An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic
underpinnings In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology
Cyberlibertarianism argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and
social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of
research David Golumbia traces how digital evangelism has driven the worldwide shift toward
the political right concealing inequality xenophobia dishonesty and massive corporate
concentrations of wealth and power beneath the utopian presumption of digital technology as an
inherent social good. Providing an incisive critique of the push for open access and
open-source software and the legal battles over online censorship and net neutrality
Cyberlibertarianism details how the purportedly democratic internet has been employed as an
organizing tool for terror and hate groups and political disinformation campaigns. As he
unpacks our naively utopian conception of the digital world Golumbia highlights technology’s
role in the advancement of hyperindividualist and antigovernment agendas demonstrating how
Silicon Valley corporations and right-wing economists antiestablishment figures such as Julian
Assange Elon Musk Peter Thiel Edward Snowden and Mark Zuckerberg and seemingly positive
voices such as John Perry Barlow Cory Doctorow the Electronic Freedom Foundation and
Wikipedia all have worked to hamper regulation and weaken legal safeguards against
exploitation. Drawing from a wide range of thought in digital theory economics law and
political philosophy as well as detailed research and Golumbia’s own experience as a software
developer Cyberlibertarianism serves as a clarion call to reevaluate the fraught politics of
the internet. In the hope of providing a way of working toward a more genuinely democratic and
egalitarian future for digital technology this magisterial work insists that we must first
understand the veiled dogmas from which it has been constructed. Retail e-book files for this
title are screen-reader friendly.
