Cyberlibertarianism and the fraught politics of the internet

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology 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, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the idealistic presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. George Justice wrote the foreword to Cyberlibertarianism, and is joined in conversation with Frank Pasquale.

George Justice is professor of English literature and provost at the University of Tulsa.

Frank Pasquale is professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.

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

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Tim Wu

Lawrence Lessig

Wikileaks

David E. Pozen: Transparency’s Ideological Drift https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/10354

Stefanos Geroulanos / Transparency in Postwar France

#CreateDontScrape

David Golumbia / ChatGPT Should Not Exist (article)

M. T. Anderson / Feed

Jonathan Crary / Scorched Earth

"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."
—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

"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

Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology is available from University of Minnesota Press.