’s most dangerous conceit: the invention of ‘cyberspace’ as a sui generis zone of radical arrogance and incontestable power beyond the reach of society and the rule of law. Cyberlibertarianism is a meticulous, discerning, morally relentless, and politically shrewd takedown of what has by now become a global institutional order, led and defended by the wealth, power, and political muscle of big tech firms and their propagandists. Golumbia hacks his way through their word jungle of twisted self-serving rhetoric to expose the shockingly antidemocratic, antihuman, protofascistic, and openly violent extremist politics that animate the companies, their inventions, defenders, lawyers, PR specialists, phantasmagoric fellow travelers, and pseudo philosophers. These characters see themselves as rightful owners of the future. If you want to understand the origins of our information hellscape with its vast new inequalities, corrupt information, algorithmic control, population-scale behavioral manipulation, and wholesale destruction of privacy, then begin here. And if you want to learn how to take back the future, then begin here." —Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

"David Golumbia has written a masterwork of political theory, a comprehensive take on the political, economic, and social consequences of cyberlibertarianism, the dogma that is deeply—and likely inextricably—interwoven through what we have collectively come to consider the ‘tech industry.’ Golumbia pulls no punches in his indictments, taking on the laziness of what stands in for intellectual thinking in academic, journalistic, and other popular takes on the status quo. Time and again, he proves himself intellectually, primarily through an in-depth and expansive reading of the literature and in many schools of thought—notably including that which he deftly critiques. His attention to detail in describing the social, political, and technological change over the long term is itself an antidote to the breathless and usually unsubstantiated, if not wholly wrong, claims of technological exceptionalists. Cyberlibertarianism is essential for understanding the contemporary moment and the recent past that got us here. It stands as a monumental magnum opus from a meticulous thinker and sharp social critic who is sorely missed." —Sarah T. Roberts, director, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLA

An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic underpinnings

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia traces how digital evangelism has driven the worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the utopian presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. 

Providing an incisive critique of the push for open access and open-source software and the legal battles over online censorship and net neutrality, Cyberlibertarianism details how the purportedly democratic internet has been employed as an organizing tool for terror and hate groups and political disinformation campaigns. As he unpacks our naively utopian conception of the digital world, Golumbia highlights technology’s role in the advancement of hyperindividualist and antigovernment agendas, demonstrating how Silicon Valley corporations and right-wing economists; antiestablishment figures such as Julian Assange, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Edward Snowden, and Mark Zuckerberg; and seemingly positive voices such as John Perry Barlow, Cory Doctorow, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and Wikipedia all have worked to hamper regulation and weaken legal safeguards against exploitation.

Drawing from a wide range of thought in digital theory, economics, law, and political philosophy as well as detailed research and Golumbia’s own experience as a software developer, Cyberlibertarianism serves as a clarion call to reevaluate the fraught politics of the internet. In the hope of providing a way of working toward a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian future for digital technology, this magisterial work insists that we must first understand the veiled dogmas from which it has been constructed.

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David Golumbia (1963–2023) was associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of The Cultural Logic of Computation and The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minnesota, 2016).

George Justice is professor of English and provost at the University of Tulsa. He specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and the history of the book, and he writes frequently about higher education.