How do left and right libertarianism differ? When you say left libertarian are you distinguishing between free-market fetishists and people who just respect personal rights?
(“Libertarian on social issues” could very well descibe a democratic socialist…)
Left libertarians see the value in the government providing a social safety net, infrastructure, scientific research, education, etc. but are very much against the government meddling in people’s personal lives, or engaging in social engineering. Social democrats tend to be much more ok with the idea of social engineering, and often think that the government should be engaged in protecting people from themselves, with things like drug laws.
I’d consider myself a democratic socialist, but I’m not into regulating what people put into their bodies either. And I do love my guns…
Maybe the libertarianism was coming from inside the house all along?!
A good (though not foolproof) way of distinguishing left libertarians from right libertarians is asking how they feel about Marx or, more broadly, property.
Nah, the EFF/ACLU crowd are just traditional liberals. They shy from the label because they mistakenly think that liberal = left. They’re still capitalists.
Just like how “libertarians” can refer to the leftist anarchists in 1930s Spain as well as right-wing free marketeers like Rand, there’s at least two types of techno-libertarians as well. And much like how the Spanish anarchists got beaten down by the forces of reaction and capitalism, the idealism of the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” didn’t last against the type of techo-libertarian running Uber, AirBnB, or Facebook who wants to make a buck despite whatever laws they may bend or break.
Facebook has been a dumpster fire for quite some time now. I’d like to applaud myself on having the foresight to have gotten the hell outta there some years ago, but now I’m in what feels like the non-Facebook-consuming minority watching the whole thing go crashing out of control through virtually everything I care about, while all I can do is stand and watch. Or is that the illusion of enfranchisement lost? I… it’s… facedesk I’ll just stay here for the next hour before I have to go to work.
Someone get me a coffee. And a straw.
Why do you think the EFF are traditional liberal capitalists?
There’s some diversity there, but my impression was that they’re dominated by liberals and tech-libertarians. Their fondness for ACLU style free-speech marketplace-of-ideas arguments suggests so.
Cory is a smidge left of that, but I had the feeling that he represented the left flank of the EFF.
And Stalinists. (We have always had Bowb Your Buddy Week.)
Yup.
OTOH, the historical focus on the Stalinist role in the Spanish Republican defeat serves as a useful smokescreen to obscure the impact of the arms embargo imposed by the capitalist democracies.
OTOH, simple recognition that “people on your own side” doesn’t always mean that they are your friends is prudent.
(Probably part 2 for the Spanish Civil War.)
Yup.
Not many Stalinists in the modern USA, thankfully. Plenty of wavering center-right types, though.
Sure, Facebook got played. The Russians weaponized social media and threw it back in the Americans’ faces. And rooting out this particular botnet, now that it’s been identified, won’t be too hard. But for the next one, the Russians will probably use accounts piggybacked on zombified PCs that have USA IP addresses. They will look just like a collection of random vanilla Trump voters. Not all the fake news came from Russia. Some of it came from Alex Jones-consuming idiots.
I’m just wondering how any technical cure will have the finesse that’s required to prevent Russian nefariousness while avoiding banning non-Russians who are just stupid. (Because you can’t ban stupid, can you? How does Facebook decide what level of stupidity is restricted?)
Essentially, if you are owned by the stock market, you cannot be neutral. It is impossible.
Also, if you are or have been enriched by your great googy gadget, your claim to libertarianism is fouled on the wreckage of everything destroyed to get you there.
If you are rich, and renounce riches, and assist society achieve the ability to be healthy, then perhaps you start being a libertarian.
The idea that Zuck et al are libertarians is totally #fakenews. They might think they are, but the money tells it differently.
I’m no anti-capitalist. But these modern era media moguls - and that is all they are - are indeed twisting the world.
No, it’s not wrong. The emergence of FB has created new structural forces in society. Didn’t have to be FB, but that’s the one that survived and thrived.
Zuck likely did not set out with an evil master plan, or knowledge aforethought, but if he fails to see what FB is now, then his apparently enormous intellect (I have that on good, personal authority) is incapable of processing the reality.
Sorry to violate Godwin’s Law but Facebook is to a positive social experience like the Wannsee Conference and Final Solution were to making Germany great again. In other words, while someone may have thought they were awesome, no, they weren’t.
In Zuck’s defense, when Facebook was first conceived, the basic idea was reasonably good — an easy, low friction way for a community to connect.
What it became under Peter Thiel’s supervision, encouragement, etc., helped, I suppose, by simple greed on Zuckerberg’s part, is simply sociopathic.
But I digress. Zuckerberg has spent his entire adult life developing Facebook. Why should he necessarily know enough to avoid getting played? Specially with Thiel to support him?
See, while you have a point (or the start of one) about libertarianism. Its one end of a different political spectrum than conservative-liberal and regressive-progressive. And any given ideological position is going to fall somewhere between libertarianism and authoritarianism. And falling towards the libertarian end of the spectrum has no bearing on where something falls right to left. Or is good or bad.
I think you’re going a bit far, and perhaps excusing things with the “there are two types of technolibertarian” thing. The obsession with disruption was always as much about end rounding government regulation and labor as it was shifting stale business markets. The radical free speech interpretation was always about shielding very particular kinds of speech from very particular people from criticism and social consequences rather than censorship. The fixation on a mythical pure meritocracy always described a hierarchy of well connected, privileged, white men from very particular areas of the country. A justification of how well they’d done rather then an attempt to make sure everyone can do that well. Its always ignored or dismissed factors that don’t fit the ideology, always ignored dynamics that haven’t effected the people in the narrow startup/silicon valley bubble. The entire edifice has always been deeply tied to, predicated on, and involved in the same fictionalization of our economy that’s created so much havoc as of late.
Its not so much “these are the good technoliberarians and these are the bad technolibertarians” as it is you’ve been seeing the ideology develop, codify, and its practical effects crystallize in the world. Your early idealistic, hopeful ideas about the web lead inexorably to the Peter Theils of the world. And there isn’t as much daylight between what Theil’s on about and Elon Musk’s “private industry will take us to mars! If you let me drill this hole without oversight” nonsense as people would like to think. Where you see things that are argued from or predicated on similar terms but aren’t wrapped up in that whole tech (and specifically tech business/finance) magically liberating us from all this odious government and social constraints thing. Well those things aren’t neccisarily what we mean by technolibertarianism. They may be related, they may have the same root (or be at the root), they may sounds similar. They may be coming out of the same blinkered bubble. But they aren’t neccisarily technolibertarianism per se. Those and even earlier forms of technolibertarianism don’t neccisarily have direct bearing on what it has become now, the effect its had out in the real world, or the movements/ideologies that have spun out of it.
Huh. I’d always imagined them as much less capitalist than that (perhaps influenced by my perspective of Cory). The wikipedia page on John Perry Barlow does appear to align with your characterisation.
