In Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, David Golumbia presents an unhinged attack on nearly every branch of contemporary digital activism. Because I write about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, I was fortunate enough to be swept up in Golumbia’s attacks. Here, I present a short response to Golumbia, demonstrating that either (1) he did not even read my article or (2) he willfully and knowingly misrepresented my article. In either case, Golumbia’s inability or unwillingness to engage scholarship on WikiLeaks and Assange requires us to question the accuracy and reliability of his entire book.
In 2021, Ethics and Information Technology published my very first article on Assange and WikiLeaks, “Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful: The Cypherpunk Ethics of Julian Assange.” Because most of the scholarship on WikiLeaks has completely ignored Asange’s own writings, save for a few token citations, the aim of the paper was to bring attention to the relevant primary sources and to treat Assange as a theorist whose principles, concepts, and values informed the creation, structure, and aims of WikiLeaks. The first section of the paper grounded Assange’s views in the history of the cypherpunk movement, which has sometimes taken as a basic tenant the slogan “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful.” The second section of the paper argued that Assange’s cypherpunk ethics were not merely derived from the California cypherpunks but were instead infused with cosmopolitanism, antiwar sentiments, hacker principles, and Enlightenment philosophy. This section also argued that Assange had adopted a rights-baed theory of communication ethics and a cybernetic account of the operation of modern states.
While my work would be taken as relatively non-controversial by most, Golumbia finds in my article apologia for fascism, Nazism, racism, etc. In chapter 7, “Cyberlibertarianism and the Far Right,” Golumbia writes the following:
At the core of fascism is the belief that people are divided into kinds. Ideologues use all kinds of descriptive terms to divide people into groups, sometimes stressing the superiority of themselves (Aryans, Übermenschen, white supremacists) and sometimes the inferiority of others (racial and ethnic slurs, “sheeple,” “muggles”). Assange’s case shows how easily that belief emerges in contexts that seem oppositional to them. In a recent full-throated defense of Assange precisely because he “adopted the principles of cypherpunk ethics, but he placed them into a distinctively cosmopolitan context. By combining cypherpunk ethics with antiwar values and Enlightenment ideals,” Patrick Anderson (2021, 307) avoids all discussion of either cypherpunk or Assange’s personal politics. At the center of those cypherpunk ethics and Assange’s own is the slogan “transparency for the powerful, privacy for the weak.” Anderson and most other supporters of Assange do not seem to notice that the slogan splits the human world into two groups—“weak” and “powerful”— and grants only certain, self-elected persons the right and power to decide who belongs in each group.
It is important to remember that historical fascists, including those in Italy and Germany before and during World War II, typically cast themselves as both the “weak” and the “powerful” depending on need. From Nazis claiming Jews actually control the world to KKK members attacking Black Americans for their alleged physical or sexual prowess, the key is always a denial of the core commitment of democracy—that we are all the same. Fascists decide on their own how society should be arranged, without regard for the rights or interests of people in general. As we have seen, this antidemocratic splitting is evident all over cypherpunk propaganda and is frequently made explicit in the anarcho-capitalist literature on which cypherpunk is based. (367)
There is much to unpack in this frantic passage, so let’s take it one point at a time. First, let me quote the full passage that Golumbia references:
“As a participant in the [cypherpunk] movement, Assange adopted the principles of cypherpunk ethics, but he placed them into a distinctively cosmopolitan context. By combining cypherpunk ethics with antiwar values and Enlightenment ideals, Assange developed a truly global conception of cypherpunk philosophy” (307).
Note that Golumbia quotes two sentences as one without regard for grammar or syntax. Because of this odd choice of formatting the quote, it is not clear to his readers what the quote meant in its original context, and its meaning is thereby obfuscated. This passage is merely a concise rendering of the summary I provided above, but Golumbia’s readers would have no way to know that.
Golumbia also fails to quote Assange with care. In Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange and his coauthors use the phrase “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful,” which I quote accurately, but Golumbia is so careless as to quote it in reverse, “transparency for the powerful, privacy for the weak.” While this may seem trivial, quoted passages should remain faithful to their original unless some correction is required, and in such cases, the reader should be told that a correction was made. In this case, no correction was required and readers were not informed of the change.
Beyond the textual issues, there are a number of logical issues with Golumbia’s comments about my work. Confusingly, he claims that I avoid discussing cypherpunk and Assange’s personal politics but then claims that the slogan “transparency for the powerful, privacy for the weak” is “at the center” of cypherpunk ethics and Assange’s personal politics. How do I avoid discussing cypherpunk and Assange’s personal politics when the title and focus of my paper is on a slogan that Golumbia himself says is “at the center” of cypherpunk ethics and Assange’s personal politics? How do I avoid discussing cypherpunk and Assange’s personal politics when when my paper is literally the only paper that does so?
Golumbia further manipulates my work to fit his aims when he describes my work as “a recent full-throated defense of Assange.” It is not clear where Golumbia gets this impression, for if he had read the introduction to the paper, the fifth paragraph explicitly states:
Importantly, what follows is neither a normative argument regarding any specific technology nor a defense of cypherpunk philosophy in response to its critics. Instead, the argument here is descriptive, claiming that the best way to understand WikiLeaks is to understand how Assange built the organization on a foundation of cypherpunk-inspired principles. While many scholars have criticized WikiLeaks, they have done so without engaging the principles upon which WikiLeaks is founded. Any criticisms or condemnations of WikiLeaks that do not compellingly demonstrate that cypherpunk philosophy is a logically or morally problematic basis for a journalistic or activist worldview will not have provided an adequate account. Thus, this essay changes the terms of the debate when it comes to WikiLeaks. Rather than merely analyzing WikiLeaks using theories already familiar to scholars, scholars ought to first familiarize themselves with the theories that provide impetus for the creation of WikiLeaks. (296)
The approach described here is identical to the approach Golumbia claims to take in Cyberlibertarianism, only he makes different assumptions and reaches different conclusions. I argue that critics of WikiLeaks have failed to describe WikiLeaks because they ignore its cypherpunk origins, and I cite many works that criticized WikiLeaks without reference to the cypherpunk movement. Golumbia argues that defenders of WikiLeaks have failed to describe WikiLeaks because they ignore its cypherpunk origins, and he cites only one paper that neither defends WikiLeaks nor ignores its cypherpunk origins. Of all the papers that could be cited to make his point, Golumbia argues that the one paper that literally contradicts his point is evidence for his point.
In addition to Golumbia’s violation of the basic standards of scholarship, he also implies that because I published an article describing Assange as a cypherpunk (the same thing his book attempts to do), I have somehow become unknowingly, inadvertently implicated fascism. Here are the relevant passages again:
At the core of fascism is the belief that people are divided into kinds. Ideologues use all kinds of descriptive terms to divide people into groups…Anderson and most other supporters of Assange do not seem to notice that the [cypherpunk] slogan splits the human world into two groups—“weak” and “powerful”— and grants only certain, self-elected persons the right and power to decide who belongs in each group. (367)
These passages are so incredibly insipid that it is difficult to give then credence with a reply, but it is necessary to reveal the absolutely nonsense implied in these passages.
According to Golumbia, dividing people into descriptive groups is a hallmark of fascism and Nazism, but if this is true, then literally every discipline in the humanities and social sciences is fascist. Anthropologists acknowledge the differences among cultural and linguistic groups to better understand the human variety. Sociologists use demographic categories to better understand trends and patterns within given social contexts. Literary scholars build entire canons that embody distinct literary traditions. Philosophers make conceptual distinctions in order to clarify the meanings of our words. Every academic discipline uses analysis, but if we following Golumbia, then we would have to conclude that analytical reasoning as such is fascist.
Shockingly, if we following Golumbia to his conclusions, then Golumbia is himself a fascist. Throughout Cyberlibertarianism, Golumbia uses the epithet “right-wing” to describe the wide array of cyberlibertarian he find lurking around every corner, and in chapter 1, “The Dogma of Cyberlibertarianism,” Golumbia attempts to define what “right-wing” means. He writes:
Few ideas are more contested than that of “right-wing politics”…Although the notion of right-wing politics depends on a meaningful split between the right and left wings, the term “right-wing politics” is not entirely identical with everything that goes onto the right-hand side of a right–left split…If we are drawing a binary contrast—as we often must in politics—between right and left, then Burkean conservatism falls on the right. But as the split between the pro-Trump (and pro-Tea Party) and anti-Trump factions in the U.S. Republican Party showed, factionalization and sectarianism are always possible within these high-level categorizations. (19)
The absolute madness. Here we have an author who accuses cypherpunks, Assange, and myself of being fascist for making a distinction between “weak” and “powerful” groups and individuals, while himself feeling entitled to make a distinction between the “right” and the “left.” At the core of fascism is the belief that people are divided into kinds, yet Golumbia does not think himself a fascist for believing there is a difference between right-wing and left-wing politics. Ideologues use all kinds of descriptive terms to divide people into groups, yet Golumbia does not think himself an ideologue for dividing people into political groups.
Though the preceding look at Golumbia’s work is revealing, perhaps the most ironic part of all is Golumbia’s arrogance in accusing the people he seems to hate of doing what he himself does. According to Golumbia, the cypherpunk slogan “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful” grants only certain, self-elected persons the right and power to decide who belongs in each group. While it is true that “weak” and “powerful” can only be determined within a context and that such determinations can be debated, it is not true that only “self-elected persons” get to decide at the expense of everyone else. Disagreement is not fascist.
But throughout Cyberlibertarianism, Golumbia hypocritically appoints himself the self-elected person with the right and power to decide who is a fascistic, right-wing cyberlibertarian and who is not. Golumbia has anointed himself the person to decide who counts as “right-wing” and who counts as “left-wing.” Because much of his argument rests on the idea that many leftist groups and individuals have been suckered or duped by the pervasive neoliberal ideology of cyberlibertarianism, he consigns many self-described leftists, progressives, and liberals to realm of fascism.
Returning to Golumbia’s use of my article in his argument, we must conclude that either (1) he did not even read it or (2) he willfully and knowingly misrepresented it. I can imagine a combination of both. After finding the paper in a search of some kind, Golumbia probably read the abstract and then skipped to the paper’s conclusion, which is where the quoted passage originally appears. Then he probably found some text he thought would make his point, regardless of whether it faithfully represented the original meaning. This series of events would explain why the quoted passage was so odd and why it misconstrued the argument in my paper. Given that my work does several of the things he claims his work does without doing any of the things he claims my work does, we have serious reason to doubt his academic integrity and scholarly precision. Unfortunately, Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism is merely the latest example of the shameful state of scholarship on the cypherpunks and WikiLeaks.
Bibliography
Anderson, Patrick D. “Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful: The Cypherpunk Ethics of Julian Assange.” Ethics & Information Technology 23 (2021): 295–308.
Assange, Julian, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. Cypherpunks: Freedom and the future of the internet. New York: OR Books, 2012.
Golumbia, David. Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024.