I expected to like this book. Golumbia was early in criticizing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as ideologically right-wing. His book The Politics of Bitcoin was well-received in crypto-critical corners of the internet.
To summarize the definition of cyberlibertarianism that I gleaned from the book, it's this:
All technological progress is liberatory. Using computers is inherently radical. The internet is so different from the physical world that existing laws should not apply there. People deserve strong encryption to protect them from the government. The government slows down progress and should be minimized or replaced by technology.
The book didn't coin the term: it was already prevalent on the internet well before publication, and Paulina Borsook wrote on similar grounds back in 2000.
I have some feelings about this book.
Man, it is mad at so many people. Like "slaps roof of book, this can hold so much contempt for people of many different eras and political persuasions."
And this is very incomplete. I started keeping it after realizing that the book would just keep moving from target to target.
I agree with a lot of the critiques. Like, who on earth can defend Curtis Yarvin, the most racist blogger ever created?
But then some of these critiques are just so out-of-left-field, and they didn't move the case of cyberlibertarianism forward at all, that it just seemed, on a vibes basis, very mad.
It dilutes the term to say that Yarvin, who is literally pro-slavery, is "far-right" and then go on to say that the EFF fits in with "far-right organizations associated with political liberalism." Say what you will about the EFF's corporate connections and anti-regulatory tendencies, but it is not in the same category.
Golumbia must have considered himself to sit far on the left side of things, and thus proportionally what we would call right-wing was far-right to him, but it just doesn't make any sense to go full-bore on all of his targets, lumping them all into either right, far-right, or cyberlibertarian-influenced buckets.
There's a discussion about how comparisons of the internet to the printing press are incorrect, because they're different technologies, the printing press was not the main catalyst of the renaissance, and some other minor factors.
Did we need to continue down that thread to say that it's also not good to think the printing press was good because it was used to distribute printed versions of the bible, which precipitated the Protestant Reformation, and then, did we need to say that… I have to quote here:
It is certainly not the case, for example, that the Reformation was a global change that everyone agrees, in retrospect, was welcome. The Catholic Church did not go away. In many countries it persists quite strongly to the present day, and the vast numbers of Catholics then and now may well not see the Reformation as a positive event at all. Perhaps more pointedly, the Catholic Church is often viewed as a deeply problematic institution today due to its role in promoting colonialism and violence, suppressing dissent, and demanding conformity. It is truly difficult to look at the history of the various sects of Protestantism and see them as notably different in this regard. Colonial history is almost equally divided between Protestants and Catholics, with many of the bloodiest wars fought between powers whose rivalry was fueled in part by this religious clash. The later history of these two branches of Christianity is not much different, at least in terms of ascribing to one or the other tendencies toward the worst aspects of human conduct. Both Catholics and Protestants have colonized and enslaved; both have also protested and resisted each practice. Antidemocratic politics, including Fascism and Nazism, are found among congregants in both branches.
I'm sorry, but what the heck is this even trying to do? In the middle of this book about cyberlibertarianism, in the middle of a critique about a metaphor, then the printing press, then the bible, we're asking whether Protestantism is not good because some Nazis were protestants, and the reformation didn't abolish war or racism? This supports the argument about how internet freedoms shouldn't be used to justify deregulation how?
There are other tangents like this – not as crazy – but still, man. Maybe this is just something that should have been taken out in the editing process. But the raw out-of-touchness with reality or the way that ordinary people think just makes you lose faith with the rest of the argumentation.
This book contains a ton of critique, but it's not just a negative vision: Golumbia absolutely had a positive political viewpoint and states it in various places, although it doesn't have a dedicated section. It's unusual.
The book is very pro-copyright. It quotes the CEO of RIAA without saying that he's the CEO of RIAA. It brushes aside critiques of DRM, copyright terms, publishers, and so on, without much logical critique - the defense of copyright is a defense of property rights. I would say that there's a lot more to something like DRM than property rights - digital copyright protections have a power that far outstrips that of physical copyright protections, to the point that they remove any ownership of the things that you buy. But Golumbia is uninterested in the details here: to him, copyright is good.
He also uses Jack Kirby as an example of how piracy and copyright evasion robs creators of their work. His summary:
Kirby is the comic book writer and artist who created most of the characters now world famous due to the blockbuster Marvel films. Kirby was famously denied participation in the profits on account of the work-for-hire agreements he was made to accept in his early years in publishing.
This argument makes no sense. Jack Kirby’s career was marked by getting screwed over by publishers and companies, under a strong copyright system. His comics weren't illegally pirated. In fact, Golumbia had just written, critiquing St. Laurent’s critique of copyright:
He has elided the fact that publishers and other distributors typically enforce creators’ copyright through contract, and that every important work produced today with one or more creators is issued under copyright with significant benefit to the individuals or companies that produce and help to distribute the work.
But the Jack Kirby example: contracts with distributors? Who helped distribute works, and then didn't pay Kirby enough, in a freely-agreed upon contract under our current copyright law? The defense of copyright in this book is so fervent but argued inconsistently.
It is also very anti-encryption. Like, the government should be able to listen in on all conversations on the internet. The reason for this is that he believes in a form of democratic government in which we all vote and have power over governing, and thus the masses are more powerful than the individual. He believes in a strong interpretation of Max Weber’s idea of monopoly of violence: that the violence is actually legitimate and good.
Democracy. I would say that Golumbia believed in a form of perfected democracy: a government that deserves our trust and should have say over a much wider range of decisions than it does now. For example, he contests whether social media websites or internet forums should be allowed to exist without government approval.
I would say that this is maybe the crux of the problem: that doesn't exist and has become even less close to existing today. Part of the reason why I and many of my friends use Signal to communicate, or why Germans are very enthusiastic about privacy is because even if you have a good political administration now, you might not in a few years.
And right now, it's those "few years" - we're in the bad place where fascist henchmen are actively attempting to rewrite government systems to spy on individuals.
You can sort of argue that you get what you prepare for: if we all buy guns and use E2E encryption in fears of some dystopian turn, we accidentally summon it, and if we build a government that has lots of power, hopefully democratic power, which it can use to police speech in a way that hopefully limits the odds of a fascist takeover, then we might get democracy. Notably Golumbia does not argue this, though, he sort of assumes that the government is a lot more trustworthy than any government has ever been.
I think that it's sort of notable that the pro-copyright, anti-encryption, and strong limits on free speech viewpoints of the author have pretty complex political alignments themselves. Sunsetting Section 230 has strong support from far-right republicans like Josh Hawley because they want to use the government to enforce their preferred rules. The biggest defenders of copyright in America are huge corporations, most notably Disney. The strongest opponents of strong encryption are the NSA and neoliberals.
In part, I think this is because, as Rorty says in Achieving Our Country, there is a dearth of pro-government leftists in America in the post-Vietnam era. Our most popular far-left parties, which aren't very popular, like the DSA, are big-tent organizations that have a lot more members on the libertarian side of philosophy than the democratic centralism side.
I think this book should have been edited way down before publishing. If you were to take the best half of it, it would have been readable, consistent, and more useful as a way to change people's minds about its very valid points. But it overshoots and goes into so many puzzling tangents, and relies way too much on a very rare combination of beliefs that Golumbia held. It ends up attacking so many people and ideas, and then supporting this extremely 'statist' perspective that few people are likely to hold, especially in this current political era.
Golumbia seemed like a very cool person and I hate to not like something that was published so recently and posthumously. I think that, to give him the benefit of the doubt, the editors should have done more here.