Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology

“Cyberlibertarianism is a commitment to the belief that digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of democratic governments,” according to this hit-or-miss critique. In the most persuasive portions of the book, Golumbia (The Politics of Bitcoin), an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who died in 2023, argues that cyberlibertarians deploy “digital rights” rhetoric to stymie regulation on behalf of business interests. For example, he notes that the industry-friendly nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation frequently denounces regulation as invasive government surveillance while remaining silent on private companies’ commercialization of users’ data. Unfortunately, the difficulty of tracing dark money means that Golumbia is forced to rely on circumstantial evidence to prove the EFF and other pro-business think tanks are industry-backed fronts (“An EFF ‘privacy’ campaign... aligned precisely with Apple’s marketing strategy”). Golumbia also has a habit of making assertions without citing his evidence, as when he suggests that Google led successful efforts to tank the federal Stop Online Piracy Act in 2011 but doesn’t discuss how the company did so or how he knows. Golumbia makes some provocative claims about how Silicon Valley shields itself from legal scrutiny, but he doesn’t always have the receipts to back them up. Readers should take this with a grain of salt. (Nov.)