“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, & Computer Culture

https://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html

by geekamongus • 3 years ago

71 56 3 years ago

uvm.edu

geekamongus• 3 years ago

The more things change…?

yankput• 3 years ago

Yes and no.

The libertarianism the article speaks of at the end gave way to right-wing populism, while Silicon Valley moved into mixture of hard capitalism and social justice (dodging taxes and monopolizing while showing pride flags)

I think this utopian techno-libertarian is more like a relic from the 90s nowadays.

edit: on the other hand… it gave rise to bitcoin/cryptocurrency, which is like the culmination of both techno-utopianism and libertarianism. So, maybe you are right

FrustratedMonky4• 3 years ago

I miss the "utopian techno-libertarian". There was a time in the 90's where I think a lot of people did believe they would change the world for the better. Who knew the old paradigms would still win in the end, the rich took the spoils, and the technology was subverted.

OO000oo2• 3 years ago

I have noticed that people on HN tend to equate neoliberalism with classical liberalism, being clueless about the difference.

Classical liberalism was a naturalistic belief in market supremacy, understood to be a colossal failure by the middle of the 20th century. It was associated with the Gilded Age, which spawned the so-called Progressive Era, the ideological camps that followed, and the catastrophe that was the world wars.

Neoliberalism is what the capitalist class have insisted is a reformed liberalism, invincible to the problems that classical liberalism motivated. It is a far more centralized, 'managed' market supremacy without the naturalistic perspective. Neoliberalism claims to acknowledge that markets are not natural and must be tightly managed by experts.

Aerroon• 3 years ago

I don't understand the classical liberalism part. How do a bunch of empires, that don't operate on market principles, going to war with each other show that classical liberalism is a 'colossal failure'?

jowea• 3 years ago

I believe the case against classical liberal economics has more to do with the economic crises of the late 19th century and specially the Great Depression than with the wars.

cbau• 3 years ago

Not an expert, but if you read any of Keynes, he's basically critiquing classical economics and pointing out some of the ways it fails to explain economic cycles, hence the invention of macroeconomics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme...

jay_kyburz• 3 years ago

I assumed the OP was saying The Great Depression led to WW2

dauertewigkeit• 3 years ago

Read on the rise of fascism in Italy. It had a lot to do with discontent with liberalism at the time.

OO000oo2• 3 years ago

Germany and Britain and France and Austria were all very much capitalist countries.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Sargon of Akkad has described himself as a "classical liberal": https://youtube.com/@SargonofAkkad

In fact, his channel profile now simply says "English liberal."

Wikipedia begs to differ with all that...

pharmakom• 3 years ago

"classic liberal" was claimed by the alt right and doesn't mean what it used to mean in those contexts.

GloomyBoots• 3 years ago

Wikipedia begs to differ with all that...

Not really. It says that journalists describe him as “far right” which by current journalistic standards is a superset of classical liberalism.

astrange• 3 years ago

Neoliberalism doesn't exist and is just a word academics use to describe anything they don't like.

antupis• 3 years ago

It actually exists some countries like Estonia https://www.cato.org/policy-report/july/august-2006/mart-laa... .

ttctciyf• 3 years ago

From 1999, the linked article seems an interesting read on the intersection between 'hacker culture' and the libertarian project; dry and a little quaint.

Readers might like to compare the more journalistic (and entertaining, IMO) 2014 piece on 'San Francisco’s tech-libertarian “Reboot” conference' from sadly defunct Pando, for example:

At first glance it makes no sense to front a rabidly anti-gay candidate like McMorris Rodgers to sell the Kochs’ and the Paul family’s scrubland libertarianism to a Bay Area audience full of hip disruptors and “anarchist” practitioners of bohemia grooming fads.
But that’s because what Silicon Valley folks think of when they hear the word “libertarianism” actually has very little connection to what the libertarian movement actually stands for, and has stood for since the 1970s.

...

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20141118174216/http://pando.com/...

boffinAudio2• 3 years ago

All culture is a lie that only persists in the re-telling. There is no such thing as America or Russia - these things exist merely as a facsimile created in the minds of humans, who must perpetuate the concept by re-telling the lie, lest it fade out of human consciousness into the oblivion of history.

Computers merely allow us to lie - and forget the lies - at light speed. This will eventually replace all other cultures - neoliberalism especially ...

svara2• 3 years ago

We do speak of dynamic phenomena as "existing" all the time.

A river is made up of different water molecules every day, yet it's the same river over millennia.

In the same way, countries (and other abstract entities such as companies) exist in the dynamics of human interactions.

So yes, humans must perpetuate the concept by re-telling it, but somewhat paradoxically it's not a lie as long as they do so.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

A river is made up of different water molecules every day, yet it's the same river over millennia.

Heraclitus would like a word with you.

tomjen32• 3 years ago

I don't get why OP is downvoted. We have a (nearly) perfectly round globe and the first thing we did with it was to carve it into pieces.

Rerun the human race 1000 times. Do you think Russia will show up more than a handful of times?

boffinAudio2• 3 years ago

People don't like to be confronted with the reality of their own lives' utter fallacy. We all participate in these fallacies, it is very hard to extract our own personal identity from them once we have spent decades supporting the fallacy.

It only takes a few days in the bush, out back, to realize just how futile it is to consider any one culture superior to another...

“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, & Computer Culture

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