Excerpted from David Golumbia:

(the whole article is well worth reading, though in my opinion, it advocates a sectarian view of the left, that would preclude it to seek commonality with other social forces)

Fidelis / Flickr

“If digital communication technology promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?

Part of this disconnect between advancing technology and a retreating left can be explained by the advent of cyberlibertarianism, a view that widespread computerization naturally produces democracy and freedom.

In the 1990s, UK media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, US journalist Paulina Borsook, and US philosopher of technology Langdon Winner introduced the term to describe a prominent worldview in Silicon Valley and digital culture generally; a related analysis can be found more recently in Stanford communication scholar Fred Turner’s work. While cyberlibertarianism can be defined as a general digital utopianism, summed up by a simple slogan like “computerization will set us free” or “computers provide the solution to any and all problems,” these writers note a specific political formation — one Winner describes as “ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics.”

There are overt libertarians who are also digital utopians — figures like Jimmy Wales, Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, Dread Pirate Roberts, and Sergey Brin, and the members of the Technology Liberation Front who explicitly describe themselves as cyberlibertarians. But the term also describes a wider ideological formation in which people embrace digital utopianism as compatible or even identical with leftist politics opposed to neoliberalism.

In perhaps the most pointed form of cyberlibertarianism, computer expertise is seen as directly applicable to social questions. In The Cultural Logic of Computation, I argue that computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power. To the extent that algorithmic forms of reason and social organization can be said to have an inherent politics, these have long been understood as compatible with political formations on the Right rather than the Left.

Yet today, “hacktivists” and other promoters of the liberatory nature of mass computerization are prominent political voices, despite their overall political commitments remaining quite unclear. They are championed by partisans of both the Right and the Left as if they obviously serve the political ends of each. One need only reflect on the leftist support for a project like Open Source software, founded by libertarian Eric Raymond and corporate sympathizer Tim O’Reilly and widely celebrated by libertarians and corporations, to notice the strange and under-examined convergence of the Right and Left around specifically digital practices whose underlying motivations are often explicitly libertarian.

When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their work.

This, much more than overt digital libertarianism, should concern the Left, and anyone who does not subscribe to libertarian politics. It is the acceptance by leftists of the largely rhetorical populist politics and explicitly pro-business thought of figures like Clay Shirky (who repeatedly argues that representative democratic and public bodies have no business administering public resources but must defer to “disruptive” forces like Napster) and Yochai Benkler (whose Wealth of Networks is roundly celebrated as heralding an anticapitalist “sharing economy,” yet remains firmly rooted in capitalist economics) that should concern us, especially when they are taken up as if they are obviously positions the Left should favor. It is the boastful self-confidence of engineers and hackers that their advanced computer skills inherently qualify them to say a great deal about any part of the social fabric to which we are lucky enough to have them contribute, regardless of their understanding of politics or society.

The inherent claim informing these politics of digital utopianism is that the political world has shifted so radically due to digital technology that the old rules do not apply; computers represent such a fundamental break in human history that they justify altogether new ethical and political standards.”