Technolibertarianism

Technolibertarianism is an extension of libertarianism with the belief that technology is a liberatory force to ensure civil liberties, encourage the operation of free markets without government intervention and avoid over-regulation.

Technolibertarianism is particularly aligned with the use of cryptography, cryptoasset and censorship-resistence tools to protect against what they see as government overreach into the financial lives of citizens. The ideology is predicated on a distrust of institutions and command-and-control structures, and a preference for technical solutions with philosophical appeals to decentralization.

See also cryptoanarchism, libertarianism, and post-state-technocracy.

References

  1. Wolf, Martin. 2019. ‘The Libertarian Fantasies of Cryptocurrencies’. Financial Times, February. https://www.ft.com/content/eeeacd7c-2e0e-11e9-ba00-0251022932c8.
  2. Beltramini, Enrico. 2020. ‘Trust, Finance and Cryptocurrencies’. In Anarchism, Organization and Management, 184–95. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315172606-19.
  3. *———. 2021. ‘Against Technocratic Authoritarianism. A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement’. Internet Histories 5 (2): 101–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1731249.
  4. Allon, Fiona. 2018. ‘Money after Blockchain: Gold, Decentralised Politics and the New Libertarianism’. Australian Feminist Studies 33 (96): 223–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2018.1517245.
  5. Beltramini, Enrico. 2021. ‘Against Technocratic Authoritarianism. A Short Intellectual History of the Cypherpunk Movement’. Internet Histories 5 (2): 101–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2020.1731249.
  6. Brody, Ann, and StĂ©phane Couture. 2021. ‘Ideologies and Imaginaries in Blockchain Communities: The Case of Ethereum’. Canadian Journal of Communication 46 (3). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2021v46n3a3701.
  7. Golumbia, David. 2013. ‘Cyberlibertarianism: The Extremist Foundations of “Digital Freedom.”’ Clemson University Department of English.
  8. Inwood, Olivia, and Michele Zappavigna. 2021. ‘Ideology, Attitudinal Positioning, and the Blockchain: A Social Semiotic Approach to Understanding the Values Construed in the Whitepapers of Blockchain Start-Ups’. Social Semiotics, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1877995.
  9. Korhonen, Outi, and Juho Rantala. 2021. ‘Blockchain Governance Challenges: Beyond Libertarianism’. AJIL Unbound 115: 408–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2021.65.
  10. Binder, Carola. 2021. ‘Technopopulism and Central Banks’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3823456.
  11. Hellegren, Z. Isadora. 2017. ‘A History of Crypto-Discourse: Encryption as a Site of Struggles to Define Internet Freedom’. Internet Histories 1 (4): 285–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1387466.
  12. West, Sarah Myers. 2018. ‘Cryptographic Imaginaries and the Networked Public’. Internet Policy Review 7 (2): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.14763/2018.2.792.
  13. GĂŒrses, Seda, Arun Kundnani, and Joris Van Hoboken. 2016. ‘Crypto and Empire: The Contradictions of Counter-Surveillance Advocacy’. Media, Culture and Society 38 (4): 576–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643006.
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