The tech “libertarian” right turn

I understand the confusion of people surprised to see many tech “libertarians” have been making a turn toward far right authoritarianism. A few things to help make sense of this:

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Understand the split between anarchists and libertarians in the United States.

Anarchists’ opposition to power & authority includes an opposition to the power of wealth.

The libertarian tradition embraces private property emphatically — it regards anything less than total control of one’s property as a violation morally equivalent to violent bodily assault. “I created that wealth with my time and effort, so taking any portion of it treats me as a slave.” Though libertarians regard private property as logically prior to the state, they have shown again and again that they are eager to support exercise of power by authoritarian states to enforce it.

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Many American “libertarians” are fascists & white nationalists engaged in misdirection. For example, I have an old post cataloguing how Ron Paul was never really a libertarian, but loved misleading people into thinking he was.

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Sincere bonehead contrarian libertarians have a tendency to make the switch.

Partly it is just going from one contrarian form of zealotry to another. Partly it is an easy drift from “I am awesome, and I would prosper were I not handicapped by the state” to “my people are awesome, and we would dominate were we not handicapped by liberalism”.

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Neoreactionaries — a distinctly nerdy strain of far right ideology — have a fantasy of authoritarian minarchy. They argue that the state per se is not the problem; they fault the liberal state as “too big”. If the government is unencumbered by due process and regulatory responsibility, they believe, its ruthlessness allows it to be “small” so that in practice citizens are more “free”.

They misread Singapore as embodying their dream. “You might get the death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk, but if you steer clear of obvious mistakes and political dissent, the government stays out of your way. There is so little regulation of economic freedom!”

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Libertarianism has a crisp simplicity and superficial elegance which appeals to the Engineer Mindset common in the culture of the “tech” industry. But libertarianism is not the only facile “rational” simplification of a complex domain which plays to that frame of mind.

It also produces notorious crackpottery like 9/11 Truthers: “jet fuel cannot melt steel beams, QED!” Fashy “logic” is full of exactly that sort of move:

• pseudoscientific racism and sexism
• Clash Of Civilizations claims about the superiority of Rational Western Culture
• the Fremen Mirage

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Silicon Valley culture understands itself as standing at the top of a competitive meritocracy with authoritarian & fashy implications:

• we defeated supposed experts in their domains because we are smarter and better — competition is the truth of the world which reveals inborn excellence
• it is good when this concentrates resources in our hands, because it empowers our efforts which make the world work better — they must rule, it is destructive when others try to “steal” their deserved wealth and power
• our corporate organizations are Super Effective, unlike the clumsy state — democracy is stupid & inefficient, unlike heirarchical exercise of authority

(It is necessary here to caveat that the common claim “Fascism = Corporatism” is a misleading canard.)

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Animating much of this we can see the libertarian misunderstanding that “authoritarian” means a “big” state. But authoritarianism is better understood as “power unchecked by limiting institutions”, the thing these guys want for themselves, because they are so much smarter than everyone else that they will use that power well.