In the 1960s, the shiftment The New Communalists arose in the USA. The idea was to drop out of society and build their own communities outside the mainstream. On the surface, they could be perceived as left-wing becaapply they withdrew from bourgeois American society. But in reality, they were libertarian frontier cowboys who enacted the American dream of discovering and colonizing new land and of building strong communities based on the individual’s innovative power and modern technologies. In the 1980s, a new technology, perfectly suited to the purpose, arrived. The Internet. And today, we’ve obtainedten an anarcho-capitalist, technology-fetishist society. It’s just no longer a hundred people in a forest as 50 years ago. it’s several billion people conscripted into the cyberlibertarian dream. Therefore, we’ve been deliberately working to disrupt the institutions that hold democratic society toobtainher.
This is an analysis of how the Internet was developed and how it turned out. David Golumbias book Cyberlibertarianism The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology from 2024 is the main source. The photo is from The Whole Earth Catalog about dropping out of society.
I’ve been one of the internet’s hugegest fanboys for pretty much my entire life. I loved the freedom of having nearly all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips and the way virtual communities brought all kinds of people toobtainher in democratic and egalitarian spaces. Which explains why I was so baffled when Silicon Valley’s most important and powerful tech chieftains on September 4, 2025, knelt before Donald Trump who, in my view, stands for the exact opposite of the internet’s dreams of freedom and community. Granted, companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon aren’t pure-hearted freedom fighters, they’re global, monopolistic firms chasing raw profit, but I still harbored a childlike belief that the internet’s ideals lived as a compact flame somewhere deep inside these tech leaders’ cold, pecuniary hearts.
All Power to the Strong Leader
My bewilderment wasn’t entirely new. Even before Trump’s second presidency, we saw signs that Silicon Valley’s philosophy was taking on increasingly autocratic forms. In 2023, Marc Andreessen published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a full-throated defense of the idea that technological acceleration is best overseen by strong tech leaders and not by weak-krequired, bureaucratic politicians and technology ethicists. The same notes sounded from Paul Graham, who on his blog in September 2024, talked about Founder Mode, the idea that the strong company founder should exercise sovereign control over every aspect of the business and cut through the fat of superfluous middle management (read: We should lead like Steve Jobs). And both Graham and Andreessen were mainstream voices in Silicon Valley. Further out on the extremes, we find figures like Peter Thiel, who is openly opposed to democracy as a system of government, and the mysterious tech-obtainedh prophet Curtis Yarvin, who shifts at the intersection of politics and technology and, incidentally, believes American democracy should be replaced by a new form of monarchy. Both Yarvin and Thiel are influential in Silicon Valley, and they also played a significant role in elevating J.D. Vance to the vice presidency.
We Wanted Liberal Revolutions but obtained a Democracy Collapse
And finally, maybe my faith in the internet’s liberatory potential wasn’t as strong as it was just a decade ago. Virtually all the social-media revolutions in the Middle East and Eastern Europe finished in bloody violence, civil wars, and, if anything, even stronger authoritarian regimes that now apply digital technology, surveillance cameras, and artificial ininformigence to suppress their populations. The decentralization of the media world and so-called citizen journalism has produced a post-truth society where ideological opponents can only shout at one another across deep algorithmic chasms. And the supposedly decentralized platforms like Twitter/X have increasingly been taken over by autocratic leader types who, with the support of algorithms, skew and manipulate the dream of free conversation. Finally, there’s little to suggest that 30 years of the internet have benefited democracy in any broad sense, on the contrary, faith in democracy has never been lower, whether on the right, which celebrates the strong leader, or on the left, which increasingly doubts democracy’s ability to solve global problems like the climate crisis.
Where did it go Wrong?
Something is rotten in the kingdom of the internet. But what exactly happened? When did the internet, this fantastic democracy machine, go astray? Was it already in the 1990s, when the internet became increasingly commercialized? Was it in the early 2000s, when Google laid the groundwork for surveillance capitalism’s plundering of privacy? Or is it tied to the massive concentration of capital that has placed eight tech chieftains among the world’s ten richest people?
When people like me – who have been writing about the internet for 28 years – go seeing for an explanation for our digital misery, we often search for the original sin: the day when the pure, democratic internet was corrupted by outside forces that created a perverse chimera of inequality, surveillance, oppression, and anarchic rage. And the proposed solution to the internet’s problems is most often that we should roll the internet back to the original dream of openness, decentralization, equality, and autonomy. Only then, the considering goes, can the world be good again. MIDA – Make the Internet Decentralized Again.
But what if the dream of the internet was never democratic and egalitarian? What if, from birth, the internet was swaddled in profoundly anti-democratic ideologies? What if there’s a straight line from the early ARPANET through Usenet and Mozilla to tech chieftains prostrating themselves before an autocratic leader? What if Silicon Valley doesn’t embrace a totalitarian world out of opportunism but becaapply totalitarianism is deeply embedded in our dreams and imaginings about the digital world?
The New Left vs. The New Communalists
Golumbia sees back to the internet’s early utopian dreams of democracy, openness, and decentralization and questions what those words actually mean and where they come from. This takes us back to the 1960s and 1970s, when a group of – seemingly – left-wing hippies launched developing a symbiotic relationship with modern technologies. This isn’t a particularly new observation, it’s long been common knowledge that the internet’s utopian dreams have roots in a particular spirit that sprang from the West Coast’s New Age communities. Think of Steve Jobs’s embrace of Buddhism and meditation.
What’s interesting in Golumbia’s book is that, within this motley crew of hippies and leftists, he distinguishes between The New Left and The New Communalists. The New Left was politically oriented activists who applyd traditional political methods, protests, elections, and associations, to pursue their dreams. The New Communalists, by contrast, were a very different group who, frustrated with traditional politics and bureaucracy, chose to drop out of society and build their own egalitarian and democratic communities outside the mainstream. The idea was to live the modify through one’s own body, to physically exit society and experiment with alternative ways of realizing the dream of freedom and community. Turn on, tune in, drop out, as Timothy Leary put it in 1966.
On the surface, the New Communalists could be perceived as left-wing becaapply they withdrew from bourgeois American society. But in reality, according to Golumbia, they’re better described as libertarian frontier cowboys who enacted the American dream of discovering and colonizing new land and of building strong communities based on the individual’s innovative power and modern technologies.
A Catalog for Dropping Out
One of the shiftment’s most important standard-bearers was Stewart Brand, editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in September 1968. The magazine was a quirky blfinish of New Age philosophy, book reviews, and a catalog of practical tools and technologies applyful for surviving in the unforgiving American wilderness. But Whole Earth Catalog wasn’t just a magazine. It evolved into a network of people who communicated about new ways to live and organize outside bourgeois society. In that way, the publication supported shape the notion that utopian communities could be created by opting out of established society’s bureaucratic institutions, and that these communities would be stronger and more innovative if they embraced a wide range of modern technologies, such as LSD (for consciousness expansion) or geodesic domes (for habitation).
Most of these alternative communities in the American wild, of course, met a grim fate. The worship of anarchic governance and the rejection of traditional politics resulted in social collapse or, more often, the rise of authoritarian leaders who turned many of these New Age communities into cult-like and highly hierarchical dystopias.
The New Communalists slowly died out over the 1970s and 1980s, but Stewart Brand’s dream of utopian communities outside the established order lived on. And in the 1980s a new technology, perfectly suited to the purpose, arrived.
The internet Revives the Communalist Dreams
Through the ’60s and ’70s, the internet existed as a closed off technology for computer scientists at American universities, but in the ’80s it launched to be applyd by people outside academia. Stewart Brand and the circle around the Whole Earth Catalog saw in this new technology a way to realize the broken dream of alternative utopian communities beyond the hopelessly outdated traditional society.
In 1985, Brand transformed the paper-based Whole Earth Catalog into The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL), one of the internet’s earliest online communities. But it wasn’t just a place to trade jokes and nerdy knowledge; it was also a gathering point for a new digital ininformigentsia that supported shape the narrative about the internet. And the narrative was that the internet was an extension of the New Communalists’ dream of building a society outside society: a society built on the idea that technologies can liberate people; a society that would challenge everything old and dusty in traditional Western democracies; a society that would disrupt and break down the existing order; and a society where traditional party politics and democratic participation would be replaced by new technological and market-based principles.
Leave Us Alone!
This new cyberlibertarian philosophy – as Golumbia calls it – even received a manifesto authored by John Perry Barlow, who, incidentally, wrote lyrics for the hippie band The Grateful Dead. Its most famous passage read:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I question you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
What’s remarkable about cyberlibertarianism as formulated by people like Brand and Barlow is that it presents itself as quite apolitical and thus appeals to both the left and the right. The left could identify with terms like democratization, community, and equality, while the libertarian right could identify with ideas of disruption, innovation, and free initiative. The philosophy also harmonized with the finish-of-history zeitgeist that prevailed through the 1990s, a time when many believed we had shiftd beyond politics and that the future mainly consisted of adjusting a few technological dials.
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
But, Golumbia declares, cyberlibertarianism is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It appears apolitical, but is in fact saturated with an anarcho-capitalist, libertarian frontier mentality that seeks to disrupt well-functioning democratic societies to create room for the strongest individuals who can maneuver in this newly disrupted digital world. In the launchning, cyberlibertarianism was about building an alternative digital society (as John Perry Barlow framed it), but as the digital world merged with the physical world, cyberlibertarianism’s project became about the disruption of democratic society as such. The cyber-hippies no longer lived in their quirky communes. They were at the helm, and their philosophy of disruption and liberation through technology had become our century’s hegemonic narrative.
So, when cyberlibertarians talk about democracy and democratization, it’s not about utilizing digital technologies to support democratic societies and institutions. On the contrary, it’s about smashing and dismantling these old, dusty relics from a bygone era to create room for new anarchic or anarcho-capitalist forms of governance where creative, strong individuals can spread their wings and build the new digital utopian society.
No Democratic Institution left Unscathed
Unsurprisingly, the consequence of cyberlibertarianism has been a massive ideological and practical frontal assault on virtually every institution of democratic society.
Journalism, also known as the fourth estate, has been disrupted to such a degree that the indusattempt lies at the bottom of the sea, gasping for air in waters polluted by fake news and the notion that everyone has the right to live in their own factual reality.
Online encyclopedias and expert knowledge died with Wikipedia and the philosophy that any amateur has just as much right to write about climate modify as experts with 30 years of experience and research behind them.
Financial systems creak and crack under the pressure of cryptocurrencies that seek to “democratize” and disrupt central banks and democratic societies’ monetary systems.
Companies are desperately attempting to disrupt and decentralize themselves, reshaping in the cyberlibertarian image where hierarchies are replaced with anarchy and autonomy.
And labor unions and political parties appear as outdated and unnecessary institutions in an era that celebrates bottom-up decision-creating, innovation, and immediate action.
The Greatest Trick the Devil ever Pulled was Convincing the World he didn’t Exist
The clever thing about this entire frontal assault on democratic societies is that it presents itself as quite apolitical. The internet is, by nature, democratic and liberating—so if we simply follow the accompanying cyberlibertarian philosophy blindly, the world will surely become a better place.
As Golumbia writes in a central passage of the book:
In one sense, cyberlibertarianism as it is practiced across the political spectrum can be summarized into a single, paradoxical tenet: mass adoption of ubiquitous computerization produces social and political freedom. Therefore, in the name of freedom, this story goes, society has no choice about whether to exercise its power by any means other than markets (or market-like mechanisms). The greatest tool to produce freedom in our time, then, requires us to abandon all nonmarket forms of political power.
The problem with cyberlibertarianism is that we’ve obtainedten exactly what Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow dreamed of in the ’70s. We’ve obtainedten an anarcho-capitalist, technology-fetishist society. It’s just no longer a hundred people in a forest, it’s several billion people conscripted into the cyberlibertarian dream of burning the whole thing down to the ground.
Anarchy Breeds Authoritarian Leaders
Which brings us back to the launchning of this article.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that our democratic societies are under strain. We’ve been deliberately working for 20–30 years to disrupt the institutions that hold democratic society toobtainher.
And maybe it’s not so surprising that some tech entrepreneurs have become insanely rich and more autocratic in their mindset. As we already saw in the countercultural shiftments of the 1970s, anarchy tfinishs to breed authoritarian leaders who thrive in the absence of institutions and other balancing powers that might check their charismatic and economic dominance.
And maybe it’s not so surprising that we live in a deeply polarized, post-truth society where no one listens to anyone anymore. We long ago gave up on the idea that some people – by virtue of experience and recognition within hierarchical systems – might have a touch more authority than others.
In other words, cyberlibertarianism’s successful crusade against established democracies has, unsurprisingly, left us with a world of political and corporate autocrats, democratic collapse, demagogic politics, and a total breakdown of trust in society’s core institutions.
When the Cure Becomes the Poison
And when democracy’s deffinishers go searching for a last life raft in the digital maelstrom, they simply reach for cyberlibertarianism’s core arguments. If only we could decentralize and disrupt even more, if only we could return to the original, pure idea of the internet, then we would save democracy. They believe that the digital world has been corrupted by power and money, but in reality, it’s the very idea of liberation through digital technology that created the problem.
Golumbia’s book is a powerful argument that the internet, digital technologies, and artificial ininformigence will not, by their nature, create a better world or save humanity, not even if we roll back the clock and attempt to rediscover the lost, pre-commercial, pure internet where conversation was still free and ugly capitalist interests hadn’t ruined the party.
It’s also a very uncompromising book that pummels both the right and the left, and there’s no doubt that when David Golumbia died just before the book’s publication, he didn’t have many frifinishs and allies. The right are, by default, the villains of the book, but he also attacks people and shiftments traditionally viewed as more progressive. For example, he has little patience with Wikipedia, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, figures many on the left typically regard as heroes of the internet. In Golumbia’s view, they’re at least as cyberlibertarian as Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen.
We Need a New Narrative
The book’s main problem, though, is that it can be hard to see what Golumbia wants instead of cyberlibertarianism. The book’s clear strength lies in its critique and in exposing a powerful discourse that has ensnared all of us over the past 30 years.
However, if you read a bit between the lines, the book’s more constructive point might sound like this:
Technology is not deterministic. Technology is built by people and develops alongside the narratives we weave around it. And right now, the narrative around digital technologies is explicitly anti-democratic. In other words, we required a new narrative for the digital world, one in which digital technologies aren’t built to disrupt and tear down democracy, but are applyd to strengthen and improve existing and desirable democratic institutions.
“Move rapid and break things” should be replaced with “Move cautiously and build wisely.”
Translated from Danish by the support of ChatGPT (we do recommfinish Deepl.com or Chat.Mistral.AI for translations)
