“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

1. “OPINION: No virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], December 2, 2025
2. “No Virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, December 4, 2025
3. “CONTRIBUTOR’S VIEW – Thomas Knapp [sic]: No Virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Thomas Knapp [sic], Valley, Alabama Times-News, December 5, 2025

If New York Times guest essayist Finn Brunton is to be believed, the Federal Reserve Board Building is haunted by the ghosts of crackpots past. Trump’s cozying up to corporate cryptocurrency coiners during his second term, reinforcing “his thirst for money and power, has … embraced the corruption at the heart of digital currencies — a corruption inherited from the libertarian ideals that created them” (“Cryptocurrency Promised Us Freedom — and Brought Tyranny,” October 26).

Brunton’s gloomy portrait of a new-Gilded-Age Grand Old Party recasts it in the image of the Libertarian Party that might have “languished for decades as a clown show” but whose resemblance to the Gathering of the Juggalos conceals something less like the Insane Clown Posse fanbase’s dedication to social self-support and freewheeling fun than a real-life manifestation of their Dark Carnival mythology.  At their most innocent, “quirky, high-minded libertarian intellectuals” or “civil liberties activists [who] wanted anonymous payments for political donations and for financially vulnerable industries” are, like Martin Short’s Stubbs the Clown in We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, unwitting tools of far more nefarious and exploitative hucksters who employ and envelop them (like the literal dark carnival where Stubbs works).

From the invocation of Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard with their most unsavory alliances implied to be representative, to quoting Robert Heinlein’s mantra that “an armed society is a polite society” to the obligatory mention of Ayn Rand, “libertarians’ favorite novelist” due to glamorizing “rich, brilliant supermen” who “despise everyone else” — but not her nonfictional clarification distinguishing her preferred, ethical egoism from that of those who “are lone wolves (stressing that species’ most predatory characteristics)” — about the only cliché missing is a nod to the Mad Max series more overt than a supposed ideal of “a nerd-warlord society of failed states.”  Yet a fuller and closer reading of the libertarian bookshelf, rather than a glance at placarded slogans, would reveal a wish, not to let loose the likes of Max nemesis Immortan Joe, but rather to prevent concentrations of power from existing for such malefactors to exploit.

To Brunton, the contrasting model of power offered by Scranton Joe Biden is at worst “inconsistent, confusing and cautious.”  Yet it was Rothbard who clued in the coalescing libertarian movement to the work of leftist scholars like Gabriel Kolko, who saw Progressive Era efforts to centralize banking as a broader effort not to bring an oligarchic economy under popular control but to “increase the power of the big national banks to compete with the rapidly growing state banks.” Rather than calling for “removing all checks on the power of the wealthy to do what they want,” Rothbard traced how it came from inside the Jekyll Island Clubhouse where the Fed was conceived.

Rothbard also asked those who “charge that fraud would run rampant” if currency competition was allowed: “if government cannot be trusted to ferret out the occasional villain in the free market in coin, why can government be trusted when it finds itself in a position of total control over money?”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “We have met King Joe and he is us” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, Arizona News, November 2, 2025
2. “We have met King Joe and he is us” by Joel Schlosberg, Mohave Valley Daily News [Bullhead City, Arizona], November 2, 2025

“We Will Never Be Rid of Google” (The New York Times, September 30) is quite a headline for the same Julia Angwin who wrote the book on MySpace.

Angwin’s comprehensive unofficial account was published in 2009 as Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (not “We Will Never Be Rid of MySpace”). Its subtitle didn’t remain current for long: Facebook’s international reach already made the “in America” qualifier requisite for the other social network by 2008. Still, the snapshot of the then-hip site, not yet a punchline in a David Pogue Times column exemplifying when “a hot property becomes a lame has-been” (alongside action star Steven Seagal, well after his career transition from Hard to Kill to direct-to-video, and the Macarena dance craze), remains an instructive case study.

In Angwin’s own words, the juggernaut “now positioned to further entrench its dominance of our information landscape” due to lack of antitrust enforcement was a parenthetical in the post-Y2K cyberspace from which MySpace emerged: “In early 2003 the dot-com boom was over, and the next Internet boom had not yet begun. During this in-between period, only the big three companies — AOL, MSN, and Yahoo ([MySpace cofounder Chris] DeWolfe called them ‘the untouchable triumvirate’) — were thriving  (Google had not yet taken off.)” The first of the troika disconnected its formerly ubiquitous dial-up service on the same day that “We Will Never Be Rid of Google” saw fit to see print.

While Angwin asserts that “Google has an unassailable lead in collecting and analyzing data from across the web” in 2025, in 2009 she had noted that by 2003, “even high school students could build expert-looking webpages;” upstarts like MySpace no longer “required massive computer resources and huge teams of computer programmers” as they had when Google and Yahoo were founded in the 1990s. Individual web designers unaffiliated with Google have made such improvements to its core services as &udm=14, which automatically filters out AI from Google web searches, and Filmot for finding phrases in video subtitles on Google-owned YouTube.

Angwin’s desired future of “competing search engines that offer different experiences” independently of Google already exists, albeit unevenly distributed in the remaining 10% of total search traffic, from generalists such as DuckDuckGo whose crawlers span the publicly accessible World Wide Web, to the hyper-specific likes of “The Geocities Animated Gif Search.”

To be sure, their names are harder to remember, even when typable just as quickly, but Google’s originated as a pun on a previously obscure math term for a quantity so ludicrously gigantic as to defy any conceivable practical use. So did that of their Googleplex headquarters; but is the relevant quantity not a googol or even a googolplex, so much as the trillions spent by the Pentagon?

Angwin highlights the tech maverick’s “small but growing defense contracts” —  an example of how “despite its power in the marketplace, Google is still vulnerable to all kinds of pressure campaigns from the government.” Yet apparently it simultaneously possesses “unfettered market power” — a contradiction untangled by libertarian activist Karl Hess in a 1970 New York Times Magazine profile: “We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. … We have all the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.”

Angwin’s feared “possible future in which the administration starts pressuring Google to shape search results in its favor” was already the present reality during the four years of the Biden administration (and even Trump’s first four years). As Jenin Younes explained in “How Biden Enabled Trump’s Censorship” (Compact, March 19): “the lesson of the past five years is clear: Civil-liberties violations that you countenance will be turned against you sooner than you expect. That is why we need a renewed commitment to civil liberties from both the left and the right, not the sort we have seen in which each side uses the concept as a cudgel when convenient.”

Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow made a frequently paraphrased observation that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” You should be less so inclined when you don’t have the hammer — especially when it’s about to be used on you.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY