Techno-Libertarianism and the Paradox of Politics
Technology is not an Escape from Political Power
This Wednesday, I will be on the French public radio France Culture to participate in a broadcast about the dissemination of libertarian ideas in the tech industry and the Silicon Valley. This is the third episode of a three-part series on libertarianism that France Culture is proposing this week. If I’ve understood well the intentions of the producers, the focus of this episode should be on the reasons that account for the popularity of some libertarianism in the Silicon Valley and on whether the tech industry provides a “case study” for the practical implementation of libertarian ideas. Here is a brief survey of what I intend to say and, more significantly, a discussion of what I shall call the “paradox of politics” of libertarianism and what technology has to do with it.
That libertarian ideas are fashionable among many members of the tech industry is not news. Take for instance Marc Andreesen’s recent “techno-optimist manifesto.” The document is basically the articulation of all the basic principles of free-market economics, endorsed in their most “classical liberal” form, with an optimist take about the potential contribution of technology, especially AI, for the future of humanity. The manifesto is definitely libertarian in the sense that it calls for a complete retreat of the state from human affairs – or at least does not appeal to any intervention of the state into human affairs. There is Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal, who seems to be somehow a semi-god in libertarian milieux for having successfully promoted libertarian ideas and projects through his entrepreneurial activities – even though his recent “conservative turn” should make libertarians uneasy. And there is of course Elon Musk, maybe not a self-declared libertarian, but whose conception of freedom of speech clearly espouses libertarianism.
Now, if we ask what accounts for this seemingly natural affinity between libertarianism and the tech industry, there are two separate questions. The first is about what makes tech entrepreneurs more receptive to libertarian ideas. Here, we can guess that a form of self-selection is at play. By their very sociological and psychological profile, entrepreneurs are less risk-averse and more pro-business than on average. They are just more likely to subscribe to the view that Ayn Rand’s John Galt is a true modern hero because they can figure themselves in a John Galt-type social role. But the more interesting, second question is what accounts for the attraction of libertarians to the kind of technologies developed in the Silicon Valley.
In my view, the roots of this attraction lie in a foundational tension within libertarian thought. The basic libertarian problem can be put like this: how do you move toward a society with a minimal state or even no state at all from a state-dominated society? As such, this is more a strategic than an intellectual problem. There is no paradox or contradiction in wanting to reduce the importance and the scope of the state in a state-dominated society. Indeed, the very project makes sense if you’re living in such a society. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a strategic conundrum. For decades, some libertarians have thought that their project could be pursued by playing the democratic game. For multiple reasons, this was unlikely to work. In parallel, libertarians have pursued a more “activist” strategy, with the important role played by foundations and institutes, and illustrated for instance by their disproportionate activity on the internet through blogs and forums. Ultimately, this has been a failure, at least if we evaluate the success of the project by looking at the scope and size of the state in the US and other Western countries.
Contemporary libertarians seem to have acknowledged this failure. Today, they have turned their back on the (liberal) democratic game. They have settled instead for two other, not necessarily mutually exclusive, strategies. The first is to go along with right-wing populists, as well illustrated by Thiel’s support for Trump in 2016. That libertarianism and conservatism should be intellectually incompatible does not seem to bother those libertarians who are espousing the conservative populist agenda in the US. You can interpret that in two different ways. Maybe those libertarians are tired of being politically irrelevant and have decided to sacrifice their intellectual integrity to have a decent chance of effectively promoting their ideas. Given the fact that the current American populist right does not distinguish itself for its economic liberalism or even its liberalism tout court, this strategy is a massive failure, at least at the level of ideas. Or it may happen that many of those libertarians were actually attracted from the beginning by racist, supremacist, and sexist ideas while endorsing free-market economics in the meantime. This is plausible, as there is a long list of such eminent libertarian intellectuals, starting with Rothbard and Hoppe.
The other strategy has been to try to escape the democratic game by looking for the creation of “zones” free from the domination of the state. This corresponds to the concepts of so-called charter cities and “seasteads.” It seems that nowadays, most libertarians tend to think that militating and contributing to these zones is the best way to promote libertarian ideas but also, more importantly, to implement their ideals. As Quinn Slobodian has shown,[1] in some cases at least, they can also be used to realize the reactionary agenda of “paleolibertarians.” Irrespective of the underlying purpose, it seems clear that there is a relationship between this strategy of escape and libertarians’ interest in some technologies like the blockchain or smart contracts. The belief is that these technologies will allow for a complete automation of tasks and functions that, until now, require human intervention. If you can execute contracts automatically, you no longer need someone to enforce the contract. If you can guarantee by technological means that an asset is authentic, then you no longer need someone to control its origins. While in theory these functions could be occupied by private agents, as a matter of fact, they are most of the time taken care of by public authorities. The bet made by libertarians is that these technologies will make the state obsolete, or at the very least will make human interactions free from state domination possible and attractive.
Whether it will work or not, only time can tell. However, what can be said I think is that this new version of the libertarian project is wrong in one of its core aspects. To understand this point, we have to look at the roots not only of libertarianism but of the more general classical liberalism intellectual movement.[2] Classical liberalism has been historically grounded in a skeptical attitude toward the state but also more generally toward politics. Many classical liberals don’t like politics because they see it as the potentially illegitimate exercise of coercion to subjugate others to one’s will. 19th-century classical liberals like Tocqueville were famously wary of the “tyranny of the majority” for this reason, leading them to express a prudent skepticism toward democracy. However, the response of classical liberals has never been to call for the suppression of politics as the human activity of coercing others to achieve some goals. It has rather been to harness it. The separation of powers, check-and-balances, judicial review, and the Bill of Rights all concur with the same general idea. Politics is not something we can dispense with, one way or another people have to be coerced for otherwise society will not be able to coordinate plans, provide for public goods, and pursue overarching goals. This must be done however in a way that interferes as little as possible with individuals’ (negative) freedom and based on the general recognition that humans are moral equals. That’s why classical liberals espoused democratic institutions despite their fears, under the condition that the democratically enacted political power of the People is always checked and regulated by an appropriate constitutional design.
The difference between libertarians and classical liberals is that the former do not want to harness politics. They are pretending to do without it. The libertarian myth is a society where there is no political power exercised as all human interactions are consent-based and contractual. It is a society where there is no public space and no public reason. Coercion would only be required to enforce contracts, and because the relationship between the contractors and the enforcing agents would also be presumably contractual and consent-based, this would not be coercion in the political sense. Politics, as the domain of life where people argue about rules and make sure that they are respected once they are collectively chosen, would be automatically illegitimate because, in a libertarian society, no such collective choice can be made.
We could argue whether we should aim for such a society. But this would be useless because the libertarian ideal of a society without politics is impossible. Where there is human agency and reason, there must be politics. Humans have the intellectual and physical abilities to use their intelligence and force to coerce others to act in such a way that it serves their interests. Modern technologies don’t change anything about this and actually, may contribute to exacerbating the coercive power that humans can have on each other. A libertarian society would be a society with non-state-based coercion and politics, but it would be coercion and politics, nonetheless. Some agents would have the actual power to force others to act in specific ways. This is the paradox of politics. Any idea of a society conceived to escape politics is an idea of a political society. For (classical) liberalism, the upcoming challenge will be to determine how politics can still be appropriately harnessed in the context of emergent technologies like AI. The libertarian myth of a society without politics is a delusion with high opportunity costs.
[1] Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (UK USA Canada Ireland Australia India New Zeeland South Africa: Allen Lane, 2023).
[2] Many libertarians consider themselves classical liberals and reject the term libertarians. Maybe 19th-century classical liberals like Tocqueville or Mill would have been 21st-century libertarians. I doubt they would have been Trumpist or endorsed the populist agenda of the (far) right in many Western countries, however.