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The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes hierarchies, decentralizes what had been centralized, democratizes what was the domain of elites. Most on the left would endorse these ends. The widespread availability of tools whose uses are harmonious with leftist goals would, one might think, accompany broad advancement of those goals in some form. Yet the left today is scattered, nearly toothless in most advanced democracies. If digital communication technology promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes? Part of this disconnect between advancing technology and a retreating left can be explained by the advent of cyberlibertarianism, a view that widespread computerization naturally produces democracy and freedom. In the 1990s, UK media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, US journalist Paulina Borsook, and US philosopher of technology Langdon Winner introduced the term to describe a prominent worldview in Silicon Valley and digital culture generally; a related analysis can be found more recently in Stanford communication scholar Fred Turner’s work. While cyberlibertarianism can be defined as a general digital utopianism, summed up by a simple slogan like “computerization will set us free” or “computers provide the solution to any and all problems,” these writers note a specific political formation — one Winner describes as “ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics.” There are overt libertarians who are also digital utopians — figures like Jimmy Wales, Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, Dread Pirate Roberts, and Sergey Brin, and the members of the Technology Liberation Front who explicitly describe themselves as cyberlibertarians. But the term also describes a wider ideological formation in which people embrace digital utopianism as compatible or even identical with leftist politics opposed to neoliberalism. In perhaps the most pointed form of cyberlibertarianism, computer expertise is seen as directly applicable to social questions. In The Cultural Logic of Computation , I argue that computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power. To the extent that algorithmic forms of reason and social organization can be said to have an inherent politics, these have long been understood as compatible with political formations on the Right rather than the Left. Yet today, “hacktivists” and other promoters of the liberatory nature of mass computerization are prominent political voices, despite their overall political commitments remaining quite unclear. They are championed by partisans of both the Right and the Left as if they obviously serve the political ends of each. One need only reflect on the leftist support for a project like Open Source software to notice the strange and under-examined convergence of the Right and Left around specifically digital practices whose underlying motivations are often explicitly libertarian. Open Source is a deliberate commercialization of Richard Stallman’s largely noncommercial notion ofFree Software (see Stallman himself on the distinction). Open Source is widely celebrated by libertarians and corporations, and was started by libertarian Eric Raymond and programmer Bruce Perens, with support from businessman and corporate sympathizer Tim O’Reilly. Today the term Open Source has wide currency as a political imperative outside the software development community, despite its place on the Right-Left spectrum being at best ambiguous, and at worst explicitly libertarian and pro-corporate. When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their work. This, much more than overt digital libertarianism, should concern the Left, and anyone who does not subscribe to libertarian politics. It is the acceptance by leftists of the largely rhetorical populist politics and explicitly pro-business thought of figures like Clay Shirky (who repeatedly argues that representative democratic and public bodies have no business administering public resources but must defer to “disruptive” forces like Napster) and Yochai Benkler (whose Wealth of Networks is roundly celebrated as heralding an anticapitalist “sharing economy,” yet remains firmly rooted in capitalist economics) that should concern us, especially when they are taken up as if they are obviously positions the Left should favor. It is the boastful self-confidence of engineers and hackers that their advanced computer skills inherently qualify them to say a great deal about any part of the social fabric to which we are lucky enough to have them contribute, regardless of their understanding of politics or society. The inherent claim informing these politics of digital utopianism is that the political world has shifted so radically due to digital technology that the old rules do not apply; computers represent such a fundamental break in human history that they justify altogether new ethical and political standards.

Cyberlibertarianism even surfaces in the projects of “civic hackers,” the most well-known of which is Code for America (CfA). On the surface the project appears laudable: skilled programmers choose to devote free time to contribute to community and government projects. Yet CfA is an independent nonprofitfunded by both corporate and nonprofit dollars. Their “civics” are incredibly ill-defined: civic hacking projects don’t encourage their participants to reflect on how government functions or what government is supposed to be. Instead, private citizens are revising government outside of democratic structures — and often in substantive ways. Rather than “civics” as the term has historically been understood in the US — disinterested, public-facing, not-for-profit contributions to the general welfare — this is actually its opposite: corporate-funded interests tweaking democratic institutions primarily for their own benefit. Most who hear the phrase “civic hacking” would likely be surprised by the significant emphasis CfA places on not merely cooperating with but actively promoting business, generating private profit from governmental resources extracted without charge from citizens. It is no accident that, along with “free” and “open,” two of the words most frequently encountered in CfA’s promotional materials, are “efficiency” and “innovation.” CfA directly promotes the development of for-profit corporations that make money off of open government data via its “Incubator” and “Accelerator” programs for tech startups. In the application of the typical hacker “we know better” philosophy to democratic government, civic hacking introduces an antidemocratic mechanism into democracy. That mechanism privileges not “civics,” but the extraction of public resources for use by concentrated capital. One index of the subtle shift in politics occasioned by cyberlibertarianism can be found in the work of a central advocate of Open Government and civic hacking, Carl Malamud. Malamud is widely taken to be a figure friendly to the Left, and his staunch advocacy of open information and public governance is easy to understand in terms compatible with Left causes. Yet Malamud himself rarely writes about core principles that make this identification simple or direct, and his work is championed by libertarians. He actively promotes the view that intellectual property is valueless because it is non-scarce — a view that Mirowski convincingly aligns with economic libertarianism. Tom Slee observes in “FutureEverything: Notes Against Openness” that “the language of transparency, the language of non-commercial civic engagement, and the romantic language of rebellion are being used to provide an exciting and appealing facade for an agenda that has nothing to do with transparency, nothing to do with civic participation, and a lot to do with traditional power politics and profit making.” As Slee notes, CfA and the Open Government movement have done less for the public than for corporations, some of which have been built almost entirely on the availability of public data. The most famous of these is Zillow, the real estate listing service that draws large amounts of data from public records. Malamud’s own project to “liberate” SEC Edgar filings has arguably served corporate interests — investors and securities traders have been the primary users of the liberated SEC data — much more clearly than it has served any comprehensible Left causes.