Re: <nettime> David Golumbia on "Cyberlibertarianism"

[Andre Rebentisch via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Carsten,

I read the posthumous publication a while ago, and upon reflection, I 
think the narrative is one-sided and misleading to new generations.

In particular, it matters who argued for what at which point in time and 
in which context, who revised their opinions (Barlow did that very 
early!), etc.

The Californian Ideology criticism: I even found that in the Telepolis 0 
publication in German from 1996, published by Heise. He dates all of 
this later and fails to grasp the light Marxist puns.

It is a contextual marker whether you defend a nascent network 
subculture against external interference or you are all sitting in the 
same network connectivity boat.

I mean, the net scare of the 90s was like the metal music scare of the 
80s. It involved ignorance. It involved insights about the trajectory.

In Germany, we didn't get that many internet cafés because particular 
judges equated these computers with taxed arcade machines. The 
democratic legislator didn't correct case law established by a few 
distinct judges. All of these shots were "in the cradle", ignorant of 
the damage done to the future development of our digital societies. In 
all democratic societies, there are also reservations about the state 
and careful balancing of the private sphere, e.g. child education, what 
should be left to parents and what should be a matter of public interest.

Furthermore, there are always good reasons why you prefer some 
institutions with their practices over others in a specific context. 
E.g. we are still unable to replace W3C standards development with 
DIN/ISO, although W3C is just a consortium and national ISO bodies are 
de jure bodies. That doesn't mean that you take an ideological stance 
against de jure bodies per se.

Also, the notion of software freedom has to be tied (and seldom was) to 
its origin: (highly educated) scientific researchers working (quite 
autonomously) at expensive public data centres who are capable of 
porting source code to a newly acquired machine themselves and skilled 
enough to fix bugs, but are just not authorised to do so and rely on 
software providers to do it for them, or the providers refuse to do it 
for lack of capacity or commercial interest (the so-called software 
crisis). The frictions and efficiency losses in the old data centre 
environment were described as a lack of freedom. So the correct term may 
be "agency" of computer professionals.

Free software has completely taken over and gone beyond the old Unix 
world. Today, all top-100 supercomputers rely on free software. This had 
little to do with consumer software purchases or software for office 
productivity markets.

Best,
André






Am 26.08.26 um 10:47 schrieb Carsten Agger via nettime-l:
> The last week or so I've been reading David Golumbia's
> "Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology".
>
> I think he raises many important and well-known points that have also
> been raised by writers like Fred Turner, Richard Barbrook, Evgeni
> Morozov and Yasha Levine:
>
> That behind the seemingly progressive "computers as liberation"
> ideology is a libertarian right-wing agenda which can, as we have seen
> with Tim May from the "cypherpunks", openly tolerate extreme bigotry
> veering towards fascism, if only they can also get their freedom of
> government interference.
>
> That's something that's worth being aware of - you also have some
> alleged civil society organizations which are, some of the time, more
> like corporate lobby groups acting on behalf of with not very
> progressive values, e.g. Google and Meta. As I said, Golumbia raises a
> number of important points.
>
> But I'm also kind of disappointed with the book - I think Golumbia's
> argumentation is sloppy, often being limited to stating that this
> person says such-and-so ... and that's what a right-wing person might
> also say.
>
> E.g., he criticizes people for thinking of Glenn Greenwald as a
> progressive icon, when he actually started criticizing Democrats'
> reaction to Trump's victory in 2016, and that paints him as right wing.
>
> However, while Greenwald has indeed veered to the Libertarian right,
> Golumbia does not go into *what* Greenwald was actually criticizing
> Democrats for - which was their conspiracy theories that the election
> was stolen by Putin and Trump was really a traitor taking orders from
> Putin. Greenwald was thus *right* at the time, and his position can't
> be taken as a sign that people were blind to his alleged right-wing
> opinions.
>
> In another place, Golumbia criticizes the pro-cryptography campaigns -
> no entirely wrongly - but then goes on to say, that  all governments
> *must* be able to monitor all electronic communication between
> individuals, and only right-wing libertarians would think otherwise.
>
> He also criticizes Richard Stallman's position on free software for not
> being very aligned with the normal political ideas of "freedom" as
> stated e.g. by John Stuart Mill (this is not wrong) - and that,
> therefore, Stallman and the Free Software Foundation are also part of
> the movement towards right-wing libertarianism. He doesn't engage with
> what Stallman's ideas of software freedom *do* entail, or whether they
> are reasonable or not.
>
> I wish Golumbia was still alive today, because then it would be easier
> to criticize these points - as it is now, it's not like he's able to
> revise any positions he took.
>
> Best,
> Carsten
--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org