A number of my friends, especially in Silicon Valley where I now live, might be described as techno-libertarians. Loosely speaking, this is the idea that technological progress will lead to greater individual freedom and reduced state control. Some techno-libertarians are simply optimists, hoping that inventions like the internet will put more power in the hands of ordinary folks. Others are seeking to build technologies that make regulation difficult or impossible to enforce — for example, the way Uber makes it hard for cities to justify maintaining taxi companies’ monopoly on hired-car service. As entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan pithily tweeted : “Don’t argue about regulation. Build Uber. Don’t argue about monetary policy. Build Bitcoin.”
Techno-libertarians have been criticized by progressives for paying insufficient attention to human welfare and the needs of society at large. But in recent days, I’m starting to wonder whether the ideology has a bigger problem — it’s vision of history, and of the interaction between technology and the state, might be badly flawed.
There are two ways that technology might not actually erode state power. First, new technology might provoke governments to crack down and reduce individual freedoms. Second, governments might use new inventions as a means of controlling their citizens’ lives.
As an example, consider the internet. When it was created decades ago, many predicted that the free sharing of information would weaken the grip of governments over their people. Since monopolies over information are one of authoritarian states’ traditional methods of control, that prediction made sense. And indeed, the internet has allowed popular movements to spread rapidly, from the demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003 to the Arab Spring protests in 2011. Social media even helped Turkey’s populace turn out to stop its most recent coup attempt.
But in the past decade, the internet has not achieved […]
