A Modern Counterculture: Reflections on Liberty and Liberty-Adjacent Movements

“Libertarianism” is a term adopted by a national party, neo-reactionaries, conservatives, socialists, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, objectivists, a plethora of historical thinkers and their disciples, and nearly everyone else (and don’t forget the unrelated metaphysical stance). I make no claim to the illegitimacy of any of these adopters of “libertarianism”; instead, I support a simple perspective on the philosophy, that may or may not serve as a primitive to other “libertarianisms”. At the base of libertarianism, in this perspective, is a realization that the moral authority to coerce — for example, the authority of a state to require its constituents to obey its commands by threat of violence — is an illusion. Libertarianism claims that reflecting this realization in the formation of societies is, in addition to morally obligatory, important for individual and communal flourishing. And that’s all.
Libertarianism, in this light, is nothing different than what many call “voluntaryism”, the idea that all human interactions should be voluntary and in accordance with the assumptions that we own ourselves and our individual property. Following the implications of voluntaryism through, we arrive at a sort of anarcho-capitalism, in which not even minimal coercion can exist to provide safety nets or solve coordination issues (which, in fact, are not issues for the anarchist). For now, I’m not going to attempt to persuade you of the philosophy; see modern thinkers like Michael Huemer, Bryan Caplan, Matt Zwolinski, David Friedman, and Jeffrey Tucker for rational explanations of voluntaryism and anarcho-capitalism.
Amid the many varieties of libertarian movements throughout history, one that aligns closely with voluntaryism is the Cypherpunk movement. Cypherpunks espoused the importance of privacy and anonymity for an open and free society — the importance for individuals to have the ability to volunteer what they reveal about themselves to the world, to keep private communications private, known only to participants. Privacy and anonymity can help individuals bypass surveillance, censorship, exploitation and criminalization of speech, which are often forms of coercion and plagues upon societal progress. The Cypherpunks realized that governments could not be trusted to defend citizens’ privacy, and insisted on arming themselves with the powerful tools of cryptography to build and spread anonymous information transaction systems. Closely related to the Cypherpunks were the crypto-anarchists, who aimed to apply Cypherpunk methodologies to achieve a cyberspatial anarchy. Crypto-anarchists wanted absolute and unrestricted individual freedoms, and explored tools like public-key cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs to create anonymous systems, like digital cash, that would advance these freedoms. The more government infrastructures that could be replaced in the crypto-favorable cyberspace, the closer to anarchy we could get.
Taking a step back, I must note that the moral authority modern world citizens assume of their governments stems from a long-imbued and unchallenged trust of state. Theorists have long claimed that societal functions require concentrating power over people and capital into the hands of centralized or consortium entities — which in turn requires immense trust in the entities’ competence and benevolence. Yet, trust alone is not foolproof. And only when Satoshi Nakamoto’s “Bitcoin” arrived in early 2009, under influence of crypto-anarchist ideals, was this functional requirement of trust altered.

Bitcoin is the first truly trustless digital transaction system, the success of which is owed to its breakthrough in achieving a robust system of consensus among decentralized peers. It is able to operate as a completely decentralized, double-spend-proof currency through public-key cryptography for spenders to verify that they own their Bitcoins, its public transaction ledger, the Bitcoin “blockchain”, and Bitcoin’s “proof-of-work”, a protocol describing the “mining” process of spending computational power to gain rights to canonicalize “blocks” of transactions on the blockchain. Given a two-thirds honest majority of miners at worst, Bitcoin is trustlessly Byzantine fault tolerant (it can achieve accurate consensus despite malicious nodes). And all this without a third party controlling any part of the system, and thus, without the possibilities for valid transactions to be censored or redistributed or for the finite Bitcoin supply to be unilaterally tampered with. Bitcoin, along with being decentralized, trustless, censorship resistant, and deflationary, is permissionless — anyone can become a miner or make transactions, anyone can audit the blockchain and the software — and pseudonymous — you are only known by your cryptographically generated public key(s). Pseudonymity is a large step in the direction of the original Cypherpunk ambitions, and other cryptocurrencies that have emerged since Bitcoin use further cryptographic innovations (ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs) to achieve true anonymity.
Though the small circle of Bitcoin and similar payment-system cryptocurrencies has been a breakthrough success for the decades-long Cypherpunk crusade, the blockchain world at large far surpasses it in potential to lead the world to a state of freedom.
Blockchain technology not only has the ability to replace centralized infrastructure as an ultimate arbiter, but also has demonstrated its ability to be more efficient and innovative than centralized infrastructure, in a way justifying libertarian principles as practical as well as ethical. Blockchains can be used to distribute file storage for a fast and open web, drive secure, fast, and free machine-to-machine transaction or registry systems for an Internet of Things revolution, create micropayment systems for freelancing online data, create secure and open fundraising campaigns, and optimize supply chain management, among many other use cases. Many of these are made possible by the concept of cryptocurrencies being “programmable money”, and specifically, using blockchain-based “smart contracts” to accomplish a particular use case. Smart contracts are pieces of software that encode, allow users to interact with, and enforce any programmatic rules regarding transactions within a given blockchain. At the forefront of smart contract technology is Ethereum, a blockchain platform for developing decentralized applications via writing and running smart contracts in its Turing-complete programming language.
A doubly important application of blockchain and smart contract technology for libertarians is in decentralizing governance itself. While voluntaryists condemn central planning because of its unethical use of force, economists have long argued against it on more consequentialist-seeming terms, by invoking an economic problem known as the “knowledge problem”. The knowledge problem starts with the distributional problem — the need for a heterogeneous system like a nation or a business to distribute scarce resources. In order to solve the distributional problem, the system needs to have adequate knowledge of people’s wants, what resources are available, and how to most effectively distribute those resources. And this leads us to two related conclusions: one against central planning, which lacks knowledge discovery and information about subjective values — and one in favor of markets that run on the supply-and-demand price mechanism, which are responsive to and collate information from diverse resources.
The knowledge problem has prompted ideas such as that of “futarchic” governance, the 2000 brainchild of Robin Hanson, which describes a system that uses markets to make core policy decisions. Futarchy, in short, attempts to solve democracy’s failure to aggregate accurate information from an electorate by instead extracting information from prediction markets. Constituents “vote on values” — democracy remains in place to fairly determine an electorate’s ideal utility metric — and “bet on beliefs” — the results of open prediction markets, measured against utility, determine policy. The consequence of monetary gain or loss incentivizes “experts”, who have strong beliefs about how certain policies will affect utility, to direct the markets (and thus policy and policy effects) towards an ideal state. A small boom in prediction market and futarchy research and development has come with the onset of blockchain technology; blockchain tech allows prediction markets to have immutable and unbiased transaction ledgers and oracles, ensuring that payouts and outcome reports are correct, without needing to trust or compensate middlemen and central managers; additionally, the creation and facilitation of prediction markets can easily be mapped onto smart contracts.
Futarchy can hypothetically be applied to political entities like neighborhoods, metropolises, and even countries, but the little futarchy research that has been done heretofore has mostly been regarding its application onto enterprises (mostly blockchain companies) in order to affect decision-making that optimizes its profit and its product (e.g. its blockchain system), with research culminating in the ideal of the futarchic “DAO” — or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, typically a blockchain company whose governance (method to make collective action, e.g., regarding the protocol) is formally embedded in the protocol design, rendering the company autonomous. Proving that DAO-hood is effective and achievable is an ambition for many blockchain developers and a milestone for the libertarian dream.
The next important liberty-conducive development in the space, I would argue, is the widespread recognition of the idea that “decentralized protocol updates” (a.k.a. decentralized policymaking) includes being able to update protocol concerning governance itself in addition to updating everyday policy. This idea is understood by individuals like the creators of Tezos, a “self-amending crypto-ledger” which uses a voting mechanism to allow for the evolution of new protocols and new governance methods. This idea of permitting evolution of both mundane and governance-related rules attempts to solve the general problem of locked-in obsolescence that technologies and political societies constantly face — from HTTP, to MIDI, to QWERTY, to communism, to monarchy, to representative democracy, evolving from some of these early infrastructures has been near-impossible, given backwards-compatibility constraints and establishment interest in the status quo. While Tezos has grasped this idea fairly tightly, communities like the Startup Societies Foundation and the Seasteading Institute have demonstrated utmost comprehension of the importance of fostering environments for experimental governance and evolution. Just as an open marketplace for speech is conducive to the success of the best ideas and an immunity from the worst ones, an open marketplace for “startup societies” will lead us to governance victories and innovations unheard of in a world where individuals have no say in the deep-set Washington bureaucracies.
To generalize even further, I claim that this idea of permitting evolution to the fullest extent is an obvious basis for the acquisition of knowledge. We used to think empirical observation, observation by the senses, was all there was to epistemology. This was shut down by non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, quantum theory, cosmology, etc., where we discovered practical truths extraneous to sensory observation. Though empirical observation is still considered a large part of epistemic progress, the part of progress I claim we should emphasize is precisely the idea of permitting evolution: allowing for large sets of conjectures to exist upon which we can make observations, criticisms, and theories — the larger the conjecture sets are, the closer to truth our evolved theories likely are. Knowledge, then, evolves through this tradition of conjecture and criticism. Considering the term “evolution”, this isn’t a novel idea; this is how organisms like ourselves biologically progressed for billions of years, through natural variation and selection.
Progress, overall, is about allowing anything to participate in the evolutionary game. Whichever genes, or memes, or ideas succeed best at replicating themselves will win. And in a laissez-faire environment, like the one in which biological evolution has taken place, the winners tend to be the most effective, innovative, and beneficial (otherwise, we better keep the evolutionary mechanism in place to allow for new winners to emerge). I think this idea of pushing an environment of conjecture and criticism is the heart of pro-market voluntaryist philosophies. It is nothing more than the removal of forced structure in human societies.
Though many libertarians would likely agree with these views, the libertarian movement has suffered from bad marketing for decades. Libertarians need to make clear that we aren’t pushing for anarchy as a universal (lack of) method of governance — we are pushing for anarchy as a basic tenet of a universal ethical code — we want everyone to be on common ground that coercion is bad. Conservative, nationalist, socialist, and communist societies can develop on top of this anarchic bedrock, as long as they pass the evolutionary test. Libertarians don’t want to deny governments the ability to exist, we just want to allow an environment where they can evolve peacefully, effectively, and with clear social contracts. A libertarian utopia has a very short list of standards, yet is constantly viewed by skeptics as one of the most idealistic worlds.
To touch on more movements related to liberty, the open source and anti-open source movements play a significant role in libertarian debate. For many (but not nearly all) libertarians, the concept of intellectual property is a front for government regulation of the flow of information. And open source efforts like Hyperledger and the Internet Archive seem to stem from a fundamental anarchic intuition (not to mention the well-known international political party that came about from desires for copyright law reform, de-bureaucratization of government, and increased personal privacy). Yet, a significant number of open source giants are fighting for big-government solutions for net neutrality. Anti-open source leaders certainly agree with the ideals of absolute privacy and freedom from locked-in obsolescence, yet believe the natural evolution of Web 2.0 and open source efforts are damaging and should be restricted. The two sides, then, share a piece of libertarian insight, and may only be reconciled with a solution that maintains both personal sovereignty and voluntary freedom of information (and with a reminder that these are achieved through a movement away from government). Specifically, this could be achieved with something along the lines of blockchain-based content storage and encryption.
“Rationalist” and “effective altruist” communities are refreshingly trustworthy for libertarians. These are folks who nearly live up to their ambitious labels, technology- and research-oriented people who celebrate truth-seeking and making positive change in the world. The divide that seems to exist, however, between a rationalist and libertarian mindset maps to that between utilitarian and deontological ethics. “Ideological” libertarians have these rules of non-coercion that they are unwilling to part with in any circumstance, whereas to rationalists and effective altruists, rules are moral weights that can be cancelled out by other, heavier factors such as a communal good. This divide, to me, is an illusion. Libertarians abide by the utilitarian calculation; we just happen to give non-coercion a very large moral weight, because of the economic and happiness benefits we believe it has. There surely are apocalyptic circumstances in which the most principled anarchist is willing to give it up. Where rationality or effective altruism stops being convincing to the libertarian is when it converges on the belief that force is an easy and morally inexpensive option for bringing about its communal goals. Winning by force is winning at the cost of denying victims of the force their right to self-ownership and the realization of their own individual utility, and also denying the potential for more effective solutions to evolve. A victory at that cost should seem pyrrhic to a rational utilitarian. To be fair, a large fraction of rationalists are libertarian-leaning. Perhaps there needs to be more discussion on applied ethics among disagreeing members in the community.
All in all, libertarianism, however you define it, may be more pervasive than you think.
But while many may identify as libertarian, a cohesive movement has yet to take off. My hope is that with innovations in cryptography, blockchains, governance, epistemological thought, and rationalist thought, liberty can become the counterculture to the left- and right-wing reactionary cultures of today.
