The Intolerable 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.

> 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.

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_.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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 not 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 - 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but this sells me on cyberlibertarianism.

There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc...

A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in the space and convince a lot of people to follow them. Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. It's to stay strong, help your friends be strong, and accept that not everyone will make it. That has always been the flip side of freedom.

The Internet, and now AI, delivered so many of the dreams of my childhood. It is a mostly free society, for better or worse. I'm hoping that intelligence remains distributed, enshittification stops when my agent deals with it for me, and the physical world remains as free as it is. But these aren't things that would be changed with new governance of cyberspace, these are features of the optimization landscape of reality and technological progress.

Do we live in the best possible world, of course not. But this one is pretty good, and it's easy to imagine non libertarian ones that are so much worse. I feel a huge debt to the people who designed the Internet with the foresight that they did, the capture exists at a psychological layer, not a physical one.

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

I think this article touches upon something quite apparent in this modern age.

Talking to people with different opinions is considered tantamount to joining them. It is much better to point the finger of blame rather than suggest a way forward. The best way to criticise someone's argument is to take their words, explain what they really meant by that in a way that supports your argument, making the counterargument ridiculously easy.

What I don't understand is that how people have come to believe that arguing for the things that corporate interests fought for represents standing against those interests.

The thing that has it in a nutshell was this line

>The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation.

Cumbersome to everyone without a battery of lawyers. Copyright law has only become more powerful, and the patent process has become more a game of who can spend the most in court on this meritless claim. Disney didn't spend all those lobbying dollars extending copyright out of concern for the welfare of the people. They did it because they wanted to buy and own ideas and keep them for themselves for as long as possible.

I am all for robust well enforced regulation to help and protect people. I thing laws should be in the interest of society and the welfare of everyone more than it should for individuals. I don't think anyone advocating for personal freedoms is necessarily arguing against the interests of the group. There are people out there suggesting ways to correct the system through many many boring but required changes, some of them quite little, some of them large, one of the large ones is getting money out of politics.

I wonder if John Perry Barlow advocated for electoral reform to reign in lobbying? Because it didn't happen, and quite frankly arguing about the world that came to pass without that happening isn't going to represent anyone's plans for the future no matter

So what do we want to build? How should the better world be. Don't frame it as Not that!. Do you want the Revolution and Reign of Terror or the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution?

You can fight to build something better, don't confuse fighting to tear down as the same thing because you are angry and fighting about it makes you feel good about that.

Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. - John Perry Barlow

Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.

Further reading:

1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.

2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.

3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.

5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.

6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-p....

7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.

8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/j....

9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.

10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.

11) Spiers, Elizabeth. ‘The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites’. Elizabeth Spiers, 1 April 2026. https://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-intellectualism-of-....

What? No mention of Web3?

Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.

Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?

As someone for whom the Declaration strongly resonated with, and still does, I think this is the crux of how things end up going sideways:

> Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms.

This is a core American delusion that runs much deeper than merely the Web or the Internet. It's even been legally codified in things like Citizens United - a fallacy that large companies are merely groups of individuals. It's basically the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic applied to activities rather than money.

In reality, large companies are top-down authoritarian structures where most of the individual humans involved have their own individual will suppressed. Rather they are following direction from above, and any choices they are allowed to make as an individual are within that context. If they go against the direction/orders too much, they will simply be replaced with a different more obedient cog (this is something so-called "right libertarianism" directly whitewashes by rejecting analysis of most forms of power dynamics aka coercion).

I do not think it is inconsistent to still believe in those individualist ideas applied to individuals, while also viewing Big Tech - with its many qualities of actually being government - as something whose at-scale "policies" should be subject to democratic accountability. But to do that, meaning to achieve reform without throwing out the whole idea of individual freedom in the online world, requires us to openly reject that corpo fallacy whereby individuals empathize with billion dollar corporations!

But of course from an American perspective this is all kind of moot for the next few years at least as the main support behind the current regime is Big Tech looking to head off any sort of de jure regulation. And so we must not be tempted by their political calls that might claim to address these problems, as this regime's bread and butter is using very real frustrations as the impetus to implement solutions that perpetuate the problems while setting themselves up as speed bumps to profit (eg look at the shakedown happening to mere wifi routers).

Which brings us back to why that individualist message is so powerful, despite how it ends up going sideways - because when traditional democratic accountability has been hopelessly neutralized, self-help is the only thing individuals have left.

Libertarianism sounded great. Its all about freedom, and the right to do with yourself what you want. And who doesnt want that?

But they also wanted that freedom for their property and money.

And if youre willing to skirt or plainly violate the laws, you can make bank. And then as a company, you can basically bribe politicians and do all these horrible things.

The end result of libertarianism is simple: He who has the gold makes the rule.

Dont like your pay? Fuck you. Quit.

Dont like the conditions? Fuck you. Die.

Dont like political manipulation? Too fucking bad. You have no choice.

Dont like policies at mega-internet corp (meta, alphabet, microsoft)? Too bad, we'll erase you.

Libertarianism creates semi-autonomous enclaves of technofeudalism. And their power is enforced by non-internet mundane government laws, like the DMCA.

You violate a company, and they delete you. You violate government law, and they arrest or kill you. Of course its in line of duty, or defense of officer - all the eupamisms.

But long story short, I do not trust libertarians in any way. They do indeed want freedom to control everyone else.

> 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.

The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.

The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists.

They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.

If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.

This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society?

The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market.

Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good?

It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.