Is the web libertarian?

The political philosophy of the World Wide Web? What a dull subject, you might think. And move on to the next website where you can read about the Apple iPad. However, it’s a subject worth examining for a brief moment. The question: is the Web libertarian?

When I first saw a version of Programme One of The Virtual Revolution, I was taken aback. The word ‘libertarian’ comes up a lot. We’re told that it is a blend of left-wing and right-wing, a product of the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s, and derived particularly from the Well (the influential early online community).

And indeed in the video interview on this site with Stewart Brand, who founded the Well (which stands for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link – Brand previously founded the Whole Earth Catalog), he explicitly says that the Well was libertarian as opposed to utopian: "utopians know what’s good for you and libertarians don’t."

Now I’m a Guardian-reading liberal type, like a lot of academics, and my instinctive reaction to the term libertarian is to think of a peculiarly American form of political theory focused around populist writers like Ayn Rand, right-wing economists like Frederick von Hayek. Or, to put it more crudely, gun-toting rugged individualists in a cabin in the wilderness. More recently, we’ve seen it in various think-tanks responsible for some of the economic under-regulation that led to the financial crisis and the worldwide recession.

Because I don’t like this approach to understanding the world – to me it actually diminishes individual freedom, by making the individual subject to unfettered corporate power – and I do like the Web, I have always supposed that libertarianism had little to do with the Web. Sure, the Internet was created with money from the American military, and partly for their needs, but was not the Web basically subversive of these origins?

So all this led me to be quite surprised and challenged at the use of the term libertarian in the programme. Was the programme wrong? Or has libertarianism always been at the heart of the Web all the time but I simply hadn’t noticed it?

Of course, American and European political cultures are really very different, and it’s important not to view one too strongly through the perspective of the other. The scales of left- and right-wing look quite different on other sides of the Atlantic, and American libertarianism simply doesn’t exist in the same form in much of Europe.

So what the programme, reflecting the Americans interviewed in it, calls libertarianism is something weaker and more benign than its more extreme forms might suggest. It says (as with John Perry Barlow) that the Web is special, founded on a culture and technology with a ‘can-do’ worldview: one that has little patience with those who want to stop things from being done, whether they are governments, powerful individuals or large corporations.

The rise of Napster, the power of the blogosphere to hold governments to account, the use of various web tools (nowadays Twitter but earlier plain websites) to spread information that those in power would prefer stayed hidden – these have all had a big influence upon society, and the Web makes it possible.

That said, the Web does not exist in a vacuum. Napster was brought down by the music industry and their use of copyright law. Google had to accede to the Chinese government and censor their searches (though this is now open to question again). Dissidents in various countries have been tracked and imprisoned by state security forces based on their Web usage.

Creative Commons Image Wallyg under CC-BY-NC-SA licence
Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park

As my colleague at The Open University, John Naughton, has written (in the context of Google), ‘Libertarianism is all very well when you're a hacker. But business is business’. He has also observed, in another column, that ‘Those of us who want the net to serve as the Speakers' Corner of the 21st century have to accept that speakers must take responsibility for what they say. Even in the US, freedom of speech does not include the right to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre.’

So is the Web libertarian? Yes and no. It is dedicated to individual freedom – in a sense that is both left-wing and right-wing – but exists within the bounds of society. No man is an island, and the Web is not an island either.

Find out more

Watch Stewart Brand and Marcus Ramage on social networking

Watch Magnus Ramage and Charles Leadbeater on a 'democracy of creativity'

Explore courses available with the OU ICT Group