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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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...

>That is the internet we built. It was not an accident. It was the product of a specific ideology, written down by specific people, at a specific cocktail party in Davos, in 1996.

The article is entertaining but I completely don't buy that. The internet would be much the say if nothing had been written in Davos. People would still have linked computers, done good and bad stuff as is human nature, companies would have tried to own and profit from it, governments would have tried to regulate it as is their nature also.

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.

The nice thing about the Internet is that a person, great or small, can voice their grandiose and yet myopic views of a problem and their absurd solutions to it...freely.

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.

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 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

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! :)

Many followers of cyberlibertarianism see themselves as potential cyberlords, who can rule over their fiefdoms, but still under the protection of the king (state/government).

The hypocrisy becomes apparent when these entities grow large, and suddenly need state help to suppress competition.

Phase 1: Skirt laws, move fast and break things. Regulations should be abolished. Steal as much as you can, if it means growth.

Phase 2: Lobby politicians, beg for certain regulations to keep out competitors when you've become a monopoly.

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

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.

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

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.

Well the "libertarianism" part is the clue. They were always the corporations.

The essay briefly mentions "Open Source" which of course was the corporate friendly rebrand of Free Software.

I'd quibble about the copyright/patents part. This was a time when large corporations were "harmonizing" their ownship of IP ever higher across the globe.

Wanting less of that wasn't crazy. Assuming the free market fairy would deliver it was at best certifiablly naive, at worst a spoiler operation to distract from actually doing it through normal democratic government channels.

Also, "Magna Carta" is fitting as the original was a deal between a King and his Barons. It's pointed to as a step on the path to modern democracy but that's not what they were doing at the time. The powerful were asserting their rights.

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.

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.

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

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 is the first I've seen anyone coin the term "cyberlibertarianism".

The argument presented doesn't seem at all specific to cyber-anything. It's just a typical argument contra libertarianism, at a typical level of uncharitability.

>> You have to hold these four ideas in your head at the same time to see the trick. 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.

Well, the first rule of Fight Club is that we don't talk about Fight Club.

> 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.