Tech Won't Save Us - The Problem With Cyberlibertarianism w/ Chris Gilliard

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Chris Gilliard to discuss David Golumbia's final book Cyberlibertarianism and how right-wing politics shaped how we think about the internet.Chris Gilliard is co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, coming in 2026.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:David Golumbia wrote an essay called “ChatGPT Should Not Exist” in December 2022.Matt Bors drew a comic called “You made become a Nazi!”Cyberlibertarianism is out now from the University of Minnesota Press.Support the show

What's closer to the truth is that they have been right-wingers all along, and that this so-called heel turn, because they haven't received enough praise, is a very convenient fiction. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and before we get to this week's episode, I feel like there's something I need to clarify from last week. It seems that some listeners don't think I was equivocal enough in saying that Elon Musk was definitely doing a Nazi salute. So if you have any doubt about that, I just want to make it very clear that that is what I think. And what I was trying to get to with the comment that I was making about his Nazi salute is that I think on the one hand,

yes, he was very much doing a Nazi salute. That was a message to his supporters, to MAGA supporters to show that he is on their side and that this is the kind of program that they are trying to move forward on. But then alongside that, he can also take advantage of that moment to start trolling the libs and saying, of course I wasn't doing a Nazi salute. Why would you even suggest that? Anyone who suggests it is clearly buying into some conspiracy theories or whatever. So it works for him on both sides of this, which is not to say it wasn't a Nazi salute, but just to say that there are different ways to read it and different ways that it is useful to him, even though he has done it to use it in a certain way. So anyway, just so that is out of

the way and you're clear on how I feel about it. If you want to know more, I've also written something about it that you can find in the show notes. So with that said, this week, my guest is Chris Gillyard. Chris has been on the show in the past. He is the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, Luxury Surveillance, which will be out through MIT Press in 2026. Now, in this episode, we are not actually talking about some of his work specifically, but a book that came out near the end of last year called Cyber Libertarianism, the Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, written by David Columbia. Now, David unfortunately passed away in 2023 of cancer, so he can't be here to actually talk about this book with us. And so since Chris knew him well, since they collaborated together,

I felt like it would be a good opportunity to have Chris on the show to dig into this book, talk about some of its core themes, and also how it's important to think about this concept of cyber libertarianism and to think back about the ideas that, you know, we have kind of accepted about the internet for the past few decades, how they might be misleading, especially in this moment where we are seeing this very clear alignment between the tech industry, the tech billionaires, and the political far right, whether it is in the United States or increasingly in many other countries as well. We just saw Elon Musk appear at an AfD, Alternative for Germany, the neo-Nazi party rally. And that's just one example in a very

long line of things that he has been tweeting, saying, and acting on in recent months and years. I think that this episode pairs well with my conversation with Becca Lewis from a couple of months ago, where we dug into the early years of the internet, its privatization, the policy discussions around what that was going to look like, and how so many of the ideas that we have about the internet today actually come out of these really right-wing groups, but have been kind of normalized and repositioned as things that everyone should be accepting as these foundational aspects of like internet freedom or whatever. And, you know, this book, Cyber Libertarianism,

that David wrote, really calls a lot of that into question, goes back into these histories, goes back into the politics of the internet to look at how some of these assertions that we've had and that we've kind of accepted over the past few decades are things that, you know, it's really time to take a second look at and to consider whether they're fit for purpose for this new age and for this age where the companies who built this specific internet are really turning against us. So one of the things that I say in the show and that I want to reiterate here is that there's not every aspect of what David writes in the book that I completely agree with. I think there are places where he goes beyond what I tend to feel, for example, on talking about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, you know, people

whose politics I don't agree with, but who I think did important things. But with that said, I do think it's important to approach a book like David's with an open mind, given what is going on today, to start to seriously think what a modern internet politics looks like that begins to reject and unpack and even challenge these right-wing framings that we have had around the internet and accepted around the internet for far too long. So with that said, I was very happy to have Chris back on the show to discuss this book with me. As soon as I started to think about this book and who I wanted to talk to about it, you know, Chris was at the top of my list. And so I'm really happy that he was able to come on the show. You know, our recording got delayed a little bit because I was a bit busy and didn't get a

chance to finish up the book, but I'm happy to finally be having this conversation. And I hope that you find it insightful and that even if you don't agree with everything that we say, that it helps you to think about where these ideas came from and why we need to reassess them. So with that said, if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations, especially in a moment where they are going to be more important than ever, it feels like you can join supporters like the

Institute of Diagram Studies in Cork, Ireland, Alex in Brighton, Ontario, and Corey in Ohio, by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Chris, welcome back to tech won't save us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's good to be back. It's always a pleasure to chat with you. I think it's been like a little while since you were last on the show, which is like totally my bad. Because I like talking to you a lot. And I feel like part of that was I would see your work on like Twitter a lot. And then there was like the shakeup of social media. And for like, for a little while, I feel

like I wasn't seeing your like great insights as often. But now like we're both posted on blue sky, I see you all the time. And it's like, I need to rekindle this like learning from Chris because I always get so much out of the engagement. Oh, I appreciated that. You know, I can say now I was one of the first people to leave. Yeah. I left the actual day it was acquired. It's wild to think that that was like so long ago. Like it doesn't feel like that long ago. But we're actually not really talking about your work necessarily today.

Listeners of the show might know. They might have heard my interview with David Columbia a few years ago, but he has a new book out, you know, a kind of posthumous book, the last book that he was working on before he passed away called Cyber Libertarianism, the Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. Obviously, it's really disappointing that David is not here to discuss it because I feel like so much of the work that he has been doing and so much of what he's been writing about for such a long time is really like coming to fruition in front of our eyes right now. But for that reason, I did want to have a discussion about the book so that we could

dig into it. And I figured that you would be the perfect person to do that because you, you know, collaborated with David, you knew David, you worked with David. So I was wondering, you know, to start, if you could talk to us a bit about David and his work, you know, the collaboration that you had together and why he felt that this was an important subject for us to be thinking about and for us to know about and be discussing. David was a dear friend. And almost every day, I'm kind of affected and think about what he would say if he were to be here and look at what's going on right now. We collaborated on several pieces,

most notably our stuff on luxury surveillance. And I think that this book is in a way a culmination of so many of the things that he's been talking and writing about for decades. There are pieces of it in lots of his work, right? But I think this is the sort of epic piece that collects all of that in one spot. It's really prophetic in so many ways, which again, we used to text every day. We always would text memes back to each other and things like that. And so, I often think every time there's some announcement about what some tech baron is doing or, you know, some new policy or some weird quasi governmental agency that people claim to be launching. And I think about what he would say. So yeah, I really miss him, but I'm honored to be here to talk about the book.

Yeah. And I think we all miss out on not having that analysis and that response for him for what he would be thinking about all these developments and seeing it all come to fruition. And of course, this was a book that he had been working on like in fits and starts and in pieces for a while, as you said, right? The people who listen to this show might know him best from his book about Bitcoin and crypto from 2016, The Politics of Bitcoin Software's Right-Wing Extremism. And at the time, I feel like that kind of analysis felt novel, felt like it was really kind of pushing a narrative of what crypto and Bitcoin were that a lot of people weren't willing to accept at the time. And then we see like how the crypto industry were engaging in the election last year, let alone, you know, other things that they've been doing in the past few

years. And it's like, in 2016, David was spot on about this, even though a lot of people didn't want to accept it. And now, you know, this book, Cyber Libertarianism, came out in November, talking about these very deep linkages between tech and the far right. And it's like, right as it drops in November, we're seeing that really come to fruition in so many ways. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very prophetic. The other thing I point to is about two and a half years ago, he wrote one of his last essays was called Chat GPT Should Not Exist. Again, I cite that and refer to it pretty consistently because it named a lot of the

things I think people were, again, not either ready to hear or didn't realize, but so much of it stands up to analysis even today, given how the AI industry is forming. Yeah, no, I think a really important point, and I'll have to include a link to that in the show notes so people can go take a look at it. So let's get into the book itself, right? And let's start with the title because, you know, I think understanding this concept of cyber libertarianism is going to be key to the discussion that we're having in exploring what is in this book. And maybe I would say, first of all, before we dig into it, that I think that there's so much here that is important to understand as we think about and as we maybe reconceptualize how

we think about technology in the tech industry in this moment, you know, seeing what the tech billionaires are doing and maybe recognizing that some of the narratives that we had about this weren't as accurate as maybe we've come to believe over the past couple of decades because of the types of ideas that we had about the internet itself. And so I think that is why a book like this is so important in this moment, right? In giving us the tools to start thinking about the notions that we had about internet policy, internet politics, you know, digital technology, the impacts that all those things were going to have on the world. And to say, wait, you know,

were all these things I assumed the internet was going to do. Like, is that really, you know, something that made sense or where did these ideas come from in the first place? And I feel like this book gives us that kind of history that we need to start to unpack those things, start to reassess them and to start to say, you know, maybe I had this somewhat wrong. And if we're actually going to understand and be able to take on the tech industry in its current form, you know, some of this stuff needs to be looked at with fresh eyes so that we can develop a new understanding. One of the most important things I think we can take from the book is the way he talks about cyber libertarianism is that it's an analytical category, right? And so I think that that's an important framework to even understand

when we begin talking about it. In a lot of ways, trust is, as you said, diagnose a lot of what is going on now and forces us, yeah, to question a lot of the assumptions we've had about these technologies and the people who developed them and promoted them, but also, yeah, about their capabilities and the longstanding belief by a lot of people, they are inherently liberatory, which is, yeah, a thing that he dices up pretty effectively. Yeah. And that almost seems like weird to believe in hindsight. Like, why would we just believe that the internet was going to be liberation and could not be like seized by the worst forces in society for their own benefit? It's like, why did this become what defined how we like, you know, obviously, there are particular interests that wanted us to think that way, and it served them to do so. Let's get into cyber libertarianism. So

how would you define cyber libertarianism? As David discussed it, I of course, have notes here that I can pull from, but I'm gonna see what you say first. I'm gonna cheat because I wrote this down. I knew you would ask me this. And so, I isolated what he says, right? And so, in order to do it justice, I'm just going to read it. He says, in one sense, cyber libertarianism, 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, society has no choice about whether to exercise its power by any means other than markets

or market-like mechanisms. And so, since I cheated, I'll expand on a little bit, right? Or at least talk about how I understand that. Referencing what I just mentioned, that there has been an overwhelming narrative that not only does technology equal freedom or liberation, but that the government should not have any role in curtailing that in any way, shape, or form. That any power the governments enact in order to place limits, in quotation marks, on technology is inherently tyrannical and is something to be resisted. I hate to keep referring to this, right? But I think it'll be a consistent theme throughout our discussion. I think we can see so much of that in the present moment. We can see it as the tech barons, they line up with this incoming administration. We can see it in the different blogs and posts and articles that these folks have written saying these exact same things, but saying them not in

a critical fashion, but asserting them as the way things ought to be. They might call them manifestos. That's the root of the argument. I mean, it's a 400-page book, so there's more to it than that. But I think that those two or three sentences kind of capture the kernel of what it is. Yeah, I think really well said. And I also pulled a quote, but it's a slightly different one than the one you pulled, but it's still along the same lines, which is, quote, cyber libertarianism is a commitment to the belief that digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of democratic governance, meaning democratic political sovereignty. And, you know, I think that really resonates with some of the

things I've been talking a lot about lately and writing about. But, you know, I think that really resonates with some of the things I've been talking a lot about lately and writing about. But, you know, I think it also picks up on what you were saying, right? This notion that digital technology is this inherent good for society, right? We need to let it roll out and we need to enable its rollout so that, you know, we get all of these positive benefits that are going to come from it, the freedom and the liberation and, you know, the freedom of speech and all this kind of stuff that is going to result from, you know, this like internet utopia, this digital utopia that is going to arrive as a result of the creation and the rollout of these technologies. And that if the government, even democratic governments, start to try to regulate those things, start to, you know, go against some of the ideas that tech engineers

or these major tech companies have for how they should work and how they should roll out, then that is like an inherent breach of, you know, the freedoms and the rights that we have as people. It really sets out this like narrative of technology where the government and even a democratically elected government is like this inherently tyrannical force that must be fought against at every opportunity because they are never going to properly understand what technology is. They are never going to allow us to reap the benefits that could be gained from technology. And it's always like the bad actor in the kind of situations that we're presented with

are always coming from the government. And so rarely, though a bit more often now because of what is happening and it can't be ignored from these private actors that are often in control of these things. And to me, that seemed like a really key part of this as well, right? It's like the government is always the bad one reflecting this kind of inherently right-wing libertarian narrative that David is writing about in the book. And it's not so much, you know, these massive corporations that have been able to capture and dominate everything that we do with these technologies. Another thing that sort of has come up with, to me, is the story that a lot of tech folks

have started to tell about their turn towards the right wing. You know, I think it was Andreessen a few days ago. On the Barry Weiss podcast, I think. Yeah. What had been understood as the deal, that tech people would create something, they generate massive wealth, that the public would benefit, that the tech people would pay their taxes. And this last part is important, that they would be heaped with adulation and praise, that society has broken that deal in their version, which has turned them into right-wingers, right? Now, I think a lot about the Matt Boris cartoon, you know, the famous Matt Boris cartoon that hopefully we can link to. You know, this narrative is very convenient, but I think David's book

really disintegrates that narrative, right? That what's closer to the truth is that they have been right-wingers all along and that the so-called heel turn, you know, because they haven't received enough praise is like a very convenient fiction. Having to watch all these interviews that these people do and watch now, of course, because, you know, they're always on video podcasts is excruciating, right? To actually hear about how they think about the world and understand it. But I think picking up on what you're saying there is like, I feel like the other key piece of that, right?

When you think about this notion that, you know, they haven't just become right wingers, but they were always right wingers was how these like fundamentally libertarian and right wing ideas were so long when they were associated with the internet and technology, like reframed as even going so far as being like progressive things, or at least just like non political things, like obvious things that we should all accept about how the internet works. And I feel like whether it's around copyright or privacy or speech or what have you, you know, David goes through kind of one by one, all of these kind of central ideas that we have that are supposed to define the internet and digital technology through the book and, you know, through the past few decades, right? To show how these fights and

these framings were initially often things that were associated with right-wing politics and our understanding of those issues and how they were originally framed and how they were originally understood was over time kind of eroded or kind of written out of the story that we have so that, you know, we all kind of come to believe these really right-wing ideas about the internet and even champion them as long as we don't learn about that past and where it came from and start to really kind of critically interrogate these things that just seem accepted about the internet and about the politics around it. You know, to tell a little story about how, you know, he and I became friends,

I mean, part of it was, you was, I think we had early on some disagreements about things like privacy and encryption. And I think I, ironically, we became friends through Twitter. And I think I DMed him at one point asking something about encryption. And I don't recall exactly what I said, but essentially I said, hey, don't you think citizens or people should have some right to communicate in ways that the government doesn't have access to? And his response, I mean, and you can, this is much better detail in the book, but his response was that he didn't think that there should be forms of communication that were outside of legitimate democratic processes, right?

That we have all kinds of regulations, laws, processes in place, but we have all these things, ideally anyway, in place for how governments are allowed to act in regards to their citizens. The idea that there should be categories of things, and then again, whether this is speech or finances or anything else, that there should be categories of these things that are completely outside of regulation is kind of a questionable premise. In the book, he talks about this in terms of not only encryption, but in terms of, say, finance laws as relates to crypto, things like that, in terms of communication that might be outside the law, like child sexual abuse material and things like that. So that's actually how we entered into a dialogue, is talking about the role of encryption in

a democratic society. As you said, there have been lots of ways that right-wing notions of how we should exist in the world have seeped into our politics when it comes to talking about digital technologies and computational tools. I feel like I've had similar difficulties with the question of encryption and so many of the other issues that David talks about in the book, right? And I found time and again that sometimes I was asking myself, like, maybe not so much now, but at times still, but certainly in the past, am I reacting against these framings of the issues or this description of how we came to this certain

position on how digital technology should work and how it should relate to politics and to policy because I inherently believe in these positions or just because I've heard them regurgitated and talked about so many times that if I hear something that is opposed to them or that provides a different kind of more nuanced perspective on how these things should work, that it initially causes me to push back on it because I feel like I've been told this certain thing about how the internet should work, how digital politics, how digital technology should work, how it should relate to government. And if I hear something that goes against that, I am going to feel that it must be wrong, right? Or that there must be some kind of violation that's happening here,

that my rights are going to be violated if we go down this particular path. But I feel like the more and more that I have read about the history of where these things have come from, and I've actually thought like on a broader scale about these various issues, a number of the things that I used to believe about technology in the tech industry that were just like, you know, the common boilerplate things that we would hear from like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and these other, you know, digital rights groups are things that I now call into question much more often, not just because I'm trying to react against the mainstream narratives, but because I am trying to critically interrogate what is going on and think about the actual long-term consequences of these policies and to understand where they come

from. The other thing is that the history of politics and protest in the US, certainly, but across the world, is one that every progressive movement that there's ever been has been undermined by powerful forces. And one of the mechanisms through which that's been done is surveillance. For decades, we've been sort of having theoretical argument about what happens when a lot of these powers are in the hands of authoritarians in this country. To a greater or lesser extent, they always have been. But I think, unfortunately, we're about to see some of the worst case scenarios of what heretofore had been theoretical discussions. And so, it is a very thorny and difficult problem to work through, right? I think the book does a really good job of kind of parsing some of that in ways I think that most works are not ready to deal with. And I feel like to actually engage in a discussion like this, you need to be ready to accept that these are really nuanced discussions, right?

You're often not going to find like one side is total encryption all the time and one side is no encryption and there's no like in between there just to give one example, right? I feel like in looking into the history of these things, in interrogating the politics of it, you know, there's a lot of different factors that get considered in how we have arrived at this particular place of an understanding of digital technology, the role it should play, the politics around it. And I feel like sometimes the discussions that we have around these technologies is like, as soon as you start to breach, you know, one of these lines or one of these political positions that are just assumed to be the way that digital technology has to be, or, you know, this is how we must all think about encryption or copyright or what have you, that there are a lot of people who also care really deeply about these issues, right?

Who care really deeply about people's human rights and, you know, people's freedom and ability to, you know, talk and discuss things without being surveilled by some power, whether it's government or corporation that can immediately react against these things. Because, you know, like I was talking about, we've all been told that this is the way that it is with digital technologies and that there are particular risks and that if you start to encounter a position that starts to tease those things apart and to question these like kind of foundational ideas that we have about the internet and how it works, then there can be this like reaction against it and not want to hear something that opposes it, which I think can sometimes be a difficult place to start having

these discussions, right? And I feel like in the book, David calls out some of the ways that, you know, say digital rights communities or other people who make these particular arguments have made it so that it can be difficult to have criticisms legitimized, right? By saying that, oh, if you don't have a certain level of technical skill, that you can't engage in these kind of criticisms or question these notions that have been set forward by these more technical people who told us that this is the way that it has to be. Or, you know, that democracies can never like regulate a technology, but those technologies are still inherently good for democracy. You know, these sorts of things that when you start to think about them, like

they kind of fall apart, but they have also been really strong, you know, ways of framing the issues that make it so it's hard to kind of unpack them, I guess. Yeah. And one of the things I really admire about David is his willingness to do that despite the critiques and personal attacks and sometimes professional challenges that have been levied against him based on him being willing to take either unpopular positions or question things that often people demand that we not question. I was just thinking about how early in the book, David kind of brings up this comparison or brings up this example of President Dwight Eisenhower's warning

about the military industrial complex, right? That was made decades ago now. David saying that Silicon Valley was very much part of this military industrial complex. We think of Silicon Valley today as like the internet and these startups and stuff like that, but like right alongside them are like lockheed martin and all this kind of stuff and all this early computation technology was to go into like

bombs and military technologies and all these sorts of things before there was this like shift to the consumer and presenting these things as like you know consumer technologies and all this kind of stuff and it really struck a chord with me as I was going back over my notes, you know, thinking about, you know, and we can say what you will about Biden and how he could have done a lot more, but like his kind of final address to the nation was talking about a tech military industrial complex, which is like basically the same thing that is forming and how we're seeing this like new tech oligarchy forming and the power that they have been able to build. And it feels not like that is a new thing, but it feels like we're looking back now at

a problem that sort of existed in the past. You know, these people weren't as powerful back then as they are today, but it's like this has been actually a consistent issue. It just felt like for a little while they framed themselves in a different way and had a slightly different relationship to government that is now like renormalizing around this much more like conservative right wing ideology, this embrace of the military and, you know, the US state and using that relationship to enhance their power even further. It speaks to like the moment that we're in, but it also speaks to, again, like you were saying earlier, how these people have always been right wing. You know, the politics around this stuff has always been quite right wing. It's just like for a little while there, they were able to act like that was not so much the case. Yeah. I think it's really illustrative to look now at how many of these companies and the people who run them are essentially now arms dealers in one form or another. Not only companies like Palantir and Anduril, but Facebook, OpenAI, the list goes on

and on. These companies that the story goes existed to connect people or to benefit society, things like that, right? Like if we believe the narrative they crafted about themselves. But now in some form or another, all of these companies are government-contracted arms companies, whether that's providing some form of artificial intelligence, drones, targeting software, on and on and on. And so I think this is really the sort of culmination of what you're talking about. And again, what David talks about in the book, right? That the, I don't want to call it the final form, and I certainly don't want to call it the sort of butterfly that came from the caterpillar, right?

But that metamorphosis has manifested, right? And I don't know if that's the right word, but the way that they've morphed has really come full circle in a way that I think is not good for society, to put it lightly. This episode is brought to you by The Syllabus, a non-profit knowledge discovery service doing artisanal automation. How does that work? Well, they use technology to monitor thousands of sources, and each week human curators, that is actual people, Thank you. and automation, everything's there. Each Monday, you'll get a new batch of personalized recommendations. And it's not just podcasts, it's essays and books, academic articles and reports, and even videos. Check out their website, thesyllabus.com. That's the-syllabus.com. They offer two-week free trials. And if you enter TWSU at checkout, you'll get 30% off your first

year. And, you know, you bring up Facebook there. I was going back through my notes before the conversation and I found this quote where David wrote, quote, no organization is more emblematic of cyber libertarian agitation than Facebook. You know, thinking about what Mark Zuckerberg has been saying recently, but how Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have been doing a lot of this stuff for a long time, you know, embracing these more libertarian narratives and making use of this connection between the ideas of like the Internet as liberation and as freedom. is like by connecting people is like inherently moving forward these values and enhancing democracy and all these sorts of things. And then comparing that to the actual real impacts, not that just that Facebook and these platforms are having today, but that they have been having for a really long time in

harming democracy and arguably harming, you know, our liberties and freedoms and all these sorts of things that we supposedly value. But because of this like narrative around the technologies and the freedoms and all these sorts of things that we supposedly value. But because of this narrative around the technologies and the platforms and all this kind of stuff, they were able to ride that to be able to enable all of these harms that they've been able to carry out. I wonder what you make of what Facebook has been up to lately and how that aligns with the kind of stuff David was writing about. I have so many thoughts. I think it's important to start with the discrepancy between what we know Facebook to be and what we know the origins to be versus how Zuckerberg has

attempted to rewrite the narrative. At its root, it was a company that relied on illegitimately obtaining photos of women in order to judge whether or not they were deemed hot. Well, Chris, but I thought the origin of Facebook was all about free speech. Yeah. Right, right. And, you know, that later on, a big part of the narrative became that it was about free speech. And, you know, he has that famous talk Zucker does, where he cited MLK and Frederick Douglass, and things like that, and people like that. So wild. people is an inherent good, right? And this is like cyber libertarianism at its core too,

that connecting people in itself is a good. When it's connecting grandmothers to grandkids, or when it's connecting knitting groups, or people who used to go to grade school together. Okay. But we've seen that it also means connecting violent groups to one another. In some cases, generating pages for them without even seeking permission. We've seen it as being credibly implicated in helping facilitate a genocide. We've seen it, in many cases, be an authoritarian's best friend. That is, I think, it's important to know where it comes from, where it's been, and now where it's going. Because Zuckerberg had his moment where he has come out and talked about all the ways that he feels the government has intruded upon or restricted Facebook's ability to be Facebook and calling it censorship. And this is another big thing that David talks about in the book, calling it censorship when the government may have asked them to clamp down on misinformation or hate speech or

something like that. And now Zuckerberg's sort of come out in his like sort of full masculine energy. No more is Facebook going to be curtailed by anything or anyone saying what they should and shouldn't do, right? And so, I mean, we've seen from 404, from The Intercept, from lots of other journalists, what that means in terms of what's now going to be allowed. Transphobia, like hate speech against trans and non-binary people, hate speech against immigrants, all kinds of things. 404 came out today with a report, I think it was by Joseph Cox, quoting some people inside Facebook who say that this reminds them a lot of the lead-up to the genocide in Myanmar. That these are the kinds of policies that leave open the very real possibility of a prelude to violence against marginalized and vulnerable people in this country. And so all that to say, I think it's really important to be aware of the story that's being told about these things. And again,

like how it's been very conveniently disguised right-wing narratives that I think unfortunately many people have accepted without getting into the root of what that means, right? What it means that we value connection or a company values connection over all things. I mean, there's this longtime Facebook person, I think his name is Andrew Bosworth. He wrote this famous blog post where he talks about the possibility that Facebook might help facilitate in some form of violence. And what stood out to me about that is the line in there that says, and still we connect. Whatever other story about Facebook we want to tell or Zuckerberg wants to tell, that kernel, right, that is so much a cyber libertarian thing. The idea that

this piece or this part of what this company values is more important than any kind of democratic function or limit on what companies might be allowed to do. Yeah, I think really well said. And, you know, as you say, I think we see that time and again, right? And it's like these particular ideas, whether it's that connection is an inherent good are things that come back again and again. Right. And that we've heard them for so many decades. We come to believe that they must be true. Right. They must be accurate. Why would people who we trust and we look up to be arguing these things if they weren't real? Right. If we shouldn't be believing in them. Even when you were talking about Facebook, it was bringing me back to like the Arab Spring and how these uprisings by people in various different parts of the Middle East and North Africa were being framed as like something that social media was doing, you know, not that people were organizing to do for themselves. You know, this kind of narrative like persisted even after there was reporting and research and people actually speaking out to be like, yeah, this wasn't really like a Facebook or Twitter thing. Right. But I think, you know,

just to maybe talk about a few more of those issues that really like stood out to me, right? Like one of the things that used to motivate me a lot in the past was the issue of copyright, you know, and I'm still someone who believes that copyright should be reformed and that copyright terms should be a lot shorter than they are today. But even with that said, I think that some of the narratives, some of the cyber libertarian narratives that we've had around copyright have been really harmful. If people are familiar with like the internet discourses around copyright, it's usually that if we're talking about copyright, it's like these evil labels and publishers who are trying to hold back this like content from

us that we should be able to have for free, you know, regardless of thinking about like how you're supposed to pay people to do that stuff in a capitalist world, if everything is just being given away for free, and how that narrative doesn't take into account how tech companies from the beginning of pushing those narratives out right in you know the 2000s when you had like Napster and the kind of peer-to-peer sharing stuff really taking off was like it was always beneficial to the tech companies because they wanted to get access to this content to this information to this art for free to not have to pay anyone for it. So arguing that like it was the labels and the publishers and the movie companies that were so

bad and that's not to like totally let them off the hook. I think that they did some really extreme things that were kind of beyond the pale, right? Like locking up regular people for downloading movies or music or whatnot. Right. But now, today, we see the consequences of narratives that were set 20 years ago, right? Where these major tech companies, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, are basically scraping everything off of the web that they can get,

are downloading movies and songs and things to feed into their AI models to serve these generative AI tools that they're all doing today. And we still have people who, you know, kind of formed some of those early copyright arguments arguing that we should let these major tech companies, some of the biggest companies in the entire world, get away with stealing all these things for free to train their generative

AI models that are designed to try to replace the people who are actually doing this real work. And it's like, if that doesn't show you the initial problem with a narrative like that, like what will, right? Yeah. I mean, I think we've seen sort of the logical end point of this someone at open AI. And again, I'm paraphrasing, but they said something to the extent of, well, we wouldn't be able to exist if we weren't allowed to do this. Like if we were not allowed to scrape massive portions of the internet and ingest them, then our company wouldn't be able to exist.

My understanding of the argument is, well, I guess you shouldn't exist. But the other thing, you know, and I think this is in the book, and it's very explicitly in the essay I referenced about Chad GPT, is the extreme disdain that many of these individuals and companies have for artists, for any type of creative folk, whether that's musicians, novelists, illustrators, anything like that. I mean, there was the famous thing that was, or the viral thing that was going around about a guy saying, well, people don't really enjoy creating music. Like what? That he was promoting some tool that he said would democratize, and this is another thing

that comes up quite often in the book, that would democratize making music. That people didn't really enjoy making music, which is one of the more dubious claims I've ever encountered. And so that his AI tool was going to democratize it and make it easy. So the extreme disdain these folks have for anything that's not computational in the way they understand it, I think, is highlighted so much in some of these arguments about what they should have access to. And not only what they should have access to, but what they're going to do with these tools and who they're going to put out of a job. I mean, which is, it's actually part of their pitch. You'll be able to create stories and images and music without the benefits of having writers, artists, and musicians. It's so frustrating to even hear those things.

Just as it's been really frustrating for me to see people who are really well-respected in tech circles be arguing in kind of tech circles be arguing in favor of some of the biggest companies in the world stealing basically any creative work they want and considering it fair use. Like I think it's just such a total violation and shows the inherent problem with these kinds of narratives. And if people weren't kind of reconsidering or reassessing these narratives before, like, I think that is yet another reason to start to do these things. And, you know, another aspect of that, I would say that really stood out for me is, you know, there were times where I felt maybe David was a bit too, like, positive or hopeful about, like, the American democratic project, you know, and like

the kind of norms and ideals of American democracy, you know, which is something that I'm very critical of, and maybe sometimes throwing around the term far right a bit, you know, too liberally for me. But even then, like, he can still recognize how these notions of the internet, you know, these notions of like, internet freedom and digital rights have also been very beneficial to the United States and US geopolitical interests, right? On the one hand, this notion that of the internet as, you know, this place of inherent freedom that is going to enhance our democratic rights discourages regulation, but it has also

served, and of course, this is something I've talked about on the show in the past, has really aided the US geopolitical interest around the world as well, right? You know, there's this particular part of the book where David talks about how having these internet technologies that emerge from the United States and go global considered as, you know, these real ways of spreading freedom and whatever around the world also allows the United States on its own. And the linkages of digital rights with human rights and the idea that our right to access the internet is a fundamental human right and not something different from that allows the United States to pick and choose and decide like what countries

around the world it deems to be democracies and who can be cut off from access to these systems quite unilaterally, right? That is as much as I also have problems with autocracies around the world and whatnot. Should the US alone kind of have these sorts of powers around the world? Yeah, I think that a lot of tech folks and tech companies have become a lot more brazen about the linkages between their companies and a larger sort of imperialist project. Again, and that has been true with certain companies, but I think that it's becoming more true when companies talk about winning AI dominance, when they cynically and often racially invoke China as this great scary thing that we have to achieve technological dominance over.

We've seen Zuckerberg, part of his hope with so closely aligning with Trump, is that there'll be some degree of pushback against the idea that companies outside the US should have any role in saying how Facebook should act in their country. We've already seen that. Yeah, as we move further down the line, I think companies have been much more brazen and much less bashful about linking themselves with a larger imperialist project. Yeah, and I think that very much links up to what we've been saying, right, about how there seemed to be this period where these criticisms and these realizations really kind of fell away, even though they were always there, right? You know, you talked about companies that were always recognizing they were kind of part of an American imperial project, like, you know, Oracle, for example, and Larry Ellison has kind of always been on that side of things. But even if you go back to like the late 80s and early 90s, you can hear Al Gore and you can hear Newt Gingrich talking about how, you know, high technology and the information superhighway are like going to be important tools in like spreading American power in this increasingly like post-Soviet world, right? Especially in those sorts of states and

post-colonial world, of course. Another tool to expand American dominance in the world. That stuff starts to fade away a few years later as you have these narratives about the internet as freedom and liberty retake them. These cyber libertarian narratives take over because that's a much easier sell to people than, hey, American power, if we push this out everywhere, right? Our companies are going to take over and that's going much easier sell to people than, hey, American power, if we push this out everywhere, right? Our companies are going to take over and that's going to help the American government. This moment shows that it's undeniable that we have been living through that for three

decades, even if the story that we told ourselves and that this industry wanted to tell us for so long was something completely separate from that. And I think that is like one of the things that David's book is so valuable in doing is to like ground us once again and give us this real foundation to understand what the internet is doing, what the people behind it are doing, what it has long been doing, even if we've been telling ourselves something different. Absolutely. You know, and I think it has been a very consistent story that companies have told is that they need to be allowed to innovate, their words, innovate in quotation marks. They need to be allowed to innovate so that we don't lose the sort of global dominance. And it's been very effective. I mean, the number of times that Zuckerberg and other people have gone before

Congress and said something to that effect has been very effective in preventing any type of meaningful legislation being passed. And now, yeah, that has morphed into a much more aggressive form of American sort of exceptionalism. Yeah, unfortunately, I think we've yet to see the worst of it. It's like there is a waking up in this moment, but it feels much too late to actually kind of wield the power to try to do something. But hopefully, like at least outside the United States, you know, other countries can start to do that. And hopefully in the United States, you know, it can be pushed back on, especially in future elections or, you know, through movements and political movements that

are outside of elections through union organizing, through other things. But the power of these people has reached a point where it's difficult to unravel or much harder than it would have been, you know, a decade ago or something when they hadn't accumulated so much power and wealth that they have now. And it was in part these narratives that we believed that were, you know, the kind of the dominant framings of the internet that helped us, you know, kind of fall for and believe that these tech companies and these tech billionaires were something that they were not for so long. And on that point about like the political nature of this and the threat to democracy that it presents, you know, as you've mentioned, one of the key aspects of, you know, the cyber libertarianism framing is that the internet and digital technology

is inherently democratizing, right? You talked about it with AI and how these tools are presented as democratizing our ability to create and stuff. What do you make of that framing in particular and what it does to how we understand these things? I've started to see it so much with AI. And we've seen in the past, as we've talked about, with the claims that it's helped foster revolutions and things like that, that social media has. But we're seeing it expressed so much more with things like chatbots, large language models, or other things that people label as artificial intelligence,

that it's going to democratize not only art, but education, learning, medicine, all these different things. And I think that the book is very good about this, right? That the term democratize as it's wielded by tech boosters and tech companies is really independent, so independent from anything that can be reasonably understood as democratic process that it almost becomes meaningless. The idea I think that they're promoting is that these tools in the hands of everyone is somehow going to make us all, again, more free, that we'll have access to medical care

and the world's knowledge and the ability to create in ways that we've never seen. And I don't really think there's any compelling reason to believe that that is going to be true, particularly that there's not a lot of historical precedent that suggests that that's the way that that's going to play out. And again, I don't think these companies in any way, shape, or form deserve the benefit of the doubt in terms of their willingness to make it possible for you to make some like approximation of something without having skill or just to make it easier for you to consume something, you know, as though that is what democracy is. Meanwhile, you know, these people who are now some of the richest people in the world seem to be aiding political projects that are actively trying to erode democracy as we understand it. And it's not to like, you know, replace it with some, you know, more idealistic direct

democracy that's more anarchist or whatever. If, you know, you even believe some of these more tech communities that claim to be more anarchistic and would like to see, you know, liberal democracy as we understand it replaced with something like that. Like, we are not seeing the transition to that kind of a world. We're seeing the transition, if anything, to like a more autocratic, more totalitarian world, more oligarchic, where the richest and most powerful people in the world are trying to cement their power over us and ensure that we have fewer and fewer tools or routes to like push back against them. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean fewer tools or routes to push back against them. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, again, just to go back to the thesis of the book,

the idea that technological objects are somehow inherently liberatory. I think in the current landscape, the very consistent use of that term democratize when we're talking about the use of tools that claim to be artificial intelligence is one thing to very carefully investigate. No, I think that's an essential point for us to understand. And one of the things that is important to pull out of this book, among all the other things that we could talk about, as you said, this is like a 400-page book and there is a lot in there, right? David discusses a lot of different concepts, a lot of the narratives that we have come to understand from engaging in discussions on and about the internet for the past few decades. So I wonder if, as we wrap up our conversations, if you have any final thoughts on the book, on David's legacy, anything else you'd want to leave us with? Yeah, I guess I would say what bears repeating is how prophetic his book is, his work overall is, and how courageous he was in being willing to identify and call out the things he saw, you know, often when it wasn't popular and he suffered, you know, both,

I think, professionally and personally from the attacks, but he was willing to do that anyway. That to me, I think is how I would locate his legacy other than being a great friend and a really fantastic mentor. Yeah. I didn't know him as well as you did, but it was always great to, you know, have little chats and I would check in with him every now and then and be like, David, where's the book? I can't wait to read this thing. Like, when am I finally going to be able to? And of course, I'm always sad that I can't like actually discuss it with him and, you know, learn more about him. I think it was really great, you know, during the crypto boom in like 2020, 2021, that there was a lot more attention, you know, put on David's work and the things that he recognized years ago

about the crypto industry were things that many people kind of came to in that moment and look to David and David's work for guidance through that and, you know, for help in understanding it. And I think that was really valuable in that moment. And I think that a book like this, you know, even though David is not here to share further insights with us, you know, and to participate in these discussions about it with us, you know, I think it's a great resource for people to turn to, to help to unpack some of the things that we have come to believe about the internet and digital technology that, you know, it's long past time that we were reassessed. And I think I would just say for people who are going to pick up the book, you know, to pick up

cyber libertarianism, I would say go into it with an open mind, right? There are going to be things that are going to challenge some pre-existing ideas about the internet that you might have had before. There were certainly even things that I thought were a bit too far for me and that I didn't fully agree with, but that doesn't mean that I disagree with David's inherent thesis that is happening here and how he is trying to reframe this for us. And I think it's a really valuable contribution at a time when we really need to be looking very clearly at what we've been told and what we believed over the internet for so long and about the politics that are inherent to it, which are very much not the case. Because if we're ever going to challenge these people who've built so much power on the back of it, we need to rethink what we once

believed about how this all works. One last thing I would say, at the very end of the book, he talks about the assumption that so many of us seem to carry that we have to have these technologies, right? That we must sort of live under them, which again is a thing I think that really needs to be investigated and questioned. If there is an ability, I'm paraphrasing a bit what he says in the book, there's not really a way we can say whether they've been a net gain or loss in terms of some of these technologies. But what is true is that they are not inevitable and that there's nothing that says that we have to keep them. That's an important place to end the book on. Yeah, an important Luddite recognition that all of our listeners will certainly agree with.

Chris, really great to have you back on the show. I can't wait to have you back again to talk about some more of your work, but I really appreciate you coming on to dig into David's book and his analysis with us. I think it is something

that we need to be paying attention to now more than ever, you know, and I highly recommend that people pick it up and give it a read and give a think to the ideas that, you know, we've had about the internet for so long.

Yeah, always a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you very much. Chris Gillyard is the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and is working on a forthcoming book called Luxury Surveillance. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham.

Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. Thanks for listening, and make sure to come back next week.