In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology 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, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the idealistic presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. George Justice wrote the foreword to Cyberlibertarianism, and is joined in conversation with Frank Pasquale.


George Justice is professor of English literature and provost at the University of Tulsa.

Frank Pasquale is professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.

David Golumbia (1963–2023) was associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology; The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism; and The Cultural Logic of Computation.



EPISODE REFERENCES:
Tim Wu
Lawrence Lessig
Wikileaks
David E. Pozen: Transparency’s Ideological Drift https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/10354
Stefanos Geroulanos / Transparency in Postwar France
#CreateDontScrape
David Golumbia / ChatGPT Should Not Exist (article)
M. T. Anderson / Feed
Jonathan Crary / Scorched Earth


"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."
—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

"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


Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Cyberlibertarianism and the fraught politics of the internet

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Cyberlibertarianism and the fraught politics of the internet

University of Minnesota Press

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