The notable scholar David Golumbia died last year at the age of 60. At the time of his passing, he had completed the manuscript for what would become his final book, a formidable analysis and critique of the digital age titled Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. Please find below my review of the book published at boundary 2 online, where Golumbia had worked for several years as an editor. Few scholars of digital media were as pugnacious and insightful as David. He will be missed.
Does disorder have a politics? I suspect it must. It has a history, to be sure. Disorder is quite old, in fact, primeval even, the very precondition for the primeval, evident around the world in ancient notions of chaos, strife, or cosmic confusion. But does disorder have a politics as well? As an organizing principle, disorder achieved a certain coherence during the 1990s. In those years technology evangelists penned books with titles like Out of Control (the machines are in a state of disorder, but we like it), and The Cathedral and the Bazaar (disorderly souk good, well-ordered Canterbury bad). The avant argument in those years focused on a radical deregulation of all things, a kind of full-stack libertarianism in which machines and organisms could, and should, self-organize without recourse to rule or law. Far from corroding political cohesion, as it did for Thomas Hobbes and any number of other political theorists, disorder began to be understood in a more positive sense, as the essential precondition for a liberated politics. Or as the late David Golumbia writes in Cyberlibertarianism, the computer society of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries culminated in “the view that ‘centralized authority’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are somehow emblematic of concentrated power, whereas ‘distributed’ and ‘nonhierarchical’ systems oppose that power.” And, further, Golumbia argues that much of the energy for these kinds of political judgements stemmed from a characteristically ring-wing impulse, namely a conservative reaction to the specter of central planning in socialist and communist societies and the concomitant endorsement of deregulation and the neutering of state power more generally. Isaiah Berlin’s notion of negative liberty had eclipsed all other conceptions of freedom; many prominent authors and technologists seemed to agree that positive liberty was only ever a path to destruction. Or as Friedrich Hayek put it already in 1944, any form of positive, conscious imposition of order would inevitably follow “the road to serfdom.” Liberty would thus thrive not from rational order, but from a carefully tended form of disorder.
