Cyberlibertarianism

David Golumbia (1963–2023) was associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of The Cultural Logic of Computation and The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minnesota, 2016). George Justice is professor of English and provost at the University of Tulsa. He specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and the history of the book, and he writes frequently about higher education.

"In the years before his untimely death, David Golumbia produced this scorching, razor-sharp analysis of the twenty-first century’s most dangerous conceit: the invention of ‘cyberspace’ as a sui generis zone of radical arrogance and incontestable power beyond the reach of society and the rule of law. Cyberlibertarianism is a meticulous, discerning, morally relentless, and politically shrewd takedown of what has by now become a global institutional order, led and defended by the wealth, power, and political muscle of big tech firms and their propagandists. Golumbia hacks his way through their word jungle of twisted self-serving rhetoric to expose the shockingly antidemocratic, antihuman, protofascistic, and openly violent extremist politics that animate the companies, their inventions, defenders, lawyers, PR specialists, phantasmagoric fellow travelers, and pseudo philosophers. These characters see themselves as rightful owners of the future. If you want to understand the origins of our information hellscape with its vast new inequalities, corrupt information, algorithmic control, population-scale behavioral manipulation, and wholesale destruction of privacy, then begin here. And if you want to learn how to take back the future, then begin here." -Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power   "David Golumbia has written a masterwork of political theory, a comprehensive take on the political, economic, and social consequences of cyberlibertarianism, the dogma that is deeply-and likely inextricably-interwoven through what we have collectively come to consider the ‘tech industry.’ Golumbia pulls no punches in his indictments, taking on the laziness of what stands in for intellectual thinking in academic, journalistic, and other popular takes on the status quo. Time and again, he proves himself intellectually, primarily through an in-depth and expansive reading of the literature and in many schools of thought-notably including that which he deftly critiques. His attention to detail in describing the social, political, and technological change over the long term is itself an antidote to the breathless and usually unsubstantiated, if not wholly wrong, claims of technological exceptionalists. Cyberlibertarianism is essential for understanding the contemporary moment and the recent past that got us here. It stands as a monumental magnum opus from a meticulous thinker and sharp social critic who is sorely missed." -Sarah T. Roberts, director, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLA