“Some of those who believe tech lost its way are finding explanations in a book published a quarter century ago,” according to David Streitfeld’s full-page profile of Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook in The New York Times (“A Book That Criticized Silicon Valley Gets Dusted Off,” November 30). To those who recall the turn-of-the-millennium Internet, Borsook’s is the exemplar of what Star Wars sage Obi-Wan Kenobi called “a name I’ve not heard in a long time.”

The 2000 tome warned readers for whom “it’s easy to sit at your computer and imagine yourself the Han Solo captain of your destiny” that “the era of the solo programmer making an impact is mostly long over” (the year that one created the formative video game Counter-Strike, as noted in a Times retrospective on  December 1).  Earthbound free spirits would have to settle for something sounding more like a real-life version of a Family Ties rerun, the spirit of the Sixties generation confined to “more comfort with a broader range of psychoactive substance use” alongside Eighties enthusiasms entrenched: “Deregulate this! Phooey on government!”

For all their reliance on corporate welfare, according to Borsook, “technolibertarians typically can’t be bothered to engage in conventional political maneuvers.”  The 2001 paperback edition envisioned such an ideology dominating the computer industry “long after high tech has retreated to being just one industrial sector among many.”

If the year 2025’s nationalist, protectionist industrial policy differs markedly from the road ahead suggested in Cyberselfish, perhaps it wasn’t all that perceptive about the twentieth century. Crediting heavy state funding with virtually all economic progress and social stability, and conflating the government with social cooperation, it’s hundreds of pages with all the depth of the bumper sticker proclaiming “IF YOU HATE SOCIALISM GET OFF MY PUBLIC ROAD.” (Although Borsook insists that she’d never “know how to tell other people how to live their lives,” let alone run them off the road of public life.) Murray Rothbard rates a mention in Cyberselfish as exemplifying libertarianism at its most uncompromising, but he looked to the history of the American economy not as a model for a “cruelly meritocratic world-to-come” but for evidence that its productive potential had been persistently prevented.

It wasn’t even the first published book to highlight the underbelly of the dot-com boom (Streitfeld mentions Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, which as that its subtitle suggests, saw the Net more as a road to nowhere than to dystopia). Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin’s NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web was dubbed “the ultimate corrective to Internet IPO mania” by Entertainment Weekly the same year that Douglas Rushkoff rued in Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say that he could have ever “really believed the Internet could put an end to coercion”: 1999.

It may seem impossible to put an end to coercion on the Internet in 2026 and beyond, let alone use it to free the offline world.  Disentangling the World Wide Web from political logrolling is a good place to start.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“You can refuse illegal orders … you MUST refuse illegal orders.”

That’s the message from a recent video featuring six Democratic members of Congress, all former members of the US armed forces and/or intelligence services, and directed at current members of those organizations.

Seems non-controversial, but someone else would like a word. Er, several words:

“Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? … SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

As you’ve probably guessed, that someone else is US president Donald Trump.

And he’s not just talking. He’s had US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth threaten to recall one of the politicians in question, US Senator Mark Kelly, to active duty in the   Navy for a potential court-martial. He’s having the Federal Bureau of Investigation request “interviews” with with all six politicians.

Yes, really.

But, like I said, the whole thing seems uncontroversial. This is, to use a turn of phrase Trump seems to like, a “witch hunt.”

It’s been 40 years since I spent the summer in San Diego becoming a US Marine. I’m sure things have changed since then, but I doubt they’ve changed so much that anyone graduates any armed forces boot camp without receiving instruction in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

A summary, from memory, on the section  (Article 92) concerning orders:

You must obey lawful orders.

You must not obey unlawful orders.

As I recall it, the case my platoon’s instructor used as an example was Lt. William Calley’s conduct in Vietnam during an event later known as the “My Lai Massacre.”

Here’s what the US Court of Military Appeals had to say about Calley’s defense that he was “just following orders”:

“An order requiring the performance of a military duty may be inferred to be legal. An act performed manifestly beyond the scope of authority, or pursuant to an order that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know to be illegal, or in a wanton manner in the discharge of a lawful duty, is not excusable.”

Calley served three years (of a life sentence) for the murders at My Lai.

Why? Because you must refuse illegal orders.

If it’s “treason” or “sedition” to state that fact, then every instructor in every basic training class on military law is a traitor who’s been teaching treason and preaching sedition to every recruit since 1950, when the UCMJ was adopted … and probably long before that.

Would these particular politicians  have made this particular video if it was a Democrat  issuing illegal orders from the White House?

Probably not, but they’re right anyway.

Note to military and intelligence personnel:

You must refuse illegal orders.

If this be treason, make the most of it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When asked, before Japans’s parliament, about the circumstances under which the country’s “Self-Defense Forces” could legally take military action, prime minister Sanae Takaichi cited a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan as a “survival-threatening situation” potentially warranting such action.

Beijing’s response to the remark, while a bit more over the top than usual (the Chinese consul-general in Osaka seemingly threatened to cut off Takaichi’s head), hasn’t really varied in form or substance from the People’s Republic’s position of decades.

On November 21, Chinese UN Ambassador Fu Cong wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, citing Takaichi’s words as “a grave violation of international law” and preemptively excusing any such hypothetical attack on Taiwan as “self-defence under the UN Charter” pursuant to defending its “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.”

At stake in this matter, as in similar past occurrences, is a rotten principle called “strategic ambiguity,” under which the Chinese regime makes false claims and other regimes carefully avoid mentioning that those claims are false.

Here’s the fact which Beijing disputes and other regimes avoid mentioning:

Taiwan is not now, and never has been, part of the People’s Republic of China.

The island hasn’t been ruled from Beijing since 1895, when the Qing dynasty ceded it to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki, 54 years before the People’s Republic came into existence.

To put that in historical context, Taiwan has been independent of mainland China since before Cuba became independent of Spain, and since before the US annexed Hawaii. It’s been independent of the mainland through, among other events, two world wars and a multi-decade “Cold War.” And even before any of that, it was only partially and occasionally ruled from Beijing.

Beijing enjoys no “sovereignty” over Taiwan, nor would invading Taiwan constitute “self-defense.”

But whenever any politician on the world stage publicly mentions, or even alludes to, that fact,  Chinese politicians rattle their sabers militarily while threatening, “diplomatically,” to throw themselves on the floor and hold their breath until they turn blue.

To placate Beijing, western regimes have generally adopted policies of “strategic ambiguity.” They conduct friendly relations with Taiwan while not “recognizing” its status as independent, and provide Taiwan with military assistance of various kinds while very carefully NOT openly saying they’d help it defend itself against invasion.

“Strategic ambiguity” is the worst of two worlds when it comes to foreign policy.

As a non-interventionist, I’d prefer to see the United States (and other regimes) mind their own business and avoid trying to “manage” the China-Taiwan relationship in any way.

Pro-Taiwan interventionists want the United States (and other regimes) to take the bull by the horns and tell the People’s Republic “it’s not yours, you can’t have it, and if you try to take it you’ll get smacked down hard.”

Catering to Beijing’s threats and tantrums with “strategic ambiguity” satisfies neither crowd. It makes eventual war more likely while giving “strategically ambiguous” politicians cover to pretend they’re surprised when it arrives.

Hopefully Takaichi will stand her ground. Facts, not dodges, reduce the risk of war.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY